The First Christmas

Newsletter 2024-12-23

Our first Christmas is in the books. I followed through with my plan to have my clan’s in-house gift exchange at the earliest possible moment. The goal was to keep my kids distracted for as much of Christmas break as possible. It also helped offset the lateness of our other two Christmases, which are somehow getting even further away. We’re doing the holiday with Lola’s family on December 29th, while my side’s celebration will be sometime next August. It’s not quite that late, but it might as well be. The current target date is January 20th. It was going to be a much more reasonable January 18th, but my brother, Harry, is incapable of checking a calendar. He’s a pilot whose schedule and life is dictated by a complicated app that guarantees he’ll never have the same flight plan two weeks in a row. Knowing that uncertainty, he refused to suggest a date for Christmas, forcing my mom to be the bad guy and pick a day at random. The one she chose ended up being the weekend of Martin Luther King Day, which other pilots apparently take just as seriously as Christmas. Harry didn’t get off any of the days he requested, forcing us to move our celebration back to its current place deep into next year. Hopefully nobody bought any perishable items or living pets as Christmas gifts. If there’s a puppy in one of those boxes, he’ll be a full-grown dog before we let him out.

Given all that, allowing my kids to have the smallest of our three Christmases four days early seemed like a fair compromise. Not that I made it easy for them. A few days before they got off school for break, I had a brilliant idea: I would hold Christmas hostage. The ransom price would be cleaning. As always, their rooms were a disaster. I declared that we would open presents as soon as they picked up. If they were fast, we could tear open the wrapping paper first thing Saturday morning. If they were slow, we might not open gifts until July. For once, I thought they might focus on the tasks at hand rather than fighting with each other, rolling around on the floor, or counting to infinity. They prefer literally anything over doing a single chore. If I thought the prospect of gifts would change that, I was sorely mistaken. On the first day of break, they barely got dressed before noon. They certainly weren’t going to do any early cleaning. They took long enough to get around to tidying up that I soon found myself roped into it. I dusted and vacuumed the entire first floor of the house, which wasn’t my original plan at all. So much for using bribery to extract free labor. Finally, around 3 p.m., the house was superficially neat enough to meet the bare minimum conditions I laid out. It was time to have our first Christmas of the season and undo all the cleaning we had just done.

The gifts were wrapped with care. Well, half of them were. The other half were tossed in gift bags. Guess which ones I did. Lola handled most of the purchases. They didn’t require quite as much insight into our children’s inner lives as it once did. They all have Amazon wish lists. By the time I came up with random cool things I saw that I thought they might like, Lola had already maxed out our budget for each child. That Halo warthog RC racer will have to wait till one of their birthdays. Not everything was from their list. Each child had one major Lego set that Lola picked up on sale sometime over the course of the year. They had been sitting in our closet in our strategic reserve for months, waiting for this day. Those cherished boxes all received Lola’s precise gift wrapping treatment. The smaller items passed through my clumsy hands. I hid each item below some tissue paper and called it a day. I was more eager for the kids to open their gifts than they were. The big pile of presents was blocking my dresser. If girls had taken any longer to clean the house, I would have run out of clothes for the week.

The presents had to stay upstairs until the last possible minute because of the pigs. There’s no way they could resist tearing into a nicely wrapped package. Earlier this week, Gilly found a stray piece of tissue paper and promptly ripped it to shreds. It was even better than the usual plastic shopping bags she plays with. It was her own personal Christmas. The pigs haven’t been in the main part of the house much lately. Indiana’s weather settled on the most awkward possible point: too cold to be pleasant, but too warm to freeze the ground. My backyard is

a sea of mud. The pigs will be forced to stay in their own room until the frost returns or it warms up enough to dry everything out. Neither is likely to happen between now and our third Christmas late next year. That makes the kids sadder than the pigs. They love letting those restless oinkers into the dining room to circle the table like sharks while we eat. We still let them in on the rare afternoons when their hooves are clean. The infrequency of their visits makes them more dangerous. We have time to let our guard down. We left the gifts on another floor of the house just in case. The pigs were disappointed they didn’t have a chance to destroy Christmas, but they’ll get over it when we give them our Christmas leftovers later. That’s way better than anything we could buy on Amazon.

When the big moment arrived, the kids swarmed into our room and carried all the gifts downstairs. We assembled in our rarely used front room by the tree and distributed everything into four piles. Growing up, my family and I always opened all of our gifts at once. It took a half a second for us to reveal everything my mom had amassed over the prior eleven months. If she blinked, she wouldn’t see our reactions to any of it. Now, Lola and I force our kids to go slower. We make our in-house Christmas seem grander by drawing it out. Even though the girls chose nearly everything we bought them, they were still giddy with anticipation. They didn’t know which of the seven thousand items on their wish lists we had actually purchased. I wasn’t any less ambitious as a kid. I was just more low-tech. Instead of an electronic wish list, I had a Sears catalog, where I circled pretty much everything I saw that wasn’t a Barbie. Wanting things was a pastime all its own. There’s no better way to spend an afternoon than lost in aspirational greed.

My children were shockingly patient as they opened their gifts. We went from youngest to oldest on a rotating basis around the room. In a total display of amateurism, most of the kids started with their small packages and worked their way up. Waffle got an art kit. Lucy received a Venus flytrap in a self-contained biome. Mae got half of the books in A Series of Unfortunate Events. The other half may or may not be waiting upstairs in our closet for her next birthday. Hopefully she’s not a fast reader. Betsy got clothes, clothes, and more clothes, with the occasional bath item mixed in to prove she’s still a stinky teenager. Only her gifts strayed from a prescribed Amazon list. Lola took a risk and freestyled it. It worked out because she and Betsy are basically the same person. They’ll probably share all of those new clothes. They should just share a closet.

The biggest hits of the day were the least expensive. Lola got the younger three girls a nail kit to share so they wouldn’t have to keep stealing Betsy’s. That gift alone will reduce fighting in our house by eighty-five percent. Lucy and Waffle bought presents for everyone at their school’s Santa shop. Lucy had been bragging for days about the socks she got me, although she wouldn’t tell me exactly which ones. They lived up to the hype. This pair featured the regal visage of no less a person than Captain Jean-Luc Picard. They’re a nice compliment to my blue set of Spock socks from last year. Lucy insists that I should wear one sock from each pair at the same time. Obviously that’s impossible. I can’t mix different generations of bridge crews, at least not without a temporal distortion. That only happens in nearly every Star Trek episode.

As for Lucy, she was the most excited about a laser pointer from Waffle. She promptly ran around the house testing out which pets would chase the red dot. The answer was none of them, although Onyx did sniff it once. Afterwards, the kids retreated upstairs to their freshly cleaned playroom to start in on all their arts and crafts. Their Legos will have to wait for Christmas Eve. Lola has declared that December 24th will be our family’s movie and Lego day. We’ll see how much confusion we can cause by assembling six sets at once while also trying to multitask and watch a movie. Somebody is going to end up with a Hogwarts set with TIE fighter parts, making both sets ten times more awesome.

That wasn’t the last we saw of the children for the evening. Mae asked if we could drive around after dark to look at Christmas lights. I thought she’d be the only one interested, but all the other girls wanted to come along. That was quite a turnaround from the recent past. Two years ago, I insisted that we all go out and look at lights as a family. The children complained like I was torturing them. This time, they eagerly joined in. Either I’ve gotten cooler or they’ve gotten more mature. A big part of growing up is learning to tolerate boring things with your parents. We have more than enough lameness to go around. We blasted Trans-Siberian Orchestra and Pentatonix Christmas songs as we admired the homes of people with outdoor outlets. We largely followed our trick-or-treating route from November. Not that we had a choice. We hit nearly every street in the city panhandling for candy. I was proud to see that some of the decorations from that night were still up. There were half a dozen skeletons decked out in Santa hats and colorful lights. Undead monsters like Christmas, too.

We also witnessed a Christmas miracle. Near the end of our tour, we drove by Onyx’s fire damaged house. For months, there hasn’t been any progress on repairing it. I thought his owners might be stringing me along when they said it will eventually be restored. The house was still as damaged as ever, but there was a pile of fresh roof trusses in the front yard. Somebody is actually going to repair the place. Onyx will have a forever home to go back to. He was on Santa’s nice list after all.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James