Christmas Eve

It's an hour till midnight. The last present is wrapped, the stockings are full, and the house is quiet. "The children are nestled all snug in their beds," and Wife is sound asleep as well in ours. On the other computer, the screen is showing a real-time-updated screen entitled "NORAD Tracks Santa": the conceit is that NORAD uses their sophisticated tracking equipment once a year to follow Santa Claus in his trek around the world -- starting in Siberia or the South Pacific (on the International Date Line) and heading ever west with the advancing midnight. It's really cute.

The quiet is nice. And all in all, this season hasn't been as crazy as many. For years I have had a very difficult relationship with Christmas. I love the music and the cooking. I enjoy seeing people that I don't often see the rest of the year -- frequently my aunt and uncle, plus whichever of my cousins is in town at the time. And I can get embarrassingly sentimental over the stories, whether Dickens' "Christmas Carol" or Cule's "Man at the Gate of the World" or ... well, you get the idea. But I have always hated the frenzy. And I noticed even as a kid -- when by rights I should still have been in my greedy "gimme" stage -- that the presents I got for Christmas were often not things I really wanted or would really enjoy, but seemed to have been picked up on the fly by someone filling out a checklist who thought, "Hosea likes books, so I'll get him a book. About something. I suppose it doesn't much matter what. Or maybe I'll get him another sweater -- Hosea always looks good in sweaters and you can never have too many." Over time I accumulated a large personal library (for a kid) and a lot of sweaters.

And so, over time and at all too young an age, I got thoroughly sick of the whole gift-giving potlatch. As I looked around me, it seemed like most of the members of my family were in the same boat I was in: they kept giving each other (and therefore receiving) gifts that nobody truly wanted and nobody could truly use; and all the while, even as they oohed and aahed and grinned and thanked each other, they were also drowning under clutter and mathom. And everybody spent handsomely for the privilege.

For years I told myself that when I finally moved out of the house, I was going to be done with it all. It didn't quite work out that way, because when I finally moved out it was because I had married Wife. And Wife's feelings about Christmas were very different. Maybe it was because she grew up poor, I don't know. Or maybe there was some other reason. But Wife really believed that the only decent way to celebrate Christmas was to go all out on presents. I tried to explain why this approach had come to nauseate me, and she told me I was a Scrooge and a curmudgeon. I tried to tell her that measuring how much you love a person by how much money you spend on him or her at Christmas is childish; but then our fourth or fifth Christmas together I bought her little things while she bought be something very expensive (a sweater, in fact!!) ... and I almost thought she was going to divorce me on the spot. So much wailing, so many tears ... and over what? Over Christmas presents? Over something that I had told her over and over could never engage my affections? I checked out. I never wore the sweater -- not once -- because the memory of what receiving it had cost me was too painful. And I stopped expressing opinions over Christmas. I let Wife run our Christmases any way she wanted. I went along for the ride like a bump on a log, got her very predictable (boring) gifts over and over, and cringed inside when I gathered up all the bills in January.

And then this year I had an opportunity to try for something better. For one reason and another, we have had some very high bills this year. Don't feel sorry for us -- they were all for things we chose deliberately, with our eyes open, knowing they would be expensive. But figuring out how to pay for them took a little juggling. And after playing with the numbers a bit (this was last spring), I told Wife that we could make big strides towards closing the gap if we eliminated the spending from the previous year in two categories: Vacation and Christmas. And Wife agreed that this trade-off was the right one to make, so we did it.

Now, I had meant my remarks as an arithmetical exercise: if you add up this column of numbers and subtract those ones over there, you get the following answer. And maybe there are lots of other ways to get the same answer. So I had never contemplated that we would spend literally nothing on Christmas this year. But Wife (as you may have noticed before now) has something of an all-or-nothing mentality; so she fixed it in her head that, We aren't having Christmas this year because Hosea says we can't afford it. I hate to think how many of her friends she told that we were teetering on the brink of dire poverty, or whatever. I do know that at one point D e-mailed me after one of her phone calls with Wife, saying that it would be awfully dreary having absolutely no presents on Christmas Day, and would I mind if she helped out? I reassured her that the story she had heard was a bit exaggerated ....

But I have to admit I did not go to strenuous efforts to correct Wife's misapprehensions, because I figured that these very misapprehensions were likely to prevent her from going shopping. And for the most part they did. I did, however, work to advertise this change as a positive step, not an austerity measure. By great good luck, D forwarded me a link to this article here; I printed it and brought it home for everyone, adding in the process "This is exactly what I have been trying to say about Christmas for thirty years!" (I explained only that "someone" had e-mailed me the link; D has encouraged me to mention as little communication between us as humanly possible.)

The change in focus wasn't an instant sale, but it went over fairly easily all things considered. The boys understood it and reacted pretty adaptably. Wife was the biggest hold-out, although she phrased all her objections in terms of the boys. (Ironically, her very resistance may have made them climb aboard the bandwagon faster, because they are at an age where they can hardly resist any chance to tweak Mommy.) When we talked privately, Wife reminded me of one Christmas a few years back when Son 2 looked at the merely medium-sized stack under the tree and said "I guess we weren't very good last year." I replied that Son 2 was older now, and if he hadn't grown up past that stage yet then it was high time. She also fretted -- you're sitting down now, right? -- that if we explained the financial reasons why we chose to cut back, then Son 2 would still expect to see presents under the tree brought by Santa Claus and we couldn't disappoint him for fear of damaging his belief in the jolly old elf. Excuse me, ... Santa Claus?? Son 2 is 10 years old by now. Did she really think he still believed in a literal Santa Claus? Well yes, apparently that worried her. (I didn't get a chance to discuss this with Son 2 until this evening, when I finally mentioned casually that Wife had been concerned. Son 2 brushed it away: he said some years ago he had woken up in the night and peered out of his bedroom to see us wrapping the presents that were allegedly from Santa Claus, so he had known better ever since then. I haven't had a chance to explain this to Wife yet.)

In the end, I think she bought a couple of knick-knacks for the boys, and my parents have bought some more. I bought a very few things for everybody, although I kept it a surprise for tomorrow morning. And I went out earlier this afternoon to get candy and little stuff for the stockings. Meanwhile, Wife has been saying all year that she wants to spend this Christmas at our house (rather than driving to see my parents) cooking the foods that were always traditional when she was a girl, and I have encouraged her therefore to spend the last few days baking cookies with the boys, making fudge with the boys, ... doing things instead of buying things. It meets our practical needs, and it is simply more fun. After the last week, it is hard for me to understand why anybody would want to celebrate the other way.

Before dinner tonight, the boys spent a lot of time hovering over the NORAD Santa Watch, laughing at the "Santa-cam videos" showing him flying over the Great Wall of China or the Eiffel Tower, Rudolph's nose blinking bright red in the front of the team. After dinner I pried them off the computer and chased them into the living room, so we could sit around the tree while I read Dickens to them aloud, choking up in all the predictable spots. Then everyone toddled off to bed, I tied up the last few loose ends that were waiting until they all fell asleep, and here we are.

Normally by this time in the holiday season, I am bitter, grouchy, depressed, and exhausted. Tonight I'm not. I hope the others feel this way, and I hope we can do this again next year.

I have no idea how my friends in the blogosphere celebrate the winter holidays -- or even which ones they celebrate, there being several to choose from. But I hope you have a wonderful time ... that you face the holidays refreshed and joyful, not anxious and stressed. Let this year's holidays be a time for all of us that it is worth getting sentimental over.

Or, as I was reading to the boys earlier this evening, ... "God bless us, every one."