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Now is the time of year when I look back fondly — and longingly — at the days of my
youth. When I was a kid, Christmas was the best time of the whole year. I’d get out of
school for two whole weeks — two whole weeks with nothing to do but stay up late,
sleep in, eat cold pizza for breakfast, watch TV, shake the presents under the tree, get
bundled up in my long underwear and snow pants and a couple of pairs of socks and moon
boots and a turtleneck and a heavy sweater and a big puffy coat and a scarf and mittens
and a hat with a big fuzzy ball on the top, and go running outside and dig tunnels in the
gigantic snow piles in the yard, and hit the neighbor kids in the face with snowballs.
All vacation long, I’d gorge myself on the cookies that seemed to
magically appear in the kitchen. I’d eat gobs of cookie dough and shake more presents.
And when Mom wasn’t looking, I’d sneak around the house and search through the closets,
looking for Mom’s Secret Present Hiding Spot.
And then the Big Night
would arrive — Christmas Eve, the most exciting, spectacular, fantastical night of the
year. We’d go out for dinner, where I’d order my usual:
cheeseburger-just-ketchup-fries-and-a-small-Coke. Then we’d rush home.
There was a punch bowl waiting at home. And dishes full of nuts and M&Ms
and all kinds of candy — and plates full of every cookie imaginable. And even though I
hadn’t even digested my grease-laden dinner, I’d stuff myself with treats. And not once
would I worry about it going straight to my thighs.
Then came the
presents. I’d rip open package after package — gifts, so carefully and perfectly
wrapped. Inside I’d find all kinds of toys and fun stuff. And I’d lovingly admire my
new toys as I waited for my next present-opening opportunity. I’d wait as Mom and Dad
and my brothers opened gifts from me — gifts that I’d most likely never even seen before,
but gifts from me nonetheless.
When it was all over — when the presents
were opened and the living room was a red-and-green mess — I’d run around the house in a
sugar frenzy while Dad tried to assemble all of my new toys. Then I’d play and play and
play until I collapsed.
And on Christmas morning, I’d wake up and go to
Grandma’s to do it all over again.
Today, things are a little different.
Christmas is no longer a two-week frenzy of toys and sugar and snow pants. Now, it’s a
four-month panic attack.
In September, my husband and I start talking
about Christmas. After all, we need to plan ahead for traveling from family to family —
and we have to save up the vacation days.
Once the subject is on the
table, it never really goes away. From that point on, somewhere, in the back of my mind,
I’m fretting about Christmas, twenty-four hours a day. I’m worrying about what on Earth
I’m going to get for everyone — and how I can manage to spread the purchases over several
credit card billing cycles.
In October, I occasionally pick things out at
the store and think about buying them as Christmas gifts. But I don’t actually buy them
because I’m afraid I’ll find something better later. This continues well into
November.
Then comes Thanksgiving. On Thanksgiving Day, as I’m recovering
from my turkey coma, I open the newspaper and a million after-Thanksgiving-sale ads fall
out. That’s when it hits me that Christmas is right around the corner. And for the next
four short, panic-stricken weeks, I grasp every spare moment to rush to the mall, where I
drive around the parking lot for what feels like an eternity, trying to find a parking
space. Then I turn around and go home because I realize that parking spaces are opening
up because the mall just closed. After that, I bundle up and hike to the store. And when
I get there, it’s so crowded that I’m sweating to death in my gigantic parka and I can’t
really get very far into the store, so I grab three of whatever’s closest to the door and
hope that Mom will like the beard trimmer she’s getting this year.
After
the stores close, I rush home to wrap the gifts I’ve bought. I inevitably run out of
tape, but the stores are obviously closed, so I just use staples instead. Then, between
the hours of 11 pm and 7 am, I decorate the house to make it look pretty and festive,
send out pretty personalized cards, hand knit sweaters for my entire family, and bake
eighty-three dozen cookies, three cheesecakes, and four pans of fudge. And a partridge
in a pear tree.
And somewhere in there, I get a bit of
sleep.
And then there’s the pre-Christmas diet, during which I stop eating
for a couple of weeks so I don’t have to hold back too much at Christmas parties. And I
still end up buying low-fat eggnog, M&Ms without those fattening nuts inside, and lite
whipped cream to top the extra-heavy cheesecake that I just pulled out of the oven. And
each cookie I consume gives me such an overwhelming feeling of guilt that I can barely
taste the cookie because I’m too busy worrying about how many miles I’ll have to walk
just to burn it off. I eat just a tiny piece of French silk pie at the
party.
Then, the next day, when no one’s looking, I’ll go to the kitchen
and eat the three pieces that were left behind.
By the time those final
days before Christmas arrive, you can find me giving up on Christmas cards and
personalized, hand-knit Christmas gifts and stocking up on a stack of Burger King gift
certificates to hand out. By then, I’ve given up on watching what I eat — oh, my
conscience is still trying to make me feel guilty, but I’m too tired and desperate to
listen.
When Christmas Eve finally rolls around, I’m bloated, tired,
crabby, and broke. I spend the day baking even more goodies and trying to dig my car out
of the snow bank that swallowed it overnight. Then, when my family gets together, I eat
even more sugar-based products, tell my conscience to bite me, and sit down with
the family to open presents. The grown-ups do so when the kids aren’t looking because if
the kids see that someone else is opening a present, they shriek until they get something
else to open — even if it means unwrapping that beard trimmer for
Grandma.
In approximately ten minutes, it’s all over. The once pristine
Norman Rockwell Christmas setting in our living room has been turned into something
resembling the set of a movie, in which Arnold Schwarzenegger hunts down evil, plotting
elves at the North Pole and destroys them all. And while the kids run around in their
sugar frenzies, the grown-ups clean up the set and put the toys together. Then we finish
off the cookies and fudge and pass around a bottle of Pepto.
And once the
kids have finally collapsed for the night, we say our goodbyes and thank-yous and give
everyone hugs and load our trunks with our Christmas gifts — our socks and our underwear
and our shiny new wallets — and head back home, where the credit card bills
await.
Then we get up on Christmas morning and do it all again. We sleep
in for a while, and then we all bundle up in our long underwear and snow pants and
sweaters and boots and mittens and scarves and puffy coats and hats. And we go out and
once again dig our cars out of the snow piles, all the while wondering if it might be
wise to go out tomorrow and start doing some Christmas shopping for next
year.
And then we give up and make some snow balls and hit each other in
the face and then run inside to eat more cookies and play with the kids’ new toys.
And why not? Every year, we get 364 days to be grown-ups — but we only
get one Christmas.
