I can’t lie to you folks: I got way way way into Christmas this year. Cynicism was cast aside, irony was folded up and put away, and all the shadows of bah-humbug were driven out by the fuse-popping glow of way too many Christmas lights. I was downright dorky about it, and I loved every minute of it.
To qualify, the adult me has not typically gotten too excited about the holidays. They were awesome when I was a kid because I was the only child of the family, which meant that everybody’s holiday energy focused on me. Me me me me me. But as I grew older and family tensions grew, the holidays came more and more to be an obstacle, a thing to get through before you could go to the New Year’s Eve Party and get justifiably obliterated. It’s not that I dreaded the holidays, I just basically didn’t care.
Having my first child changed that a bit, but not so much as to make me want to put on a Santa costume and try to wiggle my way down the chimney. I saw Gremlins, I know how that shit turns out. But even then, I felt like we were just putting on some kind of Christmas show for the kid so we wouldn’t feel like crappy parents. “Here ya go kid, here’s your tree, here’s some presents that you’re too young to even know that you’re supposed to open. Knock yourself out.”
But this year, a whole other power weighed in on the action. For the first time, my three year old son really had an idea what was going on. He was old enough to know that this time of year is special. He wanted a tree. He wanted lights. Out of nowhere, he started asking about Santa Claus. In fact, he actually asked to go see Santa, a trip we had never before attempted for fear of inflicting trauma. The visit didn’t go so great, but it made for a lot of laughs. My boy’s excitement, much like the various illnesses he has brought home since starting daycare, was contagious. Before I knew it, the entire inside and outside of my house was all Christmassed out. We ignored the recession and dropped way too much cash at Home Depot on lights. We bought the biggest dumbest tree we could find. My wife hand made stockings for everybody except the dog because he’s bad. You might say that my son showed us the way. He led us to the holiday spirit and showed us how to drink of it deeply. Christ, we were probably only a few steps short of reindeer sweaters.
The night before Christmas, eldest didn’t want to go to sleep. Over dinner, I pointed out how Santa’s job has actually gotten easier over the years because there are now so many bad kids. Santa is able to skip entire school districts, I claimed, because they’re full of nothing but bad bad children. We followed Santa on NORAD for a bit, but the kid finally succumbed to the unquestionable logic that you have to be asleep for Santa to come. He left a brownie and a cup of milk out for the old man and hit the hay.
I think the high point for me came after both kids were asleep. We pulled their presents out of hiding -- they weren’t many, but each was carefully picked -- we put them in front of the tree, and went about the work of deciding how to present them. What did we want the kids to see Christmas morning? Laying everything out, wrapping ribbon around it, even taking a few bites out of the brownie, I felt like I was making a bit of magic. Did I mention the part about getting dorky with it?
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