Conversing Peacefully with Your Family at Thanksgiving It’s been quite a year, folks. Hell, it’s been quite a week. In the last few days alone, our…
Writer & Columnist • Santa Barbara, CA
Writer & Columnist • Santa Barbara, CA
Conversing Peacefully with Your Family at Thanksgiving It’s been quite a year, folks. Hell, it’s been quite a week. In the last few days alone, our…
I know, you guys; it’s bad out there. Just blowfish-ugly in every direction. Terrorism and police brutality. Rising sea levels and E. coli outbreaks. The words “President Trump.”
Here in our dusty California hometown, we can’t get the skies to rain — and yet we’re drowning in bad news. We skulk away from headlines, afraid to learn of yet another calamity. The other day, I attended a holiday parade and quietly wondered if the van on the street corner, the one whimsically arrayed in holiday lights, might just be packed with explosives.
But enough. Refusing to hand over my seasonal smiles to dread, I begged my fantastic friends for some reasons to feel hopeful about humankind — just a few tiny toeholds to help me clamber up on top of the Awful for some much-needed perspective. They delivered, as fantastic friends do. And I’m regifting their 20 gems to you. Happy holidays.
Most Californians don’t know from snow. We have no idea what it’s like to shovel a driveway, or awake to white-blanketed landscapes, or bundle up and stroll through frosty flurries (See? Frosty flurries — are those even a thing?). But we sing about it all just the same. Come December, we croon about sleigh bells and winter wonderlands and glistening treetops with all the enthusiasm of people who know what the flake they’re warbling about.
What I love best about this lyrical-geographical incongruity is that no one seems to care. People in nippy climes don’t ask us West Coasters to pipe down and stop singing about something we don’t — and frankly can’t — fully appreciate.
“Hey!” they don’t say. “Quit your convivial yodeling, and do some personal precipitation research!” It matters not to folks in icy Buffalo, New York, or glacial Grand Rapids, Michigan, whether our musical merriment is based in experience or willful ignorance. Whatever jingles your bells, man!
Why then — and you knew I was going somewhere with this, right? — should sourpuss religious zealots give a holly heck how the rest of us celebrate Christmas?
It’s been 30-some years since my last confession, and as you well know, I’ve done some hard time on the naughty list. But I’ve been thinking a lot about you this week. After spending a month shopping, hauling, wrapping, schlepping, baking, trimming, toasting, and cleaning endless candy sprinkles off the floor from a gingerbread-decorating fiasco, I’m depleted. My kids’ holiday season has been as magical and memorable as the Target ads insist it should be, but damn if I’m not out of money, out of energy, and — can this even be right? — out of eggnog.
What about me, Nick? Aren’t I entitled to a little magic? Don’t I deserve more than a morning of wielding the camera and serving up sweet rolls followed by a week of cleaning up gift wrap, boxing up ornaments, and coiling up yards and yards and still more tangled yards of twinkle lights? Who’s gonna jingle my bells, man?
One word comes to mind as I watch my husband and sons scramble over our extremely pitched roof, stringing lights over the precarious edge of our home: balance.
It’s hard to find during the holidays, isn’t it? I’ve yet to master the balance between magic and madness, that elusive equilibrium between what the season should be about (family, friends, and gratitude) and what it actually, quickly becomes about (overspending, overeating, and buttoning up your coat for yet another bothersome obligation).
Heres one that no longer jingles my bells: I cannot bring myself to haul the family to a bustling parking lot, scout for the least-mangled tree, curse its $80 price tag, wrestle it into a stand, curse its asymmetry, argue about which unsightly side should face the wall, curse it for tilting, crawl underneath it to add daily water, live in fear of its flammability, and ultimately drag it, browned and battered, to the curb before vacuuming pine needles from the abused rug below.
I can’t do it. You can’t make me.
As a child, it was enchanting to have a huge, live tree in the house — no less astounding than if we’d dug a pond in the middle of the living room: How can this be? It’s magic!
Chubby children aside, there’s a lot of weight on the lap of a shopping mall Santa.
Encased in fur and velvet, cinched into gut-crushing belts and boots that don’t breathe, these rock stars of the holiday stage not only have to hawk overpriced 8x10s. They bear the burden of keeping the season’s magic alive for hundreds of increasingly incredulous youngsters. One tug on that gleaming white wig could be all it takes to convince them that holiday wishes are for patsies. One harsh word aimed at an incompetent elf could Dasher their hopes forever. Blitzen them, even.
Who are the brave men who accept this challenge year after year? And what, with all due respect, could they possibly be thinking? I did some in-depth research this week (can I just say, how cool is this job?) and discovered there are three basic types of Santa stand-ins.