Feeding the Christmas Beast

I've had an epiphany: Christmas is a bit too commercialized, and some of us spend a bit too much.

Christmas Beast, copyright, Teece Aronin

Every January I start budgeting to feed the Christmas beast, the tinseled, bulbed behemoth already lurking at the end of the year. Christmas, for a lot of us, has become akin to a fluffy white snowball rolling toward us down a mountain, getting bigger and bigger and badder and badder, until it rolls right over us and stops. Then we're expected to dig ourselves out and start pushing it back up the mountain again.  

But the good news? Every Christmas you have the next 364 days to do it - if you start right away. It's like a pinball game automatically resetting and demanding $700 from you for the privilege of losing again.

Then there's online shopping which is great in a lot of ways, but not so great in others. For instance, it's still surprisingly hard work. Nothing tightens up those shoulder muscles like opening an email from Amazon alerting you to the fact that your order of 47 items was cancelled because your "payment method" has expired, and you try to straighten things out on a glitchy cell phone while waiting in line at UPS and pushing two 40-pound boxes along with your feet. 

I don't think this is how Christ would want us to celebrate his birth.

Another thing I doubt is that he'd want us giving children hundreds of dollars worth of presents they'll be too polite to say they hate, but you can tell they do anyway. This sad circumstance sets us up to discover vast Christmas gift graveyards that sprawl under kids' beds and bone piles of unwanted toys that lie heaped in their closets. What a waste. 

As my kids got older (my son is 17 and my daughter 19), it all changed, but not for the better. Instead of telling me what they wanted, or handing me a list, they would text me links to things, mostly tech products with purposes I didn't understand, things that Oppenheimer would've asked his mother for if he'd been a Millennial. And I don't blame my kids; it was a natural outgrowth of what we'd come to as they got older and more tech-savvy and I shopped more often online. Having them do that actually made my shopping a lot easier. Easier, but somehow colder.  

Today I'm pledging to kill the Christmas beast by refusing to feed it. I'm not alone, by the way. Lots of people are cutting way back on the amounts of gifts they buy - even for their kids. And some people have stopped buying their kids any gifts. If an article I read recently is true, Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher are two of them. Many parents now opt for gifts requiring more time and imagination than money, like  buying a kid art supplies and then committing an afternoon to making art with said kid. 

Also according to that article, some kids, and even some adults, have gotten pretty testy during the adjustment/withdrawal phase, but a lot of families feel their lives are on a healthier track now that they're doing things differently.

When I told my son what I was thinking, he said he could really get behind it. When I mentioned it to my daughter, she said, "I think that's a good idea, but can I think about it?"

I said, "Nope, you're already handling it a lot better than some people, so I'm taking your answer as a yes."

Besides, it's not as though I plan to go all Kutcher-Kunis on them. What I'm thinking is $100 each in presents plus treats and surprises spread throughout the year, like an afternoon playing my son's computer games with him then dinner at his favorite restaurant.

The idea is to give more from your heart than from your wallet and to give your kid a memory because those can't get lost under a bed.

Then again, if you saw my kids' rooms . . .

Giving Christmas the Old Heave-Ho-Ho-Ho

Those of us who celebrate Christmas are coming down to the final turn with just eight days left until the big day. Or the big show. Or the “really big shoe” as Ed Sullivan used to say. More appropos might be “the really big stocking.” At this point, however, many of us are ready to give Christmas “the really big boot.”

Until December 26, a lot of us will be losing it a little, and some of us have been losing it for quite a while already. About a week ago I looked down at my hands and realized that when I removed my nail polish the night before, I had overlooked my right thumb. Its nail coated in chipped “Santa Suit Red,” the thumb gazed balefully at me, pleading, “Don’t leave me this way.”

I wondered: Do other women fail to take the polish off some of their nails? The next morning, a coworker flashed the backs of her hands at me. Seven nails had the polish removed and three did not. Most definitely an observer of Christmas, I thought.

On Christmas Eve, years ago, one of my gal pals was coping with her first Christmas as the single mother of a toddler. Blowing her bangs out of her eyes, nose dusted with flour, she was baking cookies, wrapping gifts, screwing toy ovens together and bathing her child - all simultaneously thanks to the six temporary arms single mothers grow during the holidays. When a friend phoned to invite her to a Christmas Eve church service, my friend exclaimed, “I just don’t have time for Jesus tonight!” If Mary had said that on the first Christmas Eve, Christmas, as we know it, would have even more baked goods in it.

Maybe it’s because my children are older now, but I am much calmer these days at Christmastime. Gone is the pressure from telling a four-year-old that I was sorry, but the present he wanted was too expensive, only to have him say, “Don’t worry, Mama - Santa can get it for me.” Long past is the night I rocked my daughter in my arms, both of us in tears because I failed to understand that she didn't "really want the truth about Santa."

Today, my children are nearly grown, so if they suggest I make cheesecake this year, they won't be too disappointed when I lovingly point them to the kitchen, and if I do happen to be a little frazzled, text them the link to a fudge recipe.  

Never Take "Bedadryl" Before Proofreading

Last week I wrote a blogpost, then proofread, and proofread, and proofread it again. When it “rinsed clear,” which is how I think of proofreading to the point of spotting no errors, I saved it as a draft and proofed it in preview mode which displays it as it will look once published. Then I pushed the publish button to send the essay hurtling into the blogosphere.

I know that even if something rinses clear, immediately publishing it is unwise if you can avoid it. It's best to wait a bit and then look at your work again, when you're fresher and not as emotionally attached. But that was the problem: I was too emotionally attached to wait and no longer fresh. Such conditions can only lead to premature ePublication. 

After I pushed the publish button, I read the piece on my actual webpage. I always do this because I find that proofing something that way reveals more things to tweak. I'm not sure why that is since the preview is essentially the same thing, but still, it just seems true for me. Then I quickly make what are usually minor fixes by this point, hit the update button, and the revised version instantly becomes what readers see. The problem is that spotting any error makes me think there might be others, so I proof it from my webpage one more time. Every time I fix something new, I go back and read again. Despite how it sounds, this process just takes a few minutes. When I proofed last week’s piece from the website, everything seemed fine. It rinsed clear. 

Now it was time for bed, but the light exposure from my computer monitor plus the tension from all that proofing, would probably jam up my sleep. So I swallowed a couple of well-known over-the-counter allergy meds. I won’t name the brand, but when my daughter was little, she used to call them BED-adryl. Then, to kill time until I felt sleepy, I read the post in bed from my phone - and spotted this:

Within days, our carpet was so buried under dried out henna-hued needles that it looked like the floor  of Donald Trump's barber.

Is it as obvious to you as it is to me - the extra space between floor and of? Oh, the humanity!

I sat bolt upright in bed and logged in to the Blogger app on my phone. Logging in took three tries because the "Bedadryl" was kicking in. I finally got in, closed up the space, then accidentally eliminated two spaces instead of one and had to put one back in. Then I fat-fingered while trying to tweak something else, which ironically was fine as it was, but could have been better and then mutilated a word which had to be tapped back in twice before my fogged-out brain cried, "Close enough!"

This is where OCD stepped up and said, "Whoa there, writer friend! Best to go back to square one and proof everything all over again because if you missed that extra space, God only knows what other horrific errors and typos are waiting to blind your readers! Actually, you can look that up! Get on that!"

Even my OCD had brain fog. It didn't mean that I could see how many people had been blinded by my errors; it just meant that I could see how many people had read the post: 205 so far. That many? It was after midnight, so maybe I appealed to other insomniacs, those who wished they hadn't thrown out their phone books. Or maybe they were reading me in Copenhagen where it was about 6 a.m. and time to kick off yet another happy day. Denmark ranked third in 2017 among the world's happiest countries. But who cared? What mattered was that things had to be made right - immediately. 

Propped up in bed, I started proofreading again, but kept dozing off, fumbling the phone, and making more typos. Then I tried sitting on the edge of the bed, nodded off, and was rudely awakened when the phone clattered on the hardwood floor. I thought standing might help, but all my concentration went toward not swaying. 

Then it occurred to me that this was a great time for cake. The refined sugar would perk me up long enough to finish my proofing. But I'd have to hop to after that because a crash would follow the rush, and there'd be no fixing my essay until about 10 a.m. That would be 4 p.m. in Copenhagen, where it would be dark and time for their afternoon bonfires. Those Danes would be warming their hands around the fire and discussing me: “That woman in the States writes error-laden essays. Best to avoid her work from now on."

So I ate some cake, sacrificing for my art, whizzed through the proofing and by 1:30 a.m. felt confident about the blog post. But I was wide awake and buzzing in my bed until almost lunchtime. 

But it wasn’t really all that late - I mean lunchtime in Copenhagen.

Christmas Trees Aren't as Innocent as They Look

Getting a Christmas tree up gets many of us down. It’s enough to make even the most placid souls ditch cutting down a tree in favor of cutting up an elf.

Image copyright, Teece Aronin

My father suffered the agonies of the damned every time we put up a tree. It was as if the tree had it in for him and had taken it upon itself to avenge every Christmas tree everywhere, along with a couple of poorly maintained topiaries. My father tried to show the tree who was boss, swearing at it in curse words more colorful than a birthday bash for Katy Perry. Then my mother would say things like, “Honestly, Kenneth, the kids." And my father would say things like, “Well, by God, it’s time they grew up!”

One year, after I'd grown up, I became not only a single parent, but a single parent who was the only obstacle between my kids and their dreams of the perfect Christmas tree. Even before my divorce, I was more or less on my own Christmas tree-wise because my ex-husband is Jewish and has cerebral palsy, so he might as well have been permanently exempted from Christmas tree duty twice. He would giggle, salute, and say, “It’s your holiday, not mine.” Then he'd be off to wherever it is Jewish husbands go when they don't want to help shikza wives put up Christmas trees. 

Another complication with which many of us cope when putting up, and keeping up, a Christmas tree, is pets. Pets have been known to make or break a Christmas tree. They make them by lying peacefully beneath the trees, like contented lambs or break them by - well - breaking them. I'm in a few cat-lover groups on Facebook and am amazed by the number of photos I've seen of cats nestled among the boughs of their humans' Christmas trees. 

When I was about 13, the tree my father put up taunted him by leaning, no matter how many times he re-screwed it into its base. As a last resort, he secured the tree with twine tied to a picture hook in the wall. In the middle of the night, our dog took off after our cat and both dashed behind the tree. The tree-trunk, weakened by all the screwing and re-screwing, snapped, along with the twine, and the tree landed in the middle of the sofa bed where my brother was sleeping with his wife.

One year, my kids and I had a tree that started falling apart as soon as I got it up. Within days, our carpet was so buried under dried out henna-hued needles that it looked like the floor of Donald Trump's barber. It took weeks after we got rid of the tree to truly get rid of the tree. 

By the following year, the kids were old enough, yet naive enough, that I could stick them with most of the work. Now that they're in their late teens, I pretty much sit back and supervise. But I'm noticing something interesting, that every year as they put up the tree, they curse just a little bit more. 

But in a way, I don't mind; it makes me feel closer to my dad, rest his soul.