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?

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

Say it With Me: "Booing is Bad"

My nine year old came to me a few minutes ago and uttered these ominous words:

“Who are we ‘Booing’ this year?”

My response was “We’re not fucking ‘Booing’ anybody because ‘Booing’ is the stupidest fucking thing ever.” I am probably paraphrasing.

If you’re lucky enough not to know what Booing is, let me enlighten you. Booing consists of gathering up a bunch of Halloween-related crap—candy, plastic spider rings, shit with pictures of Frankenstein on it—putting it in some kind of autumn-themed container, taking it to someone’s house, ringing their door bell and running away. You’re supposed to include a piece of paper with a droll and adorable poem about how they’ve been “ Booed” and now they’re burdened with sharing the love in the form of Booing some new people. Once you’ve been “Booed” you tape a piece of paper with another charming Halloween-themed image on your front door so your neighbors know you’ve already been screwed. I mean, Booed.

This happened to us about three years ago, and since the kids were younger, and it was a novelty, we played along. We bought some cheap junk and a few plastic pumpkins and brushed up on our ringing-the-doorbell-before-running-away skills. The kids had fun at school the next couple of days, listening to their mystified schoolmates try to figure out who could have done this, before they finally ‘fessd up as the culprits. Ha ha, we got you.

Then Christmas rolled around. And Booing became Elfing. And then just before Easter, Elfing morphed into Egging. This shit was getting out of control.

I have a plea for you parents. Please, please can we stop the fucking Booing? It’s cute. Once. But isn’t it bad enough that I have to buy Halloween costumes and candy, and make giant spider webs out of twine on my front porch from which to hang enormous fake spiders, and dig the nasty slimy guts of out unsuspecting gourds and hack faces into them without also having to spend $30 on cheap plastic shit that no one wants in their houses anyway for putting in “boo buckets”?

I’d also appreciate it if we could knock that shit off for all the other holidays—Christmas and Easter and St. Patrick’s Day. The day I open my front door and find a “pot of gold” with a lot of shamrock themed garbage in it on my doormat, along with a note that says, “You’ve been visited by Lachlan the Leprechaun!” it’s highly likely I will beat the shit out of someone.

I realize there are going to be parents who label me a grouchy bitch who wants my children to grow up without any joyous memories of carefree holiday delights. I suspect these are the same parents who insist on giving out birthday party goodie bags, celebrate shit like National Rubber Band Day, and who have personally authored three lists of “101 Elf on a Shelf Ideas.” But you know, we all spent our childhoods without Booing and Egging and all that other crap and I don’t personally feel that I was in any way deprived or missed out. Despite what these parents would think was a clearly disadvantaged upbringing, I did not grow up to rip off liquor stores, or set fire to orphanages. I am a respected member of my community. I don’t have a police record, a history of visits to rehab, or watch “Keeping Up with the Kardashians.”

I just hate the overboard. I am not the first parent to complain of this. In fact, as much as any other debate—sugar consumption, sleep habits, spanking—I think the parenting world may most quickly choose up sides over the excessive celebration of holidays versus the more restrained let’s-set-the-bar-low-to-make-it-easier-for-ourselves-to-achieve-success  camps. My position is that kids who spend their childhoods constantly surrounded by confetti, glitter, and cupcakes decorated like Duncan Butterflies to celebrate National Yoyo Day are children who are going to face crushing disappointment as adults when no one else in their office thinks their announcement that June is Accordion Awareness Month, and therefore the “hold music” on the company’s phone system should be switched over to polka tunes for the next 30 days is a fantastic idea. That’s the kind of thing that almost guarantees they’ll be labeled assholes. I think this is something we should strive to spare our children.