Post-Christmas is what makes me cynical

My name is Mimi, and I love Christmas. I love candles, and candycanes, and minilights, and trees. I love cards, and presents, and stockings. I love decorating my house. I love mulling wine and baking cookies and urging my loved ones to indulge. I love putting hand-crocheted red-white-and-green doodads on my winter coat. I love sending and receiving cards, and reading all the family newsletters. I love visiting with relatives and friends and being visited in turn. I love big sit down dinners and even bigger workplace cocktail parties. I love pointsettias.

Pretty much ever since I got over the final spike of adolescent greed ("All I want for Christmas is cash! Cash! CASH!!!"), I have really cherished the 'holiday season' for its bringing of light to dark times, its cheer and kindness in a gloomy month, and its resolute festivity in the face of a quite natural desire to hibernate the winter away. Indeed, I have readily seized the opportunity to say kind things to total strangers: Merry Christmas, have a great day, hope your shopping is nearly done, don't those look nice, hot chocolate'll really warm you, eh, what a great reindeer sweater! Christmas means my world--coffee shop, home, neighbourhood--festooned in green fragrant swags, in lights, in wreaths, simply to be beautiful. To bring good cheer. And who doesn't need good cheer when it gets dark at 4:45 in the afternoon?

I understand--I really do--that I'm a sap to imagine that Starbucks puts up wreaths to cheer up my day. Starbucks puts up wreaths to sell me things: good lord, they have branded a particular coffee as a limited offering 'Christmas Blend' (red bag for regular, green bag for decaf). Even the garlands on local lamposts appear only in the commercial district, purchased and maintained by the local merchants association, again presumably to kindle the shopping spirit. But for the most part, I can just enjoy the beautiful cheery things, can't I? Can't I?

Well yes, mostly I do, although it's the boundaries of the holiday that bring me down. It is crass, crass, crass, I think, to crank up the Bing Crosby the day after Halloween, when people are still wandering around in flip-flops. I vividly remember being handed my red 'holiday traditions' takeaway cup at Starbucks that day, and just reacting with visceral disgust: "It's too soon!" I thought, "you'll ruin it if you start too soon!" Mine is not an uncommon complaint, obviously. What could we talk about the first week of November if not, gosh-I-wish-we-celebrated-Thanksgiving-with-the-Americans-so-
we-could-hold-off-on-Xmas-until-then?

Mostly I hold out for a December festivity. The tree goes up on December 1st, and I give myself license to live it up to the red and green fullest until ... well, until New Year's. This seems a sensible, intuitive end to the holiday 'season', does it not? Most people seem to book off that week as vacation, and Christmas and New Year's Eve are two fairly major celebration events. Children are off school. Many offices are not simply understaffed but shut down entirely. In fact, my family has always tended to concentrate most of our celebrations during this week, after Christmas and before New Year's, and I imagine yours must have too.

So. What has really started to depress me, beyond the now-cliched it-starts-too-soon lament, is that Christmas ends too soon. What really depress me are the braying Boxing Day ads: buy! buy! buy! Get what you really wanted for Christmas! Now it's time to shop for you! Santa screwed you over, but we've got a big sale! My memory is not so poor that I don't recognize these retailers as the same ones pushing a peace, love, and better-to-give-than-receive message a mere 24 hours prior. It's just so cynical. I have not managed to work my way down to the orange-laden toe of my Christmas stocking before the holiday is loudly derided, and the tinsel all cleared away in the name of yet another commercial holiday. Radio stations that switch from 24 hour holiday music back to regular programming on the 26th give me a similar feeling: such practices seem to indicate that once the presents are open, the holiday is over. Or once more, my local Starbucks: it is denuded of wreaths by the time I walk down for a little Boxing Day treat, some indie-rock darling having taken over the sound system from Bing and company.

By the time that everyone is finally able to just sit down and enjoy the holiday, rather than freaking out preparing for it, it. is. declared. done.

So here is my plea: can we start the windup just a little later? and keep the party going just a little longer? Because my calculated innocence is starting to wear a little thin. And I'll need all the energy and cheer I can muster in the seven weeks remaining until Valentine's Day.

Merry Christmas!

Hello ... here's a little Merry Xmas dispatch from our house. Hope it makes you smile ...

Santa! Santa! Santa! Santa!

This was what I was hoping for

Tonight, after I had come home from work and settled into what is becoming our family's evening routine, I had one of those moments that I want to remember. Nothing terribly special, but so pleasant and so ordinary that it just feels like an exemplary experience. The kind you imagine having when you are round and pregnant and daydreaming about, say, your first Christmas with as-yet-unborn baby.

It was nothing really. Miss Baby was a little crabby, in the way that she tends to be around the supper hour, so we were doing our rounds of the house, her carried on my hip, looking to pass the time until her bath. We closed all the blinds on the main floor and said our goodbyes to the neighbours, the street, the backyard, and the traffic. We sat in the laundry room and sorted the loads, then watched and watched and watched in fascination as the glass-doored front-loading washer spun the socks and t-shirts first one way, then the other. Then one way, and again the other. We had a conversation with the baby in the mirror. We made sure that PCK had enough water in her dish. We wandered into the family room to say hello to The Dada, and as he was engrossed in his book, we had some quiet fun examining the Christmas tree.

Then we sat on the floor, and Miss Baby settled happily on her back, cooing at and chewing her Rudolf book, staring up at the tree. I settled down on my side at eye-level with her. She grabbed at my belt and rolled and arched, and chewed and cooed, and drooled and stared at the tree. I watched and cooed with her. Pynchon finished his book, and came over to nuzzle her neck and make her laugh.

That's it. Nothing special. Nothing spectacular, no new developmental milestone, nothing terribly photogenic or really noteworthy. Just Miss Baby expressing her little self and enjoying her Mama, her Dada her book, and the Christmas tree. And me, in the right frame of mind, and at the right angle, to really appreciate this for what it is. My family. Comfortable and content, all together, just being with each other.

It's the kind of thing I hope I'll always remember.

"Hallelujah, Holy Shit! Where's the Tylenol?"

Thus spake the ever-harried every-Dad Clark W. Griswold at the climax of National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, a chronicle of one man's big-hearted, ill-fated attempt to host a "fun, old-fashioned family Christmas."

Christmas Vacation is always the first holiday movie I watch each year because I find it enacts the perfect balance of holiday cheer ... and holiday angst. Its sweet idealism and aw-shucks goodwill are perfectly balanced by the sourness of holiday stressors we all suffer. It enacts the timeless Christmas ritual of optimism and cheer struggling hard against cynicism and exhaustion. And of course, the slapstick is killer: falling off roofs! and through ceilings! attacks by maddened squirrels! sewer gas explosions! Cousin Eddie's distressingly tight pants!

Griswold family adventures on a classic road trip, a holiday to Europe, and a visit to Las Vegas are chronicled in other Lampoon films, and go comically awry--but there's something about this Christmas version of the Griswold failure-to-meet-expectation-vacation that's particularly compelling. I think that's because everyone turns into Clark Griswold at Christmas, prey to misty nostalgia, a misguided vision of what will occur when all one's nearest and dearest are crowded together with too much food and too few bedrooms, an idealized notion of what the holiday should entail, and a strong sense of incipient buyer's remorse when we realize just how much we've overextended ourselves financially. There must be a reason that my local newspaper and every magazine I pick up is running terribly earnest articles addressing holiday dread: how not to gain weight, how not to fight with your family, how not to go broke, how not to get depressed.

To help make your holiday season more Buddy the Elf ("smiling is my favorite") than Clark Griswold ("Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, kiss my ass, kiss his ass, kiss your ass ..."), I hereby humbly offer you a series of posts on putting the fun back into the season.

PCK, 2005: "Seriously, you guys need to have a baby already. Leave me alone."

Be Honest; Plan it Out; Be Strategic

Paradoxically, the key to having the kind of relaxed, joyous, spontaneously fun kind of Christmas around our house has been to have A Serious Discussion about it in early December, and pretty much every morning and evening of the week between Christmas and New Year's. Basically, Pynchon and I lay out our desires for the holiday season, what we imagine will stress us out, what we'd like to avoid, and how we'll block out the time. For example, our first year in our first apartment together, it turned out we both just wanted to cocoon on the Big Week, but felt kinda festive enough to throw fancier parties in the leadup. So on Christmas Day, we ate frozen lasagne on the couch and watched A Christmas Story and Home Alone on TV, rehashing our December cocktail parties during the commercials. What a relief, considering I had almost dragged him up to my parents' for a Fun, Old-Fashioned Family Christmas! We were in our jammies all day, and spent the day by ourselves, in our own apartment. By way of contrast, this year, we decided we wanted to have my parents come to stay with us for a couple of days, and host my sister's family for a low-key dinner on Boxing Day-ish. Every year is different, so every year we negotiate, and our prime task is to figure out what we want as a family. Just the two--now three--of us.

The hard part of this, of course, is not bowing to others' expectations: your parents', your friends', your siblings'. I have to admit that we are very lucky to have quite pragmatic parents: mine don't really fuss much about these kinds of 'events', and Pynchon's are much more interested in the religious aspects of the holiday. No perfect-centrepiece Martha Stewart or dewy-eyed Clark Griswold wannabes in either of our families. Some of you are not so lucky, I know. Over here, what we have to be careful of are our own sometimes unrealistic expectations of what the holiday might mean. Right now we're being careful to remind ourselves that Miss Baby is six months old. Let's be honest: Xmas means nothing to her, really. For goodness sake, she can't even sit up yet. We'll try to enjoy this as one more Christmas where we can really spoil each other, and watch the magic develop for her next year.

If I knew what was happening, I would sooo be yelling right now ...

Do I sound like a total grinch yet? I don't mean to: I love Christmas. I can hardly wait for December 1st to roll around, so I can break out the Johnny Mathis Christmas album (seriously). Tomorrow I'll tell you some of the things that bring me joy in the season ...

Teeny Tiny Tyrant: Triumphant!

My The Mama was going to write you a post about how to actually enjoy the holidays, but she is too tired, and besides, I, Miss Baby have assumed control of the household.

Do not assume from the big purple bags under my eyes and my deep and soulful expression that I am one super-exhausted baby. Well, don't assume that I will sleep. Because I won't. In fact, to make this point perfectly clear, last night I got up at 10:15, 3:10, 3:50, and 5:15 before starting my day at 7:06! Yes, that's four wakeups. The Mama and The Dada were very surprised and, I think, impressed by my new talents: unswaddling myself, skooching up to the top corner of the crib, wedging myself there in a blanket tornado, and then yelling. I got a lot of practice doing this last night, so I'm pretty confident in this area now.

Because of the wild success of my night-time tour de force, I figured I deserved a bit of a break this morning, so I napped for almost two hours! This was a real surprise to The Dada, who didn't dare nap himself for longer than 30 minutes for fear of not hearing me get up at 32 minutes like yesterday, the day before that, and the day before that. He's getting tireder and tireder as I get perkier and perkier. Wheeeeee! The Dada, you didn't get the memo about today's long nap? My bad ...

As for The Mama, she tried to sleep in this morning but I yelled way too loud and often. Ha ha, The Mama! I wanted her to come to the kitchen and play with me and The Dada and she did! Hooray! And I smiled and drooled and cooed and was happy. But The Mama and The Dada both looked like they had been hit by trucks. So I woke them up with a giant liquid poopie explosion! Nothing like an entire outfit change to cheer up the morning! Before, their eyes were half closed. After, their eyes were half-closed and watering. Yay!

The Mama says she'll be back tomorrow--she's slumped in the corner muttering something about 'so tired ... left boobie milk in cooler on desk ... at work ...' and The Dada is leaving with her office keys. Good luck! Bwah-ha-ha-ha ...