Warning: This writer has no problem celebrating Christmas as both a deeply spiritual experience and a celebration of cookies, presents, decorations and jolly old Saint Nicholas. I usually can accomplish the first better than the latter, but I try to use perspective with the latter. So it is for this cause I have come to my computer—to give you stressed-out, exhausted-by-the-Christmas-season guidelines to feel better about how you handled the whole process.
A little bit of history is in order: I tried to combine sacred and secular Christmas activities a couple of years of ago as ward activities director. We would have a moving, poignant, touching (and other appropriate synonyms) pageant in the chapel and then move to the gym to stuff ourselves with Christmas goodies and exchange cheap gifts. My four-month-old grandson was Baby Jesus. The only problem was we had forgotten to ask his permission.
By the time the shepherds marched reluctantly down the aisle from watching their flocks by night, we had a screaming Baby Jesus in a green Rudolph fleece suit sitting up in his Dad’s arms whose Joseph bathrobe was gapping and revealing an Old Navy T-shirt. The shepherds came in after the Three Wise Men, by the way, because the scheduled pianist was 45 minutes late and we had to call on a substitute who didn’t know the order of the songs. The head angel directing all this (that would be me) was an ocean of nervous perspiration by the time the whole Far Side Gallery version of the Nativity was over. After that, I vowed we would never again try to combine both aspects of Christmas at the same time.
Moving right along with those guidelines: Over the years I have learned a little through my experiences with seven kids and Christmas how to deal with the Christmas rush and wind up feeling good about it. Tuck these suggestions away for next year, and forgive yourself for whatever, probably imagined, inadequacies you feel about the Christmas just past.
First of all, choose a tree with a straight trunk, or take out Crooked Tree Trunk Insurance. Putting a Christmas tree up was such a simple project when I was growing up. You bought it, you waited until Daddy put the lights on it and you decorated it. I don’t remember the drama spelled t-r-a-u-m-a that went on behind the scenes.
One year I had a son go get the tree stand from the garage while the rest of us dragged the seven-foot tree in. He handled the job admirably, singing “Here Comes Peter Cottontail,” as we prepared to screw that sucker into the stand.
He stood it up. It fell down, nearly crushing his little sister. We stood it back up. It fell down. We finally realized the trunk was crooked. This shouldn’t have been a problem since I had told the Christmas tree salesman that I had been a victim of crooked tree trunk syndrome for several years, and I was ready to quit cold turkey. He assured me I had.
So with the girls under the tree and the guys barking orders, we got the tree standing straight and tall. The kids jumped up and down. The windows and ceiling fans shook, but the tree stood. We decided to go to the mall and decorate it when we returned.
I always put my tree in the picture window so we can see it when we round the bend in the road. We rounded; it wasn’t there. Where was it? Well, it was lying in the middle of the living room floor.
After a good laugh, we considered the possibilities. Decorate it as a Christmas hedge? Drill a hole in the floor and pour cement? Tie a fishing line to the curtain rod? (Whoops, tried that the day my daughter got married and forgot key and had to break in and broke window entry latch. Still broken.)
I don’t remember how we solved the problem that particular year. But that might have been the year I drove my Chevy to the levee and filled sandbags to put around the tree stand. The important thing, however, is to remember to buy a tree with a straight trunk.
My second idea is to either produce or hire a teenaged girl. They love to decorate, they love to bake and they love to wrap presents. When my oldest daughter left for college, my youngest daughter took over, but then she left too. It had been a good run. She loved to wrap the first 50 or so presents, then I did the rest. She loved to decorate the tree too, although that enthusiasm eventually dwindled. She made cookie dough if I baked it. And, of course, she loved to Christmas shop. The boys? They loved to unwrap the presents, look at the tree and eat the cookies. They hated the shopping, but they love dragging the dead tree across the living room floor and leaving a million needles in the carpet. All must fill the measure of their creation.
My third idea also helps self-esteem. Do not let anyone take any pictures or videos of you on Christmas morning. Ever notice how on Christmas videos—at least mine—I, the mother, the Christmas shopper, planner, wrapper, cook, decorator and sugar cookie queen sits limp and pale on the couch moaning, “I’m so tired. I don’t know why I’m so tired.”
No one ever seemed to care enough, though, to wave a piece of fudge under my nose to revive my flagging energy or even remove the silver icicles clinging to my hair. No one ever brought me my slippers, or even found them. Everyone had worn them—out to the mailbox in the mud, on the dew-soaked trampoline, even the dog in the Christmas parade. No one ever let me take a nap on Christmas afternoon. Why couldn’t they just let me sleep while the kids put all 3,000 Legos in the box, separated the presents and took them to their rooms and put all the batteries in the toys pointing the right way. Do that, then fix Christmas dinner and I wouldn’t have asked for anything else.
If they couldn’t do that, then couldn’t they just have gotten that camera out of my face and leave me, a forgotten shell of a Christmas elf, alone to moan through another Christmas morning?
Enough self-pity—on to another idea. Teach your children the purpose of black trash bags. Now everyone uses black trash bags to stuff all the shredded wrapping paper in. One year we had filled three trash bags with wrapping paper, squashed boxes and, I’m sure, a few instruction manuals we would later need. Then we fed 23 people a Christmas buffet and scraped all the plates into two trash bags. Add to that the two trash bags of garbage we had before Christmas morning began. All bags were lined up on the carport waiting to go to the Dumpster the next morning.
THEN my youngest son said, “Has anyone seen my Christmas presents? I had them all in a black trash bag out here in the living room.”
Donning rubber gloves and wading through trash does not a fun Christmas evening make.
I’ll leave you with one more idea if you still think the Christmas you created was inadequate in any way.
As soon as the Christmas letdown moves in, our minds take over burnishing everything with a rosy glow of reminiscence which leaves the good parts of a memory but erases the unpleasant ones. My sister and I discovered this one year when remembering with our parents the Christmas of 1963, the first Christmas my father was stationed in Germany with the Army.
Paulette and I listed our Norman Rockwell memories—the snowy landscape and an icy castle high up in the mountains, colorful bath oil beds we bought for everyone, the discovery of Dickens’ “Christmas Carol” and the carol “Silver Bells” and the mysterious excitement of putting our shoes out German-style on December 6 and going back to find them filled with candy.
My parents match us memory for memory. They remember it as the year my Daddy’s brother brought a friend who slept on the couch in front of our Christmas tree and later drank alcoholic beverages all day out of a three-gallon German beer stein, eventually getting sick under the Christmas tree. (This was our pre-LDS days.) It was also the week we moved from temporary housing to permanent housing on their anniversary and got into a terrible argument because Daddy got mad at a stuck coat hanger and yanked the whole closet rod down.
We prefer our version.
But the lesson learned is that by Jan. 15 most of the memories of Christmas are pleasant ones and by Labor Day when the Christmas decorations are up in the malls, the excitement starts to build again on its own. And whatever you do or don’t get done by Christmas morning (except the spiritual part, of course) is okay. It’s o-kay.
