Yet Another Christmas Review

I guess I need to figure out (once again) whether it’s my life that’s out of whack, or my expectations.

Every year I have this vision in my head about how Christmas is going to look, and every year my actual mileage varies. By quite a bit, really. I’ve written about this before, enough times in fact that it’s probably time to wake up and smell the eggnog. I seem to be perpetually in danger of missing Christmas because our Christmas doesn’t look like the one I see in my mind’s eye.

After all, our Christmas is pretty entertaining in its own somewhat skewed way. But with three services on Christmas Eve, for example, and creating PowerPoints for 2 of them and providing all the music for the third, I may not ever get a profoundly spiritual experience out of it – at least not from sitting in church. Maybe, however, from incessantly cycling through over 300 Christmas songs on my iPod, or from sitting quietly in front of the tree, or from trying to help my own kids keep the meaning of the season front & center, or even from a paragraph in a Christmas letter – even if it’s my own.

Even though we may have fallen short, once again, in observing the rituals I’d like to see become our family-traditional Christmas, there are always events of the season that guarantee we won’t forget it. Such as:

· My son playing a Wise Man in a contemporary retelling of the Christmas story – in this case a Wise Man who was too busy at a conference to discuss “Celestial Signs of the Coming Messiah” to actually notice the birth when it happened.

· The kids deciding that the best way to give Santa a list is to wait till the last possible moment, and in fact revising the list as their last act before going to bed Christmas Eve.
· Dad hauling out presents to put under the tree, eating the cookies left for Santa (and a few more, just for the sake of realism), pouring the milk back into the jug, and then settling down – AFTER midnight – to compose the traditional Santa Reply Letter. Don’t ask me where Jolly Old St. Nick keeps the laptop and printer on the sleigh.
· In response to each child’s inquiries, the letter addressing subjects including (a) how the reindeer are doing, (b) what Santa’s favorite baseball team is, and (c) how exactly he can tell from all the way up there who’s been naughty and who’s been nice. Also, why you’re not getting any of the presents no one even knew you wanted because you just added them to your list on Christmas Eve.
· Watching on Christmas morning as the boy disappears in a blizzard of wrapping paper scraps, surfacing only to ask repeatedly, “Are there any more presents for me?”
· My daughter walking around the house all Christmas day in a ninja costume, playing a trumpet which someone with apparently a rather evil sense of humor has given her, while…
· Her brother spends most of his day trying to sneak up on people with a remote-controlled Rude Bodily Noisemaking Device that someone else with a rather evil sense of humor has sent us.
· The girl pausing in the midst of a soliloquy about all the cool stuff Santa brought her to look sharply at dad and say, “Wait a minute, did you…?” before stopping herself. “What were you going to ask me?” “Never mind…”

And of course there’s one other tradition that never misses – the hurried sprint out of town for vacation, since as long as she’s in the same town where the church is located, she can hear it calling her (this is the spot where I really wanted to include a sound clip of the slot machine in this Twilight Zone episode, but I couldn't find it as a standalone).

I have to say, this time it kind of worked for me too... once we got out of town, I forgot all about what was "supposed" to happen, and I just enjoyed my vacation. Maybe next year I can start that frame of mind before Christmas!