Christmas Present
The gift of time
I managed to take time off from work a week before Christmas this year, and it has been really nice. I had time to do an accounting of our gift purchases, which is vital when you are shopping for six kids, not to mention parents and aunts and uncles. It was mostly good news; we somehow managed to spend a somewhat equal amount of money on each. But I also discovered that we needed to catch up on one, and that it was not too late to make up the difference. Whew!
I think this time off is my biggest gift this year. Each day of the past week I have also caught up on my to-do lists. I had time to get our nativity set up outside before Christmas Eve, right next to my custom-made Advent wreath display. Also, the cold tap for the sink in the bathroom has been leaky for months. MG, my wife, bought a replacement faucet sometime in September, I think. My interim solution was to turn off the water to that tap. That worked for me. I’m left-handed so it was natural to reach for the hot tap. But I’m the only lefty in the house, so it was getting very old for everyone else.
I am also well known around my house for taking on projects and getting them to at least 90% completion. Not bad. But that last 10% usually means there are finishing items I just couldn’t seem to get to. Like caulking the new floorboards I installed in the basement last summer. Finally finished this afternoon! While I worked, I pulled out an old album set from the 1960s, Reader’s Digest, Joyous Noel, and played the records on my equally old RCA stereo cabinet. My parents had these records when I was a kid. Their copy was hopelessly scratched up from us kids playing the records, and thrown away years ago. I found my own copy of it in an old record store a few years ago. It has some of my favorite versions of Christmas songs, and I realized today that they were my favorites simply because I listened to them many Christmases ago in the past. Today, I simply wanted to hear the records as I worked—I expected no magical feelings to come about—and they didn’t.
I used to be a bit of a Christmas nostalgia junkie, but I seem to have finally outgrown it in recent years. I used to try to capture that old Christmas magic by watching family videos of past Christmases, kind of like Clark Griswold up in his attic watching old home movies. This doesn’t work for me anymore. I simply have no desire to watch them because it actually makes me too sad to watch them. My mother warned me that this would happen, and she was exactly right. They make me sad because I cannot go back to when all my kids were children. They had to grow up on me (the youngest is now 19). I love them now just as much ever, but I do miss those days of having them all around me always, at home, at trips to the museum to see the Christmas train sets, to the zoo to see the Christmas lights, you name it. I was always tired in those days, but I loved every moment of it.
I’ve actually had Twilight Zone-like dreams where I find myself back in the past. There was one I had where I was in my home and I found a trapdoor in the ceiling in the hallway. I knew as I climbed up into it and followed my way down a dark corridor in the roof, that I would be back in the past when I came out another door. Sure enough, as I climbed down the other side, my boys were little again and all around me hugging me. I actually woke up crying with joy.
Thus, I am not immune to nostalgia, but I won’t let it dominate my Christmas. I am focused on Christmas Present. I still have all my kids—and they are all with me this year. I have my wife, my parents and siblings—we still get together on Christmas Eve as we have done our entire lives. I don’t know how many more we will have together, but I’m not worried about that—we have that now in Christmas Present, and that’s good enough for me.
Merry Christmas!