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I am a recent Christmas convert. I can’t blame my late-bloomer status on something noble like the rejection of commercialism or some bitter childhood memory of receiving a lump of coal in my stocking. Don’t get me wrong, the commercialism does bother me, especially when I see people behaving like Gollum during the gift-receiving and opening process.
Going back to childhood though, I simply held the very notion of Christmas at arm’s length. Sure, we had our traditions, including the gifts and a tree or a nativity scene. We spent Christmas morning at grandma’s house where all the kids got stockings overstuffed with candy and fruit and a half-dozen wrapped and bow-covered packs of underwear and tube socks, buttressed by a couple of cool gifts like a video game or remote control car.
Even back then, as I was surrounded by loving parents and grandparents and likable cousins and aunts and uncles, Christmas represented to me a level of family engagement and responsibility I just never thought I’d reach. Plus, I just felt self-conscious about my role in all the hubbub.
Sad, right? A buddy once told me my explanation was so sad I should pitch it to either Lifetime or Hallmark for a made-for-TV movie starring a waiter who acts on weekends.
Really, it wasn’t that bad. You’d never find me forlorn and depressed in December. I was just a grumpy, “old” kid who was skeptical of what non-religious stuff Christmas supposedly represented and was convinced that non-religious stuff had as many awful layers as Dante’s inferno had circles. There was the layer of shopping for people you didn’t have time to say “hi” to the rest of the year. There was the layer of hosting a Cousin Eddie at your home during the holidays. There were more.
Looking back over the years, I’ve come to realize that my objections and those layers all had two common denominators: They involved (1) me as a kid not believing I’d ever fit into an integral role in a family, and (2) me as an adult being selfish about sharing my time and space.
Seriously, cynical 8-year-old James figured gift-givers were important, while gift recipients were as interchangeable as Legos. So I just figured I wasn’t necessary to the celebration. I felt like a prop in a play whose actors weren’t all certain how they felt about one another.
Friends in Milwaukee, where I landed my first U.S. journalism job after college, may remember that as a single guy I almost never participated in Christmas festivities. I didn’t go to Christmas parties, other than those work-related gatherings that came with free food and drink. I didn’t go nuts on gifts. I stocked up on junk food and drink. I ordered either pizza or Chinese food, and I spent Christmas Eves and Christmas Days alone, stretched out on my couch watching NBA games, Kung Fu movies, and re-runs of Def Poetry Jams.
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So, 10-and-a-half years ago I got engaged. Almost immediately, I began participating in Christmas activities with my then-fiancé’s family. It brought back a rush of negative childhood memories. The problem wasn’t her family. They quickly became as much family to me as my flesh and blood, but in my new “position” with them, I still felt no necessary role for me at Christmas time. I just felt like I was going through the motions without bringing anything meaningful to the table. Sort of like mall Santas. They look almost right — red jumpers, beards, fat suits, a pocket full of “ho ho hos” — but at the end of the day they’re off-kilter just enough to be unnecessary, like those wrong-sounding Muppets (credit Family Guy/Stewie Griffin) in the years following Jim Henson’s death. Besides, what’s the point of teaching kids in toddler age range about stranger danger, and then taking them to the mall and making them sit on the lap of a guy they don’t know who is grimacing because of his beard glue itches?
After we got married, I started catching new feelings for Christmas — small feelings at first, like an itch that couldn’t be scratched away.
I wouldn’t have admitted it to my wife then, but I enjoyed being “dragged” shopping with her or visiting that rural winery where they sold handmade wreaths and old-school ornaments.
We had years of pleasant times, my wife and I. But for the first six years of our marriage, the non-religious portion of Christmas was more a romantic thing than a seasonable celebration. We celebrated each other and the fact that we were all the gift the other needed. We lived in South Florida then, and I used to imagine our Christmas Eve strolls from our house to our ’burb’s quaint, walkable downtown for dinner and drinks was something that Bonnie and Clyde might have done had they not been so busy shooting people. My point is for the longest time Christmas was about us boosting each other and fiercely loving each other. That was cool. I felt a role. I needed my wife. She needed me. Tradition be damned.
Then, we had Kid A in the spring of 2011, after six years of trying unsuccessfully to make a little blend of us. It didn’t hit me right away, but I started to get it when his second Christmas season began to ramp up. By then, in the late fall of 2012, he was a few months away from turning 2. He got the Christmas tree. He got Santa. He got that some — most — of those gifts under the tree were for him. He went to Sunday school and got a lesson about Jesus and Mary and Joseph and stars guiding three wise guys bearing gifts, and so on.
I’m still grappling with the commercialism. It bugged me on Christmas Day that my son who, smart child though he is, still doesn’t know his behind from a hole in the ground but knew all about the gift-receiving aspect of Christmas.
Once again though, I had a role, an even bigger role. Now, it wasn’t just my wife and I embracing each other like old-school Jay and Bey. We were also celebrating the birth of our own son. So, I was further stoked ’cause I knew that my son needed me at Christmastime. He didn’t understand commercialism and needed me to be the man, to represent, along with his mom, the source of all that’s good about Christmas. He may believe Santa hooked him up with some of his gifts, but he’s let slip that he knows mom and dad had a big role in it all.
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Last spring — the day after Kid A’s birthday — Kid B was born. She’s now a few months away from turning 1.
Yep, they got gifts but we’re thinking that next Christmas, when Kid A is a few months shy of 5, we’re going to dial back his gifts and have him pick out things to share with another youngster who may not get gifts very often. I’m hoping he’ll volunteer to give up a gift to share with another child too.
I really do enjoy the season now. From the annual trip to the Christmas tree farm where we chop down our own, to picking out a couple of things we think the kids will like, I have a crucial role in Christmas now.
Looking back I wasn’t an unusually cranky child. I was just an old soul who no more saw myself in an integral Christmas role than I saw myself one day driving a minivan, changing poopy diapers, cleaning a freaking litter box for an ungrateful scratching, biting cat — or any cat at all, walking a dog in the rain and not really minding when he takes his time doing his business. I do all of that stuff now. Granted, not always happily, especially the activities involving poop. So, I guess if I made any mistake as an “old” kid, teenager, young and young-ish adult, it was not having a big enough imagination to picture myself as Sinatra’s family guy in a Scottie dog sweater.
Kid A is old enough that he both knows who Santa is and firmly believes in him. But the way he sees it, “daddy still needs to have tools to put together Santa’s presents.”
I’m cool with that. It’s my role. Mine alone.
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This post was previously published on Medium and is republished with permission from the author.
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