Crafting Christmas: A Tale of Horror and Supernatural Events
Each year I start the Advent season anew, moved by nostalgia, or more properly, amnesia. I can’t seem to stop myself. Come November, I’ll actually believe I’m going to make handmade gifts for friends and neighbors. I’ll actually believe that my spare evenings will be spent relaxing in front of a roaring fire, penning clever Christmas cards, while my children raptly lose themselves in the pages of a Children’s Literary Classic.
Here’s the fine print on my holiday fantasy. Children and relaxation rarely - if ever - go together. For me doing almost anything with my children requires a total abandonment of self in which I become a Gumby Doll with an escalating series of nervous tics.
During the holidays, FYI, a typical three year old greets the day lobbying for chocolate. The conversation will go something like this:
“No, Sweetie-pie, we don’t eat chocolate for breakfast.”
“Please.”
“No.”
“But I said please.”
“The answer is still no.”
“Please, please, please!”
“You know the rule. No means No.”
In my case, this would be the cue for my daughter to begin to cry. “The answer is still no,” I say, but my tone isn’t firm, it’s every bit as wobbly as my daughter’s upper lip.
“Please-please-please!” This last liturgical wail is accompanied by a violent tug on my nightgown. APlease, please, please!”
This goes on for several more seconds until I am the one who is crying. Within minutes I am fixing my sweetie half a piece of toast so she can scarf down a grapefruit-sized Christmas ornament made entirely of chocolate.
Having flunked the parenting-with-backbone pop quiz , I comfort myself by imagining the fun we’ll have doing holiday baking together. Here, imagine is the operative word and together is the spoiler. While I may begin with a notion of adorable star-shaped Christmas cookies with white and silver frosting, we will end up with paramecium-shaped globs covered with what looks like mud but is actually what happens when a Jr. Scientist has poured all the food colorings into the same undersized container.
Oh well, I will sigh. Maybe I’ll get my artistic jollies later,
when we wrap presents. Somehow though,
by the time I’ve finished doing the dishes, the wrapping supplies I assembled
only moments earlier have been altered beyond recognition. The foil wrap is a
crumpled bundle of fine lines and crows feet, the
wonderful Glen Plaid has been shredded into tiny small scraps, pine cones are
bleeding gold dust, and the tape has joined the Witness Protection
Program. Instead of the smartly-wrapped
presents with inventive decorative trim I’d seen in the
You would think, after days of scraping small scraps of Glen Plaid off a floor that is sticky with mud-colored icing, I would get the picture. I swear: this whole Christmas spirit thing is a big fat sham perpetrated by the International Chocolate Cartel and the scotch tape industry. I think it’s mass-produced right after labor day and slowly dripped into our veins along with those exotic-flavored-coffee cravings and a sudden desire for electrostatic dust cloths. Even with Christmas two weeks away, however, I cling to the illusion of long winter evenings in front of that fire.
Hah! None of my chores has been reduced. In fact, both paying and household work sit undone in the week before school lets out, a period of command parental participation in activities conducted entirely on miniature chairs, begging my preschooler to please just mouth the words to the carols she’s been belting out at home. My one spare evening is spent devising an angel costume (surprise!) after the stores are closed (surprise!) for our candy extortionist who will be crushed if she can’t glitter like the rest of the children while climbing into my lap and hiding her head from the Three Wise Men.
By the time school lets out, we are absolutely in need of a break. There isn’t a pair of clean underwear in the house, the sheets haven’t been the same since their audition for the Bethlehem Players and the pantry’s sole occupants are arcane cookie ingredients that will eventually bite the dust without having fulfilled their golden-doughed destinies.
“Now,” I sigh, handing over the carefully-chosen, horribly-wrapped teacher’s gifts. “Now my holiday will begin.”
Somehow, though, the chaos continues. There is traffic, parking, shopping and spending, all in service of creating a “magical” Christmas. There is my son, whose friends have all left town. He has become permanently connected to his video controls when not tormenting his sister in hopes of making something, anything, happen. There is my overtired daughter, whose nerves are shot by Santa’s omniscience regarding mis-behavior.
By Christmas morning, the verdict’s in. I spent more than I planned on too many presents that were opened in five minutes and consigned to a large plastic bin while my daughter cuts Xmas wrap into tiny pieces and my son plays with a balloon from last week’s dentist visit.
I’ve finally earned my long repose in front of the fire, but I just can’t relax. I’m too busy wondering why I’ve done all this, worked myself into a frenzy trying to be the perfect mom, the perfect housekeeper, a Martha Minnie-Me. My husband and kids don’t seem to give a flying sleigh whether our house sparkles, our cakes are made from scratch or our vintage ornaments catch the light. So why do I?
It hits me suddenly that while the right hand was feeling vexed that it never got to do what it wanted, the left was feeling so guilty about such un-Mommy-like emotions that it was singlehandedly trying to reincarate Donna Reed, June Cleaver and the whole Mothers’ A-team from my fifties childhood.
After I’ve reconciled myself to this, I do begin to see that I’ve been expecting the impossible. My picky eater is not suddenly going to crave beta-carotene, my curious son is not going to resist the impulse toward hideous color combinations. Neither of my “hands-on” children is going to sit by serenely by while I use all that wonderful shiny wrap to create right- angled preciousness. Furthermore, even on my best days, my house is not immaculate. Santa may be good, but he’s not that good.
Or is he, I ask myself, as I notice that our house is not devoid of holiday magic.
Throughout Christmas day, for example, each time I re-enter the living room, the neat piles of presents I just stacked under the tree have been mysteriously re-strewn into chaotic formation. Balls of crumpled wrapping paper have jumped spontaneously out of the trash and are scattered across the rug. Small plastic toy pieces have exponentially multiplied and are perfectly distributed for maximum damage to the ball of the foot.
Most inexplicably of all, two months into Winter, I will look back on this holiday and forget the frustrated expectations, the frenzy, the shame that my house never once got perfectly clean. Come February, I’ll get misty-eyed remembering the absorption with which my daughter minced the wrapping paper, my son’s triumphant cackle as he recreated Universal Mud Brown Icing, my husband’s delight as he opened an amoeba-shaped bundle containing splotches of petrified mud. The undone laundry, the untidy rooms, they come and go, but the messy splendor of giving: that can last a hopeless optimist forever.
Sheila Curran’s novel, DIANA LIVELY IS FALLING DOWN
(2005, Penguin