Category: Christmas

Posted on

Christmas Memories: 2006

It’s odd how Christmas changes after you have children of your own.

When you’re young it’s about your family and its traditions, those traditions predicated by your parents and continued in the face of waning enthusiasm by you and your siblings — you know, when the magic wears off. Then you’re a teenager and a young adult and you’re trying to figure your own life out, much less the life of a fictitious character from the North Pole who may or may not be living on the tip of an iceberg. During that time you wear the costumes ironically and give things like cameras to your friends just because.

Then you grow up all the way, and you get married, or at least have a significant other. Valentine’s Day takes on more significance, but Christmas begins making a comeback too. You buy and make sentimental gifts for each other and that makes it all less ironic somehow. By the time kids come along you’ve gotten into a pattern that for all intents and purposes works for you. You buy each other $100 worth of presents each year and wonder why your credit cards always seem to be maxed out come January, but you’re happy.

Then the first kid comes and you realize you’ve been doing it wrong for years. Christmas is, after all, a holiday for children first and foremost, and you come full circle when you have some of your own. That’s when you begin to create your own family traditions that will at some point become the ones your kids will eventually mock ironically as young adults. Or maybe they’ll appreciate them so much that they pass them on to their own children.

It’s what we hope, of course, that having those children of your own will bring back the magic for you, that magic that has taken years to disappear and that only seems to emerge somewhere near Disney World. But it’s not a mouse that brings back the real magic. It’s instead a burly man from up north who may or may not be a distant cousin to Jesus Christ. Time to leave out those cookies and that milk. Continue reading “Christmas Memories: 2006”

Posted on

White-Out Christmas

snowfall_1My first Christmas here it snowed puppies and kittens. Now, I’m a Philly boy born and raised, so a little snow never bothers me. I grew up around snow plows and getting snowed in (on occasion), so I thought I was prepared for a true, honest-to-goodness upstate New York winter. I was not. And Christmas was the perfect time to discover that for the first time.

The blizzard of 2002 started rather inauspiciously, with a few snow flurries on Christmas Eve, but by the time we rolled out of bed on the special morning and shuffled to the large picture window in our fuzzy robes and slippers our mouths were agape at the winter wonderland that awaited us. And we both thought at the same time, “shovels.” Then the shifts began, the great Christmas dig-out.

She had the first shift, bundling up against the cold, grabbing the nearest shovel and getting to work while I made hot chocolate for both of us in our tiny kitchen. I couldn’t help thinking about the insane juxtaposition of spending Christmas in Tennessee in 2001 when it was a balmy 50 degrees with nary a snowflake in the sky. What a difference a year (and a couple thousand miles) makes.

Then it was my turn, and I took the same shovel she used, feeling a kinship with her as I grabbed its handle. Either that or it was just damn cold. As I headed out into the abyss that was our yard, I knew I would be out there for a while. And it kept snowing the whole time. That was the craziest part of it. We were just trying to keep status quo in the midst of so much of the white, fluffy stuff.

It was my job to dig out the cars. Snow had come up almost to the windows while the storm had raged on Christmas Eve, and the position of our driveway at the time was down near the road. I had to shovel through what seemed like miles of yard just to get to the vehicles, and my arms were exhausted from the effort. Then it took a Herculean effort to shovel around the car wheels, creating an island of car in the sea of snow. Then I dug out the second one. Continue reading “White-Out Christmas”