Holidays

It is holiday season in America. To most people (i guess that includes me), it means Thanksgiving and Christmas, topped off by New Year’s Eve. I have to declare right off that Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, full stop. Eating and drinking (two things I’m good at) with no social pressures of gift-giving, decorating and the like. Yes I am ignoring the massive effort that goes into preparing the turkey dinner, and admit that my wife does most of the hard work in that regard. I try to help, or at least claim to help, or maybe just claim to try to help….but the honest truth is that she does the work, and complains that I don’t help. But she’s so good at it! I love Thanksgiving dinner. We used to get everyone together. It’s difficult now, esp with Sarah living in London (funny that they don’t get Thanksgiving off work in the UK). This year we visited Katie, our oldest, in Colorado. She lives up in the mountains, in Winter Park, in a two-bedroom condo with her dog Mogul (yup, he even looks just like one). We had a nice quiet turkey dinner and it really was wonderful. It was relaxing and beautiful in the snowy mountains. We hiked and read and ate and drank a bit of wine, and that’s a good holiday in my book.

Christmas is Dale’s favorite holiday. She has loved it since she was a little girl, I think, and relishes decorating the house, baking cookies, buying gifts, the whole nine yards. Every year, i start out feeling like Scrooge. I always wonder why we have to spend hours putting up lights (getting pissed off when they don’t work and then buying new ones), decorating the whole house with boxes and boxes of decorations accumulated over the years. We spend too much money on gifts for everyone in the family, and I ask (admittedly halfheartedly) whether this is the year we can cut down on extravagant presents and maybe just give some money to charity or do some good works together, But she gets such joy from it all. And when the kids were little it was of course all compulsory and worth it. The rituals were important – we’d spread stardust (birdseed?) all around the house so the reindeer can find it, I always read The Night Before Christmas, we argued about opening one present on Christmas eve, we fought over when to wake up in the morning. Earlier in the week we have the battle of the gingerbread houses – Dale buys two kits and the boys compete with the girls to make the coolest house. The boys always make something akin to a war zone, complete with battle scenes, bodies, and the like. The girls make something beautiful. It’s usually a tie (awfully hard to judge). Jack’s birthday is 12/22 so we start with that celebration, and Katie’s is 12/24. When the kids got older (and there wasn’t a pandemic) we’d have a party on 12/23 to celebrate both birthdays – lots of friends were invited and we drank a lot. Christmas Eve was extra special because it was Katie’s day – she always chose (always) “pink fish” for her dinner – this being salmon, of course. The morning itself was pretty typical; we’d wake up, put on Christmas carols, and open presents. The last present of the day was always for Dale. You see one of our traditions started when Katie (the oldest) was two years old. She and I picked out a Santa for Mummy and it was our special present,. Each year since then (this will be our 30th year) we all pick out a Santa for Mummy – it’s important that we all vote, and thought its harder to all go shopping together now, we use whatsapp and texting to exchange photos of the candidates before I buy it. So many traditions! What’s amazing is that we still do all of them – the reindeer dust, the reading, the gingerbread houses, the decorations, the gifts, Dale’s Santa, the whole shebang….no matter how old we all get.

Okay, I admit it. Christmas is fun. 🙂