Traditions of the Present

After Monday’s sad trombone about my childhood non-belief in Santa Claus, I was thinking about other Christmas-related events from my childhood. Prompted by one of those seasonal articles like, “One Hundred Holiday Traditions to Start This Year!” in some magazine I was thinking about traditions I’ve been exposed to in the course of my lifetime. One area that stood out clearly was the variety of rituals that surround present opening.

When I was a kid, my mother always wanted me to “play elf.” That is, she wanted me to go to the tree, find everyone a present, distribute them, then do it again until all the presents were opened. I hated this. I didn’t want to bounce up and down and traipse around the room any more than anyone else did, but I was forced to because I was the youngest (and the only child). I still hate it, but now that I’m a grownup I can refuse to do it. I don’t make my kids do it, either.

When we started going to my in-laws for Christmas, my sister-in-law actually liked playing elf. I don’t care if that’s how people want to open presents, as long as I’m not the one that has to pass them out. If she was happy doing it, I was happy letting her.

One part of the present-opening at my in laws that I was not happy about was the laser focus on the opener. We’d go around one by one and open our presents, with everyone else watching intently as the gift was revealed.

The problem was my mother in law was notorious for both reusing boxes, and for buying a mix of really great gifts and strange junk. You’d remove the gift wrap and think, “She thought I’d want a Norelco electric razor?” only to realize that she’d just used a handy container which happened to fit the set of microplane graters you’d been dying for. It was disconcerting to have half a dozen people keenly watching your facial expressions, particularly when the possibility was very real one of them could be, “What the fuck is this…?

I would have much preferred we all open one present at the same time, then go around and admire what everyone else had been given. It would have given me the chance to settle my expression after opening something completely bizarre like a small tabletop statue of a sparrow (a real gift I was given, for no reason I can think of—I had never expressed a particular fondness for sparrows, or table top dust collectors, but about 20% of the gifts my mother in law gave were this sort of random, inexplicable thing).

Now I have my own house and I can do present opening my own way. I prefer to have a pile of all my presents and open them one at a time. At this point my kids are still in the “rip everything open as fast as possible and look around for more” stage, but as they get older, I hope they’ll learn to savor the process. And just because they rip everything open right away doesn’t mean I have to. But I like to have everything in front of me so I know how many things I have left to open. I hate to open the last present only to find that it was the last present. Like eating the last potato chip or M&M when you didn’t realize it was the last one—you feel let down because there aren’t more, and you didn’t fully appreciate the last one for what it was.

I suppose as the kids get older we’ll move more toward the leisurely opening sessions like the ones we had at my in laws house. I hear there may even come a day when I have to actually wake my children up in order to get them to come open presents, instead of having them get up at 4 a.m. and wake us up. But my husband and I have made a pledge never to use weird boxes for gifts. It’s just not fair to a 13 year old to have them spend even half a minute thinking that their mom got them a Salad Shooter, only to have it be a blue tooth speaker. That’s the kind of thing that can lead to therapy.


What present opening traditions do you have? Have you ever been forced to play elf? Does your family give weird gifts, or good gifts in weird packages?

Santa And Me

I don’t remember when it happened, but my mom told me there was no Santa Claus. I don’t mean she broke it to me that all those years I’d believed in something that didn’t really exist. I mean when I was three or four or however old it is kids are when they can get their heads around Santa Claus, she said he wasn’t real, no matter what my friends told me.

Before you condemn her (if you’re inclined to), let me explain her logic.

She told me later she couldn’t bring herself to lie to me. She felt telling me about a man in a red suit who flies around the world in one night and brings you presents and expecting me to believe it was insulting my intelligence. She was sure I’d recognize it for the impossible myth that it is and be disillusioned that she tricked me with this preposterous fiction. I think she overestimated how smart I really was, and how likely I was to view her participation in this almost universal bit of fantasy as deceit, but that’s neither here nor there. (To answer the obvious question, there was also no tooth fairy and no Easter Bunny in my childhood.)

She said that shortly after she told me there was no Santa I came home from school and insisted Santa was real, and she was to shut her pie hole (or whatever the four year old version of that was).

That may be so, but I will tell you I never genuinely believed in Santa.

I wanted to. I tried. I would lie in bed and pretend I was listening for sleigh bells and hooves on the roof.

But I knew it was a lie. Even at age five or six I knew I was listening for something that would never happen.

As ridiculous as it is, all my life I have felt I missed out on something really important by not being invited to participate in Santa Claus. I looked around at all my friends with their “Santa presents” and their carrots for the reindeer, and I was outside looking in. I didn’t even consider myself intellectually superior to them, because I was five and didn’t know what the fuck that meant.

I certainly told my own children about Santa Claus. All four of them have believed for years. The oldest is a bit on the suspicious side, and has always been looking for a way to expose me: an inconsistency in the story, a gift that’s just too perfectly chosen based on a request, a too-similar handwriting on the “thank you” note left beside the plate of cookie crumbs. But the younger three believe with all their hearts, and even at nine and eight still do. I recall when I was a kid that eight or nine was about the time parents were being exposed, and my friends stopped believing. Now the children of my  friends seem to keep the faith through fifth and sixth grades, according to a very scientific, very sophisticated survey I conducted by asking half a dozen of my closest friends about it.

So careful am I to preserve their faith that three or four times I have alt-tabbed to another screen when one of my nine year olds walked over to talk to me while I was writing this, lest he read something like “no Santa” over my shoulder.

I honestly believe that Santa is a good thing, providing a valuable and beneficial lesson: just because you can’t see it, just because it sounds too farfetched to be remotely real, doesn’t mean it might not be true. What harm does it do to let kids believe that the impossible is possible? What’s the harm in promoting fantasy and magic? Kids eventually figure out those things aren’t real (or are they? as one of my nine year olds would say) but to have time to trust in something unseen and almost unbelievable is a worthwhile exercise to me.

I think it teaches them unquestioning faith, which is something that’s in pretty short supply in our cynical, skeptical society. We expect kids to think they can do anything they put their minds to. If they think they can’t, couldn’t we remind them that when they were little they didn’t think twice about their faith in a man who got in a sleigh on December 24^th and in one night delivered a present to every kid in the whole world? Wouldn’t that serve as a touchstone for their belief that the impossible is indeed possible, no matter how unrealistic it seems at the time? Let’s teach them that just because it sounds impossible doesn’t mean it is. I’m pretty sure that’s how we ended up with the pyramids, space travel, and Disneyland.

An Open Letter to Thanksgiving

Dear Thanksgiving,

I hear many complaints on your behalf about this time every year from people who are upset that Christmas is stomping on you, causing you to be overlooked. While I agree that this is unfortunate, I have to wonder if some of it isn’t your own fault. Sorry if that sounds harsh, but hear me out.

You have to admit that as holidays go, you’re not the flashiest, funnest one of the bunch. We don’t get to give presents, dress up as zombies, or blow shit up because of you. What we get to do is make an enormous meal, which for some people is not within their comfort zone, or even their abilities. I don’t think your problems are anything a good PR person couldn’t fix. While I am not a PR person, I can offer a few suggestions to get you started. There are a couple of things where the train has already left the station, but not everything is irreparable.

Your icons are, let’s face it, a little dull. Whereas with other holidays we get a cute bunny who brings jelly beans and Cadbury Crème Eggs (bless that little rodent), or a man who performs a seemingly impossible feat on an annual basis, your spokespeople are Pilgrims. The Pilgrims may have been a fine group, without whom many of us would still be attending Anglican Eucharist every Sunday, but they’re not really much of anyone’s idea of a good time. You might consider seeking some new talent. Someone with broad appeal who just screams, “I’m a good time!” I’d recommend someone like Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny, but I think they’re under contract to other companies. But that’s the general idea.

Decorations for you share a lot of crossover with autumn in general, and run to colored leaves and gourds. There’s no bling, no twinkle. When you can obtain suitable adornment for an occasion by opening the back door and picking some shit up off the ground, you’re not really trying very hard. Maybe take a lesson from some of the bigger name holidays—find a central icon. Christmas has its tree, Easter its basket. I know you have that horn of plenty, but can we be honest? Lame.  And it’s not like on Thanksgiving morning I wake up and that thing has been in any way transformed. It has the same orange and brown leaves, and strangely warty gourds that were there the night before. There needs to be some anticipation to bring on that rush of excitement.

Food is your strength, and you want to play that for all it’s worth. However, I need to point out that turkey wasn’t your best call for a primary protein. Turkey is chicken’s ugly girlfriend. I hate to say that, but it’s true. It’s such a big bird that it’s a really hard thing to get right, and most people don’t do a very good job. If you want to be popular, you can’t make people suffer through a meal of what has the very real potential to taste like gravy-covered rope and sawdust when prepared by the wrong hands. The fact that people have to try to find ways to disguise leftover turkey should have been a red flag. I think the damage is done here, but if you can shift focus to some of the more widely admired side dishes, it's not a total loss. I’d work on promoting the stuffing and mashed potatoes—almost everyone loves a carb.

Also, that moving-the-date-around thing was not a good choice. Again, not something I think we can remedy at this point in time, but you have to admit, your lack of predictability is an issue. Easter pulled it off, but it took chocolate to make it fly. With you we have a moving target of a date, and turkey. You feel me here.

Part of your problem is that you’re not the squeaky wheel. Christmas has so many moving parts—the food, the gifts, the decorations. You’re always the same. Once we’ve decided on who’s hosting you in a given year, we’re pretty much done. There’s not much left to ponder and plan. We set the menu by rote, generally having the same things we had last year and the year before. We might mix it up and use pancetta in the Brussels sprouts instead of bacon, but really, there’s not that much to differentiate last year’s meal from this year’s.

I suggest you change your angle. Instead of trying to be a big fish in a big pond, be a big fish in a small pond. As someone who starts their Christmas planning in July (hey, you’re a holiday represented by dour fun-hating Puritans and a bird that’s been documented as being not only too stupid to come in out of the rain, but one that will look up at falling rain with its mouth open and drown, so don’t you judge me), I do actually look forward to Thanksgiving as a break in that. Before Thanksgiving I make my decorating plans, decide which cookies to make and create lists of ingredients I’ll need to buy, decide who’s getting what as gifts. I don’t take any action, but the planning is a significant effort.

Then you show up in late November, and I take a break for a day. For a day I spend time with my kids (when they’re not playing fucking Minecraft because it’s not a school day, so they get to do that), I relax by making some rolls (my usual contribution to our holiday meal), I look around the house and see what will need to be done to get ready for Christmas, but I don’t need to actually do it. I start drinking Prosecco right after lunch if I feel like it (it’s a holiday thing).

Sell yourself as a pause, an intermission, a clean delineator between the planning and the execution around Christmas. I’m sure plenty of people wait until the Friday after Thanksgiving to start thinking about Christmas, but I wonder how often that delay is fueled by guilt because everyone says Christmas “starts too early” these days. Wouldn’t you be something of a hero if you said, “Hey, you know what? It’s totally OK to start thinking of my buddy Christmas as early as you want—you know, plan and whatnot so you’re not all stressed the day after me. Just look at me as a pleasant day off before the insanity of Christmas or Hanukah comes around. You don’t even have to think very hard about what to serve to your family to eat. I’m a gimme of a holiday.”

I think this strategy could work for you. Why not give it some thought.

Best,

Me

Working at the Mall

My third job out of college was for a major long distance carrier. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the concept of “long distance,” back in the Dark Ages, if you wanted to call a person who lived far away from you, you had to use a “long distance carrier” to place the call. This was a company you chose based on how recently they had sent you a check to bribe you to switch to their service. The “big three” were Sprint, MCI and AT&T. The truth is that initially they all just bought capacity from AT&T, which owned the fiber optic network long distance calls were carried on, before eventually laying their own cable, but never mind that. In any event, I worked for one of these three (not really important which one).

 

 

Let's face it--they were pretty much interchangeable

I worked there for almost exactly one year before getting laid off, much to my delirious joy. The woman I worked for was a control freak and a helicopter boss. In that one year I had met six people that I’d gotten to know well enough to converse with, and they were the people in my department, the girl who sat across from me, and the girl who sat next to me. There are two reasons for this. First is that my helicopter boss handled all the communication with our internal customers. I remember sitting in one meeting to hear about a project we were going to be working on. One. And my boss did all the talking. All other projects I worked on came through her, and my output was returned to the customer through the same channel. The second reason is the people themselves. People at this company were just unfriendly. I would cross paths with them in the kitchen, and they would studiously avoid eye contact, and respond with only the most cursory of nods to any words of greeting extended to them. It was weird.

Our offices were in a high rise building that was connected to a mall. My cube looked out on the top deck of the parking garage. To get to the parking garage, I had to walk through the food court of the mall. It was actually a fairly convenient location—the lunch options were diverse, since we had access to the food court, and more than once I got up from my desk and ran down to pick up a birthday card or present on a short break.

Since I was there for almost exactly 365 days, I was able to observe two phenomenon that have stayed with me to this day.  The first is Christmas at the mall.

Many are the outraged tirades I’ve seen on Facebook about “starting Christmas too early.” Nordstrom famously—and, in my opinion, smugly—puts up signs after Halloween every year declaring that you won’t find any Christmas decorations in their stores until the day after Thanksgiving. La di fucking da. Isn’t the absence of those decorations enough to make it clear that they’re not rushing Christmas? But no, they have to put up signs patting themselves on the back for making sure Thanksgiving doesn’t get stomped on by Christmas being rolled out too early. Like Thanksgiving has feelings and gives a shit.

Since I was at this company in the early 90s, and stores hadn’t quite gotten to the point that they were putting out Christmas decorations the day after Halloween, Christmas sort of crept in to the mall next to my office. The first thing we noticed was that the muzak had some Christmas songs in the mix when we walked through the food court. Then we’d see the big decorations that the mall owned and put out every year. Santa’s chair was set up, and a sign told us when we’d be able to come see Santa in a few weeks. The stores started to decorate. By Thanksgiving, the mall was in full on Yuletide mode.

But the most prominent memory for me is the parking deck. Remember it was the view from my cube. I started this job in August or September (I forget the exact date), and for the first couple of months of my employment, I could look out on the deck and there might be three or four cars up there. Some days it was completely empty and remained that way.

But starting in late November, an interesting thing happened. More and more cars started parking up there. This mall isn’t far from the Pentagon and the offices that surround it, so lots of people would come over to the mall on their lunch hour to do their holiday shopping. By mid-December, looking down on the deck around lunchtime, it was almost half full. Then the amount of time during which the upper deck was somewhat full began to lengthen—there would be a good number of cars there from 10 or 10:30 until about 3 p.m., with almost all the spaces being taken during lunch. The week before Christmas, from about 9:30 a.m. until the time I left the office, the top deck was almost completely solid with cars. (We had reserved parking in another part of the garage, so I didn’t have to fight people for spaces, fortunately.) What I find interesting about this is that if the top deck was solid with cars, it meant that the four levels beneath it were too. That’s a lot of people, when you think about it.

Then the holidays passed, and winter changed to spring, and another interesting thing happened.

Washington, D.C. is a popular spring break destination. Schools from all over the country send groups of kids to D.C. to take in the history, tour the museums, and learn about our country’s early years. They also, apparently, make sure they get a chance to check out important landmarks like Banana Republic and The Gap, presumably so they can see how the D.C. locations of those stores differ from the ones they have in Raleigh or Cleveland or Omaha. (Spoiler: they don’t.)

Look it's Short Hills Mall! Or is it King of Prussia? Or possibly the Mall of America. Because THEY ALL LOOK THE FUCKING SAME.

Busloads of kids would be dropped off at the mall, where they would swarm through it, eating Auntie Annie’s pretzels and drinking Slushees and checking out chain stores that were exactly the same as the ones they had at home. I’ve never understood this. People travel thousands of miles so they can go try on the same tan chinos they could buy at a store ten minutes from their own homes. I could see if they went to Georgetown, or Old Town Alexandria. While those areas do have a few places that are nationally prominent, they have a lot of small boutique type stores with interesting and diverse merchandise. But these kids were salivating to get to Ann Taylor and The Limited so they could look at the same earrings and bangle bracelets that were for sale at every Ann Taylor on planet earth.

So I spent probably six weeks watching these kids exclaim with excitement when they discovered that this mall had all the same stores their mall had. Wasn’t that cool? Ohmuhgod, they totally have Eddie Bauer here too! Squee! Then the spring break season ended, and the crowds reduced back down to more normal levels, or at least were comprised of more adults than teenagers.

About three months after that, the director of my department called me into her office and informed me that they would have to let me go, that the amount of work the department was being asked to do didn’t justify my position, and they were eliminating it. Her manner clearly indicated that she was delivering what she thought would be bad news, and cause me great distress. The truth was I had to restrain myself to keep from kissing her full on the mouth. This was the best news I’d gotten in months. No more would I have to try to pry a pleasantry out of some surly office drone while I was microwaving a Lean Cuisine. Never again would I be given work to do in such a way that it felt more like homework than a professional contribution to an organization. And I can’t say I felt much in the way of regret when the rise of cell phones pretty much drove this particular long distance carrier out of existence. About the only thing I’ve ever missed was getting to see the parking lot at Christmas, and the throngs of kids in the spring. They were the most interesting parts of the whole job.

Halloween. Boo.

I know plenty of people disagree with me, but Halloween leaves me cold. Costumes, trick or treat, blah blah whatever. For the sake of my children, I try my best to hide this lack of enthusiasm. I buy fake spiders and plastic skeletons. I even throw a Halloween party, complete with pumpkin flinging trebuchet every year (my husband, who does like Halloween, built the trebuchet himself. I don't like Halloween, but even I have to admit that a life size trebuchet that can fling a pumpkin 300' is pretty badass).

My complete lack of interest is probably partly, if not entirely, fed by my own childhood experiences. My mom was a total washout in the costume department. I remember being about five things when I was a kid, all of them lame. The year I was seven it was so bad that I didn’t even have a costume, per se. She pulled out a blue tartan kilt and cape she’d bought me during a previous summer vacation to Bermuda and said, “There. You’re Mary, Queen of Scots.” Because I was kind of a weird kid, I knew who that was (sort of), but seriously—what the fuck?

The last year I recall actually even trick or treating at all was the year I was in 7^th grade. All the girls in my class (about 7 of us) spent the night at someone’s house and we didn’t so much go trick or treating, as go out and see what kind of trouble we could get in. Being the kind of kid I was, that wasn’t much, as it turned out. About the only thing of note that happened was when we were spraying Silly String on the playground at the local elementary school, and a flashlight beam came out of nowhere and pinned us. The guy behind it said, “Stop—police.” And my friend Sarah—for reasons that she has never been able to articulate—shot back, “Who you jivin’?” and the cop replied, “I ain’t jivin’.” Oh shit.

Turned out they were looking for kids who were actually tagging with spray paint. When they saw that all we had was Silly String, and that we had no idea who the spray painters were, and hadn’t seen them, they let us go. And that was pretty much the end of my career as a juvenile delinquent.

I was able to all but ignore Halloween from about 1982 until fairly recently. About the only thing I’d do was give out candy (and hey, seventh grade boys—here’s a tip: don’t go out in the same outfit you wore to school, ring doorbells and hold out your bag for candy with a disaffected grunt. Show a little spirit and put some effort into it, or you can just get your candy from someone else’s house; you won’t be getting any of my Snickers Fun Size, you little assholes. If you’re too embarrassed to say it, you’re too old to do it), and possibly attend the occasional adult Halloween party. I’m not a complete toad—I’d dress up. I remember one year I went as a teenager, which necessitated me buying the first copy of Seventeen magazine I’d had since I was seventeen. You know, to see what the kids were wearing.

But then I started having my own kids, and of course they wanted in on this free candy thing, so I was forced to participate again. This time I went to the other extreme, and started making all their costumes from scratch.

Let me tell you about that. Making a costume from scratch sounds awesome and supportive and dedicated. In reality it is stupid and expensive and stressful. One year I made my four kids’ costumes and ended up spending over SIX HUNDRED DOLLARS on the fabric, patterns, notions, what have you. Six hundred bucks! And I was making shit like Pokemon. I had two kids who wanted to be Pokemon that year, but of course they didn’t want to be the one they actually sell the pattern for (his name is Pikachu, if you care, or if you have an eight year old boy and it therefore means something to you). They wanted to be these other bizarre ones that look like lizards and shit, and for which of course you can’t just go out and buy a pattern. So not only did I have to make them, I had to make them up. Three years in a row I spent the weekend before Halloween in tears, swearing to God we weren’t going to do this again next year (so I was a little slow in actually doing it).

So this year we did buy costumes. Now I see part of the benefit of not buying them costumes. When I’m making them, they can’t possibly wear them until they’re done (which was usually October 30^th at 10:30 p.m.). This year they’ve had them for two weeks, and already they’ve wanted to wear them to about six different places. Mean, mean Mommy refuses to allow this. Know why? I’ll tell you—it’s because if I let them wear them to the zoo, the park, the grocery store, and every other place they wanted to wear them for the 30 days prior to Halloween, at 3 p.m. on October 31^st, they would announce that they were bored with whatever costume they’d been wearing for the last month, and that they wanted to be, “something else.” This would cause me to lose my grip on what’s left of my precious, fragile sanity.

So clearly this is a no win situation. I either stress myself out emotionally and financially, or I spend a month being stressed out because I have to keep refusing to allow them to go to every event dressed as a wizard or Dead Man Rocking (a sort of zombie rock star—don’t ask) because they’d get bored and/or ruin the costume and then have nothing to wear on Halloween proper. About the only thing I can do at this point is just wait until they claim to be too old for such foolishness. Which should take about six more years.

I know when my kids are grown up, there are things I will miss—I already miss that my daughter no longer refers biscuits as “bistiks,” and that one of my twins no longer has that adorable baby lisp that caused him to say things like “fwosting” instead of “frosting.” But I refuse to miss the mayhem around Halloween. I’ve been over it for about thirty six years now.