By Christmas, then, I am sick of Christmas. I can't take one more song, look at the lights flashing anymore or ingest another cookie. It's as if, for me, the Christmas season begins and ends sooner than for everyone else. It's a classic symptom of impatience. I am so excited for Christmas that I start celebrating too early and can't hang for the entire three and a half months.
Growing up, Christmas was an oasis in my house. I grew up in a house with conflict, as did 95% of every other human being on the planet. There was a lot of shouting and cursing and silent treatment, but after the last bit of turkey was consumed on Thanksgiving, a hush fell over the house.
I know the tendency is to romanticize one's childhood, but in our house, we did Christmas up right. We dragged out our bedraggled tree, hung up every crappy, home-made ornament we had ever crafted, put up all sorts of crazy decorations, baked cookies, listened to music and watched movies. My mom led us in a narrative (every year) about every ornament we had mangled. The mouse, sticking out of the chimney--there used to be a present, but I had unwrapped it because I was certain there was a real present in it. All the handprints, clothespin reindeer, portraits with glitter frames...everything went on the tree.
There were no blinky lights. This was something about which my mother was adamant. She hated lights that flashed, blinked, raced and chased. She was in charge of hanging the lights, so she had the final say. My dad, brother and I were in charge of hanging the actual ornaments. My dad had a predilection toward the shiny glass ball ornaments. To this day, I have glass ornaments he gave me when I moved out on my own....almost 12 years ago. I was in charge of making sure no clumping occurred, but it became difficult because the tree was so bedraggled that there were empty spaces everywhere.
We experimented with live trees for a few years. We went to lots, we went out and cut them down, but they all had a recurrent theme. One of us (I'm not saying who--mostly cause I can't remember) would promise to keep the tree watered. The problem was, because we would insist on going the day after Thanksgiving, the tree was ready to go up in flames a week and half before Christmas. In the end, we went back to artificial.
There were movies and music and each adhered to a specific schedule. We listened to Steve Green while we decorated, there was some Andy Williams, but mostly we listened to Bing Crosby. We watched White Christmas, It's a Wonderful Life, several of the Christmas Carols, Holiday Inn, and, in recent years, A Christmas Story. There was a schedule we adhered to. My dad was the fanatic for A Christmas Carol, but I recall that we watched It's a Wonderful Life on Christmas Eve and White Christmas on Christmas Day.
There were cookies. Sugar cookies, gingerbread (secretly, not my favorite), thumbprint, kolaczy. It was a lot of fun to start baking with my mom and then veg on the couch while she baked the next six dozen. It was fun to eat the cookies, at first, anyway, until the only things that were left were the un-garnished thumbprint cookies. We took platters of cookies to friends and family members. We ate loads of turkey--we have always been turkey Thanksgiving and turkey Christmas people.
It was no surprise then, when I got to my freshman year of college and my family life was floundering, that I started celebrating Christmas almost upon moving in. I'm not joking. I started listening to Christmas music (exclusively Bing Crosby--there's two different albums, though, that I listened to), put up Christmas lights and did inane countdowns to Christmas. In short, I drove everyone on my floor crazy.
I continue to celebrate Christmas in unexpected ways. We have lived in our home for four years. This past year, I decided I was finally going to decorate the staircase. I put up lights--yes, blinky, chasing, flashing obnoxious lights--and garland. I fastened the decorations securely with plastic ties, put a timer on them and grinned to myself every time I climbed the stairs to bed. Unfortunately, as Bekah pointed out to me last month, "Mommy, it's not Christmas anymore." I will say it's been about five months since I figured out a way to get the kids to stop plugging them in.
I hope that even when I'm losing my mind, I love Christmas. I have been working hard to establish traditions with my kids and new family. We don't have crazy ornaments, this is probably the first year I'm going to attempt baking with the kids and I have kiboshed the present orgy. So far, my attempts to establish traditions have fallen flat. But Mr. Crosby? Well, I have since discovered that he was an abusive, raging alcoholic. Man, he can sing, though. Yeah, Mr. Crosby will always have a place in my Christmas traditions.
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