Expectation
Posted on December 17, 2007
Filed Under bitching and moaning, christmas, debt, holiday fun, homeownership, kids, parenting, snark, suburban joys | 9 Comments
If you are like me, then a little a bit of you will be disappointed this Christmas. It’s not like being six years old again and believing, really believing, that Santa will bring you a pony despite the fact that there is no pasture or stable or knowledge of ponies within a twenty mile radius of your family home. No, it’s less instant and devastating, more nebulous and corrosive than Santa’s failure to produce anything but a stuffed pony on the 25th. It’s the disappointment of a thousand meager, insignificant expectations. It’s almost imperceptible – all tiny parts that fail to come together and create the working whole, as you’ve imagined it.
It’s deciding to make holiday cookies with the kids. Beginning the project with visions of iced snowflakes, all delicate home spun decoration, and Santa’s with bright red frosting, the fur lined coat made of carefully piped frosting, his boots black with tinted sugar and, instead, having your children insist on making only gingerbread men so they can remove their heads and create homunculous-people, cookie freaks with eyes where their necks should be. It’s pulling out the camera to photograph the whole floury, freakish cookie mess to find that the digital jobbie reads ‘ERROR’. You remove the battery. You turn it on and off. You knock it firmly on the counter and still, it reads ‘ERROR’. You realize all of X-mas will go undocumented because nowhere in the 1200 page manual does it reference the ‘ERROR’ problem. Not in Japanese or German or Spanish or Dutch.
It’s hosting a tree trimming party, setting it up to look just as it does in the magazine spread, pineapple glazed ham and garlic bread crumb macaroni and cheese, a roaring fire and a lifetime’s accumulation of ornaments waiting to festoon the tree. And finding that real, non-magazine spread children are actually suspicious of garlic and sharp cheddar. Real non-magazine spread children whine for hot dogs and don’t give a damn about the provenance of each tiny ornament as they tear into the box spraying tree trimming materials across the living room. Ornaments shatter, cast aside for the dog to consume. No child wears a bow tie or knickers, instead there are faded jeans and torn sweat shirts. There are uncombed hairs and unbrushed teeth and some eight year old’s condemnation of Ella Fitzgerald’s version of Winter Wonderland. “Who’s singing this garbage? It sucks,” he says. He is your son, apparently deaf, who dares to insult Ella on X-mas.
It is four dozen mint chocolate cookie bars baked, frosted and chilled, forty copies of the recipe painstakingly made into paper stars for the cookie swap party that is, hours later, canceled. A snowy winter’s night. Impassable roads. A day’s labor all packaged up and nowhere to go but into the freezer.
It’s buying a garland of white spruce and weaving it round the banister. Adding twinkling lights and a gold leaf swag. Admiring the fresh greens for only a day before the needles start dropping, inciting thoughts of flammability – the whole house torched for the love of one god damned festive banister. It is removing the holiday fire hazard some ten days before X-mas and clogging the vacuum hose with pine needles. It is hauling the Electrolux Diplomat all the way across state borders to have white spruce needles removed from its internal organs.
It is renting the modern Peter Billingsley classic, A Christmas Story, with the glee of finally being able to share the Red Rider bee-bee gun and the belching furnace and the little brother dressed up tight as a tick in his snow clothes with your own children, only to find your youngest unmoved by the comic brilliance. She says over and over again, “When is it going to get funny, Mom? You promised it would be funny.” And your oldest child asks pointed and uncomfortably mature questions about the narration, “What does he mean when he says ‘like sex illuminated in the window, Mom’?” “Oh nothing, honey,” you’ll say and find him googling ’sex’ later on because you wouldn’t answer his simple question.
It’s ‘Dreaming of a White Christmas’ right along with Elvis and Bing and Frank and Billie Holiday before you realize that a white Christmas translates into two snow days with the kids home from school, house bound due to frigid temperatures; several horrible icy wipe outs while carrying boxes addressed to family that live in Florida and Georgia (they have no idea); one bruised and swollen elbow having been pinched gruesomely between the heavy sliding doors of your ancient garage while trying to find the snow shovel; and a driveway that could be used for speed skating drills but, instead is the harrowing, slick trail of death you must brave each day on the way to school, to the gym, or to the mail box.
It is expecting that people show some self restraint and leave the boxes that UPS and FedEX insist on leaving at the top of your driveway-of-death well enough alone, but instead find that someone grinchy has actually begun stealing them. It is eight days before Christmas and panicked re-orders and phone calls are made to complain to package delivery services about theft and liability and the tears your children will weep on Christmas when their gifts from Santa never arrive.
And finally, it is taking the kids to the library and checking out Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol to be read in front of the fire at night, only to find that the late 19th century masterpiece is too dense, too inaccessible. The kids are confused by intricacies of past, present and future. They give up and have fallen fast asleep on the couch by the time you utter the famous phrase, “What’s Christmastime to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, and not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books, and having every item in ‘em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will,’ said Scrooge indignantly, ‘every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!’” And just a little bit of you agrees.
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