I can’t explain why, but I’m always happy when Christmas is over. It’s almost like leading up to a blind date, where you spend hours getting ready to meet Audrey Hepburn but it turns out that you’re meeting Ma Kettle.
It rarely turns out that way, but you spend so much time preparing that your expectations of the day can never be what you want. Either the presents you bought for your family don’t go over well, the ham dries out or a giant bird commits suicide in your front yard and you don’t know how to deal with it. Plus, the holidays being what they are anyway, you have a hard time dealing with anything.
You stand sobbing in the kitchen. “What’s wrong?”
“The freezer is measured in Fahrenheit not Kelvin! Waaaaaaah!”
Everyone goes nuts at Christmas. To the point where familial psychosis seems to be the norm.
The kids had a great time. Christmas Eve is always an orgy of presents, food and playing with cousins. There are kids oozing out of the walls at my sister’s house and the beer flows, the cheese ball is consumed and the little weenies roast over an open stove. We run the kids to exhaustion and then throw them in bed so that we can loudly prepare our Christmas Bacchanal for the next morning.
Christmas morning came at 6 a.m. for Matilda, who was bursting with such excitement that she couldn’t stand it. So she climbed in bed with us and promptly fell back asleep, snoring and drooling all over our pillows. The three of us got up around 8 a.m. Mom put the coffee cake in the oven and we waited for the baby to wake up. 8:15 . . . 8:30. Is she still alive?
There she was, in her crib, butt sticking up in the air, face firmly planted in the mattress, as if she were running, shot with a tranquilizer and came to a crashing, skidding halt into this position.
Matilda was about to burst, so we woke Gertrude up. “Go away,” she told us.
“It’s Christmas morning,” Matilda said. “Santa came!”
“Santa?” I’ve never seen a toddler run faster in my life. They were both out of the room and in front of the tree within seconds. They squealed with a glee that can only mean they were given guiltless presents, gifts with no expected return gratuity.
My girls are very patient. Matilda hands out the presents and we each open one at a time. Their excitement builds into a gentle fury as each gift from Santa gets more and more magnificent. But as time moved on, Gertrude was overcome by the spirit of the day and started tearing into gifts that weren’t for her. She opened her uncle’s gifts, friends’ gifts, even those fake gifts that are used as decorations.
The surprise hits of the day were Matilda’s Spirograph, which she wasn’t even expecting and Gertrude’s teddy bear, which she hugged with the ferocity of a child who had never experienced love. “I really love it,” she said.
By day’s end, exhaustion had set in. Matilda went to her dad’s, Gertrude drifted off to sleep. I watched pieces of the Indiana Jones boxed set. Mom played with her PDA.
For all the gifts I received, including my groovy new telescope, the greatest thing I was given was the joy of my children. Christmas has always been a strange time for my family (both my parents died shortly before Christmas). But each year, as I see the joy on these kids’ faces, I remember what it’s all about.
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