DECEMBER 2011 - Christmas is a difficult holiday for me. I’ve done it to myself, allowing my brain to fill with sentimentals, and hopeful scenarios rather than facing the reality of sleepless eve’s and lopsided trees. Still, I do everything I can to make the season perfect and maintain goodwill toward men. But this year was a real humdinger of a test.
It started with the decision to take Thanksgiving week off and spend it laying laminate floors, a tricky endeavor that took the whole week. Mix in my wife’s gallbladder attack (it eventually took three years to realize that her pain was due to an ulcer and pancreatitis) Thanksgiving Eve that carried over into Thanksgiving Day, and you have a heck of a holiday start. We didn’t get all the furniture back into place before hauling out the Christmas decorations—not a smart move in hindsight, but by the second week of December we were pretty well Christmased-up.
The real issues came just a few days before the Big Day. There was the power outage the Sunday before Christmas. It threatened our just-purchased Christmas dinner fixings, but we weathered that little hiccup. Next, came the Dec. 22 tornado. The storm-out-of-nowhere ripped through our neighborhood and knocked out our power for a day and a half. Afraid to take chances, we loaded our food into coolers and hauled the food to my buddy’s fridge. We killed the night playing Trouble and Scrabble by oil lamp. The power didn’t come back on until the wee hours of Christmas Eve, forcing a late start to the Christmas meal preparations. We ate out for breakfast, lunch and dinner on Dec. 24, since we didn’t have access to our own food until after Christmas Eve service.
That was followed by a Christmas Day filled with its own calamity: A wreath fell off the wall and broke one of my late-mother’s angels. It was a favorite angel, not expensive, but sentimentally important. Attempting to clean up after the morning hubbub, I picked up a permanent marker and the lid came off, leaving a nice blue mark on my brand new Christmas-tree green sweater I had just opened. And, t he rich Christmas Eve dinner at Olive Garden resulted in a Christmas gall bladder attack for my wife. Yippee! Two holidays in a row! Later in the day, we exchanged gifts with one of my oldest childhood friends. Someone else had already given him a Superman Snuggie. I had thought it was the perfect gift when I ordered it from Metropolis, Illinois. After dinner, we decided to keep with tradition and head out to the movies. That was a great idea, only I directed us to the wrong theater, and it was too late to drive to the correct theater.
Yup, Christmas was just one big series of unfortunate events, but that’s OK.
I had decided early on that I would embrace the chaos of Christmas, and we did. I wouldn’t trade anything for the look on my son’s face when we successfully tricked him with a gag gift. We had a blast playing Phase 10 and a crazy match game instead of going to the movies. I loved singing “Joseph’s Song” while my son played guitar at the Christmas Eve Service and listening to “Parson Brown” in the truck with my daughter. Truth is, there was a time in my life when I would have let such a messy, best-laid-plans holiday wreck me emotionally and mentally, but not this year.
The wife’s gall bladder notwithstanding, it was a merry Christmas. We’re not perfect. Life is not perfect. If Christmas depended on perfection, we wouldn’t need God with us.
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