Merry Not-Christmas

I have a love/hate relationship with the holidays. Love because I want to love the holidays. Hate because I usually hate the holidays.

My issues with the Thanksgiving-to-Christmas period began in childhood (sorry, Mom and Dad, you failed on this one!). My first problem was all me. Basically, I was an ADD wreck during the holidays. Happy Holidays meant that:

1. There was no schoolwork to do.
2. Most electronics were vetoed in the name of "family togetherness".
3. I was forced to play group games in the name of "family togetherness".
4. I was forced to go out in the sunlight and the snow and the stupid nature so "Mom can get some stuff ready".
5. We didn't go out anywhere or do anything because we were engaging in lots of "family togetherness".
6. The radio was playing horrifyingly bad Christina Aguilera covers of traditional Christmas carols.
7. There was no Christmas until Christmas.

It was the last one that really rankled me. Being the fairly orthodox Catholics that we are (you know it's bad when all your coworkers at Burger King lovingly nicknamed you "Christian"), my mom refused to do anything Christmas until it was actually Christmas. And Christmas, according to the Catholic liturgical calendar, began at the vigil mass on Christmas Eve and ended twelve days later. There was no celebrating before Christmas because you know, Advent, and the Incarnation had not yet occurred, and we were all still preparing the way for the Lord and all. So this basically meant that, prior to 5 PM on December 24th:

1. There were no Christmas lights.
2. There was no Christmas tree.
3. There were no Christmas decorations.
4. There was no Christmas music.
5. There were no Christmas cookies.
6. There was no fun allowed. At all.

So after all this horrible torture inflicted upon me at a tender age, I learned to dread Christmas. Everybody else got to celebrate all month long and we couldn't. Everybody else forgot about Christmas on December 26th. On December 26th we still had ten more days to go of family togetherness.

Eventually, however, our Christmas orthodoxy began to change.

The catalyst was the Christmas tree. Since Christmas was taboo until it was actually Christmas, we got our tree on Christmas Eve. This posed a number of problems. First of all, everybody else had already purchased their trees, and the tree-sellers, amateur economists that they were, assumed that the tree-buying season had passed and had pretty much all closed up shop for the season. Perhaps, I thought, by not selling Christmas trees on Christmas Eve, they were instead choosing to engage in good ol' family togetherness with their own Christmas trees! At any rate, buying a tree on Christmas eve was like finding one particular needle on a fir tree. My dad would literally drive around all morning searching for the lone remaining tree-merchant in the tri-county area. He was usually successful, but only after a full tank of gas had been expended. And lo! When a Christmas tree was finally located, we would often get a deal! Like a huge Christmas tree for ten dollars! What a savings!

So we'd cart the tree home and count down the minutes until 5 PM, when Christmas began. All of us would engage in ritual family togetherness and decorate the tree together in solidarity. Sometimes we'd even eat Christmas cookies! Sometimes there'd even be snow falling outside!

But then the true folly of our rigid Christmas observations began to emerge.

It took many years for this realization to dawn upon my parents. If you bought a Christmas tree on Christmas Eve, after everybody else had already purchased a Christmas tree, that meant that our Christmas tree had been passed over by all other purchases for some mysterious reason. Perhaps... the tree-merchant was trying to... get rid of the Christmas tree! Could it be... those last few trees were... flawed?

So we got our Christmas tree.

We put up our Christmas tree.

We decorated our Christmas tree.

Our Christmas tree fell over, shattering all of our ornaments.

The next year, we got our Christmas tree.

We put up our Christmas tree.

We decorated our Christmas tree with new ornaments.

Our Christmas tree fell over, shattering all of our (new) ornaments.

The next year, we were wiser.

We got our Christmas tree, checking it carefully before purchasing.

We put up our Christmas tree.

We decorated our Christmas tree with new ornaments.

Our Christmas tree fell over, shattering all of our ornaments, again.

The next year, we were even wiser. Finally. It just took three deformed Christmas trees. We rejected Catholicism for a week and bought a Christmas tree a week before Christmas Eve. We kept it in the garage, where its unholy Christmas would not invade our home before it was right and proper to do so. It also cost more Christmas tree money to be bad Catholics, but we made up the money in all the ornaments that we saved from destruction. We think that our Christmas trees all had crooked trunks and that's why they were all rejected by other buying and fell over once they were carefully decorated by all of us, but it could also be that the trees just had some gross motor issues. That's what I think, anyway.

So I grew up and got married. We got an apartment. And for our first Christmas together, we put up our tree on Thanksgiving weekend. We were all merry and bright by December 1st.

God did not approve. Our very first Christmas tree collapsed on our rug a few hours after we had flaunted the true celebration of the Virgin Birth. We had to contend with evil pine needles everywhere.

And this year, we bought an artificial tree. We'll let you know how that goes.