Category Archives: Holiday Hijinks

Christmas and presents

All the presents are wrapped. The stockings are ready to be filled. All that’s left is for Santa to show up and move everything into place in the dark of night.

Sometimes Christmas seems more like a deadline than anything else. But when all the goals are met with a day to spare, the relief makes the enjoyment of the Holiday all that much sweeter.

Not that my family is hard to buy gifts for. You don’t have to ask them twice what they would like.

The Kindergartener has made a cottage industry of asking for things. Any toy that is advertised on TV, he wants. Even if the toy is marketed toward girls, he’ll take it. He may not plan to use it as was intended, but Barbie’s jeep can always be cannibalized for spare parts. He wouldn’t look a gift Pretty Little Pony in the mouth. With a few, well-placed scuffs and a shave, it can be turned into a War Horse.

There are some particular toys he would most like to have, but he’ll tell you he wants every toy just in case you go through all the really good ones and still have some extra cash burning a hole in your pocket that you need to spend on a five-year-old. It would be a crying shame if you bought all the toys on his list and then stopped because you mistakenly believed he didn’t want the rest of the toys in the world.

toy soldier Christmas

Getting one last good play out of these old toy soldiers before Santa comes and overshadows them with new toys.

The one-year-old isn’t picky. A good toy to him is whatever feels good in his hand at the moment. It could be a clothes pin or a glass Christmas tree ornament. The only implied stipulation, where Buster is concerned, is that he would prefer that his presents be aerodynamic, should he decide to throw them at his brother’s head on the merest whim.

My wife compiles a short, but solid, list of presents she would gratefully accept. She takes the extra trouble to be very specific, in order that her new gift can be fully integrated with her past gifts. In fact, she would prefer it if I would let her go pick it out herself, just to be on the safe side. Once her “big ticket” present meets her specifications, I am free to add any lesser gifts to the periphery, just as I wish.

I am the most difficult person to get a gift for in our house. My wife fumes when I list things to her like shirts and slippers. She wants me to want something more special. Nobody understands how important slippers are to me. I hate walking on tile floors in socks. When your husband has psychological problems like this, buy him slippers. He and his prissy little toes will love you.

When it comes down to it, what more could I want? Tomorrow morning, my favorite gifts will be dumping out stockings and tearing through wrapping paper like it’s . . . well . . . Christmas.

The gift of an hour

I was in the living room with our one-year-old when the phone rang. I picked it up and heard my wife’s voice on the other end of the line. That’s when it hit to me:

The call was coming from inside the house!

But this is more of a Christmas than Halloween story, so nothing terrifying happened.

“A Disney Christmas Carol is on channel 48,” she said. She was upstairs, getting ready to go to bed early. She didn’t want to yell down the stairs and let Buster know where he could find her. He might decide he’d rather be with her, which would ruin her sleep plans.

I like watching A Christmas Carol. I love reading it. I try to read it every December because I think it is one of the most perfect stories in the English language. No one else in my family is old enough to remember when words were used, instead of CGI, to paint a story. So, with them, I watch it.

Big brother was already in bed, visions of making it to kindergarten on time dancing in his head. It was just Buster, me, and special guest Jim Carrey as Scrooge. We rocked in the recliner. It lacked an hour until Buster’s normal nodding off time. I wondered how long he would watch before he climbed down and looked for a toy or a mother.

Ghost of Christmas Past

Jim Carrey seems most human when he is computer animated. The Ghost of Christmas Past is a delight to little boys. (Image: Disney)

He looked for neither. He watched with me. He didn’t fidget or look around the room or punch me in the ear or anything. He watched, like he was interested. He seemed especially mesmerized by the Ghost of Christmas Past with his flaming head and superluminal flying skills. He made it through an entire hour, until the visit to Scrooge’s nephew’s Christmas party with the Ghost of Christmas Present. Then, he rested his head on my chest and nestled in to sleep.

It wasn’t much, only everything. That one hour was the kind of time a dad cherishes. Sharing something you love with your son, and having him be interested in it, doesn’t happen every day. Yes, he was interested on a completely different level, but still, it was a moment we shared.

Maybe he won’t care for it at all, next year, but that hour gives me hope that he will. It gives me hope that someday, we’ll read the story together. I’m getting ahead of myself here, but maybe someday, he’ll read it with his son. Of course its title will be changed to A Holiday Carol by then, but I expect Dickens will still be dead, and a little rolling over in the grave never killed anyone.

Illustrated Christmas Carol

My illustrated edition: beautiful words and pictures, but no computer animation, so we’ll have to wait and see how well it catches on.

I’m not a very religious person, but I do believe Christmas, taken in the right perspective, can add light to one’s soul. Maybe I’m just a backward traditionalist, but if we don’t give our kids something enduring at times like Christmas, we leave them nothing but toys. And we all know how long toys last.

We hope you had fun at our Christmas potty

I spent an hour in the mall over Thanksgiving weekend. That alone would be worthy of pity, but hold the sympathetic tears for a minute; it gets worse. I spent half of that time in the men’s room.

Okay, let the wailing begin.

While on our mall visit, my wife, who is uncannily in tune with such things, noticed something in the way our five-year-old was walking. “Do you have to go potty?” she asked.

“No,” he replied, which meant, “I do, but I’m really into these Christmas ornaments in the Hallmark store right now, so I’m gonna pretend I don’t.”

I led him down the corridor of despair that leads to the mall restrooms. Inside the men’s room, he took off his coat and handed it to me. I thought this unnecessary, but little boys have peculiar peeing habits.

He walked past the urinals toward the stalls. “Oh, it’s one of those?” I moaned.

“Yup. One of those.”

An inspection of the three choices led us to the least disturbing toilet. In my head, I heard my wife’s frantic voice demanding a buffer between her child’s precious behind and the germ-ridden seat. I wiped the seat with toilet paper and laid down one of those paper seat rings with the punch-out center. Having prepared his nest, I left the boy alone with his duty in the stall.

God rest ye merry gentlemen.

Waiting for the patent on my holiday themed seat cover.

I placed myself in the sink area. That seemed like the most innocuous place for a figure lurking in the men’s room, with no legitimate business there, to stand. As people passed me to get to the urinals, I held my son’s coat prominently, testament that I wasn’t camping in the restroom without reason. It would have been more clever to hand out paper towels, but I’d left my tip jar at home.

One gentlemen said hello to me as he passed. I decided to relocate.

I retreated to the stall area. The other stalls were empty, leaving me free to converse through the door without raising a response from the wrong squatter. “Almost done?” I asked.

“Nope. When I do this, I do it slow,” he replied. “I’m not good at doing things fast.”

“Just keep plugging away then.”

I had to warn my wife. I went and stuck my head out the men’s room door.

“What’s taking so long?” she asked.

I held up two fingers.

Her eyes grew wide, like from some sharp, internal pain. “Oh my God! Did you put down toilet paper?”

corner stall

“Oh my God! Did you put down toilet paper?”

I patted myself on the back as I nodded to her.

I returned to the stall door. “Almost done?”

“Not yet.”

I leaned against the wall, holding up my child’s coat of a flag for all to see. People came and went.

And then.

From behind that stainless steel door, came the sound of gentle humming – the melody of his favorite Christmas song: Carol of The Bells.

“Dum de de dum.

Dum de de dum.

Dum de de dum. . .”

It goes to show that even the horrors of a public men’s room can’t rob a child of his Christmas spirit.

 

Thankfulness run amok

Yes, I have a list of things that merit Thanksgiving. But rather than the commonplace “family and friends,” I’ve dug deep into my psyche to bring out these gems formed under the pressure of my heavy soul.

Caillou’s static age

It brings me some relief from his annoying cartoon that Caillou announces he is just four in the intro to his mind-numbing show. When my son was three, Caillou was an older kid, and it’s always cool to hang around the older kids. Fortunately, Caillou is a Dorian Gray. Now that my son is five and Caillou is still four, I’m hoping he’ll realize what a drag it is to associate with such a whiny baby. I hope this happens before the pent up rage that has been building in Caillou’s repressed family explodes into violence.

Broccoli

I like broccoli. But that’s no reason to put it on this list. I’m thankful for broccoli because my children don’t hate it. It’s the only vegetable they willingly eat, these children who balk at corn. We eat broccoli almost every day. It doesn’t have that horrible husk that confuses their little mouths like corn and peas do. And carrots are orange. The God of little boys didn’t intend food to be orange (popsicles excepted).

A little broccoli snack

You have to eat a lot of broccoli to make up for all those peas, carrots, and beans you won’t touch.

Frozen Pizza

I grew up where pizza joints were run by ethnic Italians. I remember an old Mom or Pop needing one of their kids to translate orders to them. Their pizza was their pride. I now live in a region where pizza places are owned by franchisees with names like Gary and Todd. The pizza is baked on a conveyor belt. The locals may be shocked by this, but I like some frozen pizza better than a lot of the pizza I could order. Plus, I don’t have to talk on the phone to get a frozen pizza, and that’s a huge advantage.

Moms’ groups

I once read about a study (no doubt conducted by male sociologists) concluding that when a group of women get together, chances are good they’ll start complaining about their men. I’m no scientist, but I have noticed that my wife loves me more when she comes home from a womenfolk powwow. She gives me a big hug and kiss and thanks me for not being like So-and-So’s husband. Whenever I’m feeling a little deprived, I inquire if she’s got a meeting coming up. Husbands lamer than me are the best part of my personality.

Lady's group finalists

Enjoy your ribbons, ladies. There’s a homemade stew of crusty dishes and dirty underwear waiting for you on the kitchen counter. (Image: Harris & Ewing)

Public transportation

We rarely use public transportation. When we do, it’s like a Holiday. My boys love riding the bus. After a trip around town on an articulated bus, you’d think we just got back from Disney World. This great adventure costs about two bucks. When one of my sons is the Super Bowl MVP and somebody shoves a microphone in his face to ask, “You’ve just won the Super Bowl; what are going to do next?” he’ll say, “I’m going across town, on the twister bus.”

We love the twister bus

We love articulated (“twister”) buses so much, we bought our own.

Yeah, I’m thankful for family and friends too. I guess.

Happy Thanksgiving!