His eyebrows lift, and his eyes grow knowing and bright. Our two-year-old is watching my lips and jaw. Can I spoon out cheer as well? “Merry Christmas, you guys! Merry, merry Christmas!” Where, now, is that lovely perfect Christmas? On whose open fire are those goddam chestnuts roasting? I have a fiction writer’s weakness for fiction. I like the invented holiday miracles, the unexpected kindnesses and transformations-at least, as they are portrayed on the TV specials! And, looking out the window and seeing only sleet, I realize that I even like the snow. I actually like the shopping, the gift wrap, the carols-even the tinkling store music. A boon for the economy and a pernicious sweet for the mind. Only then, when almost all is lost and I am feeling so unexpectedly sad, do I realize what a sucker I am for the beautiful fake Christmas that German-American commerce concocted for us years ago. On Christmas Eve, we build a fire, then snuff it out with an old wet towel, realizing, fearfully, that we haven’t cleaned the flue in five years. The tree now resembles a giant TV antenna-one littered with debris from a windstorm. Next morning, all the needles drop-in a long, continuous whoosh that sounds like rain. This year-it’s 1996-we get a slightly dehydrated Christmas tree, park it close to a radiator, and decorate it in a crazed, slapdash way (tinfoil, string, and Christmas cards). He hasn’t a clue when Hanukkah begins this year. My husband’s holiday indifference now seems like laziness. I cannot even see the words “needlepoint wall hanging” without feeling inadequate and faint. It has wonderful melodies, it has the heaviness & the rawness of early SOAD, Daron did a. It deserves to be Systems most successful song. I’ve opened it, spotted a lot of illustrations of craft items to make at home, then shut it in a sweat. I get kinda sad when people say that Chop Suey is overrated & that SOAD has better songs. “Unlike Santa Claus, who is so natural? Practically organic, practically vegan-coming down a chimney like that!” “Do we have to do Kwanzaa? It’s really just an invention,” my husband says. Our family is an improvisation, a desperate rendition of “Gilligan’s Island.” Hanukkah for my husband, Kwanzaa for my son, who is adopted and part African-American, and, of course, Christmas (I think in my Gentile-centric way) for everyone. We have to do all the holidays if we do any. Performance anxiety pervades the household. There is, after all, a possibility that, at two, he will remember this as his first “holiday season.” (At a theological loss, we have adopted the retail phrase.) Despite our anti-ceremonialist leanings, it is time to do something commemorative at home.
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