A few weeks ago (I think it was late August) my wife says "honey, it's time to get the Christmas decorations out."
"What!" I shrieked. "We just had Christmas 6 weeks ago! You must have it confused with Groundhog Day or something."
She patiently pulled up the calendar on her way-cool Apple computer and showed me, month by month, that it was indeed that time of year again. I must have been in a coma for the past six months. (Playing golf with the old guys I play with has that effect.)
When I was a kid in upstate New York, Christmas was a wonderful holiday. For a week before we got out of school, the teachers, exhausted from trying to herd us little cats since September, were ready to let out the leashes a bit. The week before vacation was filled with caroling concerts, pageants and readings from the A Christmas Carol. At the end of that week we would charge out of the school for that final bus ride home, like crazed inmates suddenly finding the prison doors wide open. We were not about to blow this one opportunity for freedom.
What followed were two weeks of fun and frolic. The only responsibility was a half-hearted effort to help trim the tree before we were pushed away by sisters, mothers and miscellaneous female relatives who didn't think wiring the cat with tree lights was a whole lot of help. Stuffy. So it was on to the pick-up hockey games, snowball fights and sledding before falling exhausted into bed to prepare for the next day's battles. Oh to go back to the joys of Christmas past.
These days, Christmas begins by crawling through debris in the storage room and dragging out dozens of boxes, invariably labeled with the wrong stuff for the wrong room. Has anyone tried reassembling an artificial tree lately? It's easier to rebuild the Brooklyn Bridge. And of course, one tree won't do anymore. We have enough trees in the house to make Paul Bunyan salivate.
Then there are the tree lights. It was not a saintly person who engineered strings of Christmas tree lights. If one goes out the others stay on? Yeah, sure. You ever notice that they work fine when you test ‘em. But after you spend an hour blending them carefully into the plastic needles, they decide to stay dark.
But all the above is like paradise compared with the finale siege – Christmas Shopping.
OMG, as the text messengers say. How do you figure out what to give your wife, the kids, the grandkids, the in-laws, the aunts, uncles, cousins, and miscellaneous strangers who come to the door claiming kinship and seeking a handout? I would rather stick my hand in a circular saw than spend an hour at a shopping mall around Christmas. Thank God for the Internet and the cash envelopes.
Okay, okay, so I'm scrooging up so far. But on Christmas morning when my five-year-old granddaughter climbs into my lap and says "Merry Christmas, Papa" and gives me a big wet kiss, you know what? The Christmas spirit amazingly washes away all those mental barnacles. There are some payoffs that are just worth the effort. Hope I'm around next year to do it all again.