For me, surviving the slide from Thanksgiving through to New Year's day always feels like something of an accomplishment. i am not alone in this I know and while i pride myself on being particularly organized even I am prone to a certain last minute nature when it comes to the sourcing and organizing of holiday gifts and the ever important delivery of SANTA's list. The Christmases I remember from my childhood were simple. Starting at the age of about 9, i decorated my family's christmas tree more or less on my own. we would start out as a group, but I tend to have ideas about the layering of the lights, the placement of each ornament and the regulation interval of tinsel (strand by strand in a most delicate fashion). It is unclear to me where my obsession with the decor arose as my dear mother at the first chance would have opted for a table top tree and a christmas meal at the club, if I had let her. One by one the other members of my childhood family would be driven away by my necessary adjustments (who puts the wooden ornaments on before the balls?) and I would be left quite happily trimming the tree. we always attended the annual christmas sing at the club where three ex whiffenpoofs would sing the parts of the three kings and lester the jolly old tennis pro would dress as santa and hand out candy canes from a big red sack to all the kids. christmas morning the living room would be cordoned off but we would be able to rip through our stockings with abandon to find dental floss, toothpaste and other such necessities as well as some candy and a specialty fruit of choice. mine was always a pomegranite. how my mother found a pomegranite in connecticut in the 1970's is beyond me. we'd get a few presents from santa and my grandparents would come for lunch and that was that.
in many ways my life as a parent at christmas is the same. one by one, my sweet husband and children and now even the dog retreat from the living room as I adjust their inadequate ornament placement. I relish the fact that left to our own devices, we allow our children to gut their christmas stockings with abandon and eat chocolate before breakfast. but like many other things in our lives as parents versus our lives as children, we are focused on making up for those things that we remember as lacking (who on earth puts dental floss in a christmas stocking?). with the benefit of catalogue mailings, the internet and cable tv advertising, our kids are able to come up with micro targeted christmas lists that would make santa's eyes bleed.
two years ago we failed in a major way to live up to santa's reputation.
the issue was a wish list item of an american girl doll colonial carriage for the governor's ball. living in nyc, the home of the mall of america sized american girl place, it never occurred to me that i needed to procure the carriage any earlier than december 23rd. i braced myself and pushed my way through the hoards of grandmothers, mothers, girls clutching their "dressed like me" dolls and mounted the escalator to the historical doll section to visit the felicity and elizabeth area. no sign of the carriage. a request to the women behind the desk turned up blank stares so I got out of dodge and went home to look on line.
discontinued.
shit.
e-bay seemed a good idea and bingo: american girl doll colonial carriage. $500. hmmm. I love her, but, really? Plan B: a tea table and chairs. just as special. until on christmas eve as she carefully dressed the "girls" in their christmas ball outfits and left them propped up against their horse next to the tree, awaiting the carriage. santa left a letter explaining that not enough children had asked for the carriage to make it worthwhile for his factory to make it any more (supply and demand economics, honey?) and my big girl furrowed her brow but somehow swallowed it and went along. my heart was pounding. but we got through or so it seemed at that moment. but the fissure created in the carefully tended image of santa and his magic was real and it cracked wide open when she asked point blank several months later: mom, are the parents really santa? tragic.
prior to that santa had never let her down, even if it came at some personal cost. like the year that her heart's true desire was a playchool mansion dollhouse. a fantastic victorian house complete with flower boxes furniture and all the trimmings. a little girl's dream. we were spending christmas in washington, dc that year with the in-laws and even though I had an 8 week old newborn baby, I had it together enough to have the dollhouse sent to dc and the in laws stowed it away out of sight. to say that it was not my best christmas would be an understatement. the idea was that the newborn would happily sleep away in the heirloom family bassinet on a sun porch while we enjoyed the family festivities. instead, it was my job to sit on a chair otherwise occupied by a hirsute cat and hold the newborn just so in the hopes that she would sleep for at least a half hour. as the in laws had downsized to an apartment, we were staying in a hotel up the road. the "no smoking" label on the door of our room seemed to mean that we were not smoking in it but did not apply to the previous several guests as the musty odor of cigarette and possible cigar smoke fairly well permeated the room. somewhere around 10 pm each night, my sweet husband would steal away to join his brother and sister-in-law to drink from the mini bar and laugh uproariously as they watched 40 year old virgin for the fourth time while I wrastled down an overexerted 8 week old to sleep. somehow the combination of the cat, the smoke and postpartum stress caused my face to break out in a rash along the lines of poison sumac.
so when, on christmas eve at about 4:30 PM, I visited the storage bin at the in-laws to inspect the dollhouse and realized that there were somewhere in excess of 1,000 small plastic pieces that needed to be assembled, I was so tired that it didn't even matter to me. there was not a thought in my mind that I would be involved in any way with the assembly of the special santa present. that's what fathers are for. with the newborn in a baby bjorn we mounted the stairs together and I explained what needed to be done
all you have to do is unpack these various boxes and put the dollhouse together so that it looks like this picture
what? that is absurd. santa will just leave the boxes under the tree and we can put it together on christmas day.
no way. that is not what santa would do. he would have it all set up under the tree so that there's that amazing "tada" moment.
uh. I guess I will stay home from church tonight and do it.
no problem, I will be over at the hotel putting the baby to sleep.
I was not there, but my husband's lovely sister, as yet without children of her own, stayed by his side to assist him and reported that in between swigs of scotch he grunted as he attached the flower petals on by one to the stems for the lovely window boxes fuck santa he is bullshit.
but bless him he pulled through and with enough coffee was able to enjoy the amazed look on his little girl's face when the sheet was pulled off to reveal that dollhouse. no mind that it had to be dismantled and sent back to nyc, re-assembled and then ultimately was given away to our nanny's granddaughter as our girl and her friends had remarkably little interest.
live and learn. this year, the big girl asked for a tempurpedic pillow, a bow and arrow and a diary. no big deal. her sister, convinced that santa requires the list to extend the length of the page came up with a remarkable list of made up items including "ice skates what are gold" (spray paint) and the ever mysterious "the place"described as the place where people go while her hands move around her face.
a salon?
no mama, the place
what happens at the place?
santa knows.
naturally the response to the guaranteed non-delivery of the place is to be sure that every other item is under that tree and it was. to add a certain je ne sais quois to the christmas mood, I decided that something truly surprising was called for and my sweet husband went for it as well. a mini christmas tree with colored lights, fluffy fake snow and a lionel train running around the bottom would appear with their stockings in their bedroom in the morning.
thank god, lionel knows how to make a simple round of track that actually snaps together with ease. the curb side tree seller is more than happy to unload a small tree complete with a stand for $20 at 10pm on christmas eve. and the plan worked. those girls were both over the moon with excitement on christmas morning. and so were we.
long live santa.
Adorable!!
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