Excellent Christmas

Well, it just was. Don’t know why. I was especially in the mood this year (although I wasn’t any more diligent about decorating and so on than usual . . . one string of stars in the porch windows, and we barely got the tree decorated.) But the idea of gathering among friends and family in the darkest days of the year appealed this year, and where I had expected her to become somewhat blasé about the whole thing, my 11-year-old was actually uncontrollably excited. It was as if she were running around happily chanting “Christmas! Christmas! Christmas!” under her breath for several days. It didn’t hurt that the space under the tree was more stuffed with presents than I’ve ever seen it, even after we’d mailed off the out-of-town stuff.

Christmas for us begins at my mother’s, where we’ve had a big Christmas Eve lasagna festival for the past 34 years or so. That’s a long time. The cast of characters has changed dramatically over that time, and I still feel melancholy over some of those no longer with us on Christmas Eve, but that’s the nature of time. All we can do is remember. How it became lasagna, I’m not sure anyone knows, but one year my mother tried to serve something else and there was a major revolt, so it’s always lasagna. The girls were good with their cousins, I got to chat with some folks, and since it was an early start we closed the place at 8 o’clock. Unfortunately, Hannah enjoyed just a few too many of Christine’s delicious espresso squares, a flourless chocolate espresso concoction that was as caffeinated as it was delicious, so there wasn’t much sleep for her on Christmas Eve.

Christmas morning was wonderful — the girls waited until 7 to wake us (as ordered), and then we came down and oohed and aahed over the Santa presents, but the best presents this year were from Mom and Dad (because we thought we should get most of the credit). Of course they already knew they had season passees to Mount Snow, and that was the bulk of Christmas, but they both got new American Girl accessories they wanted, a couple of new games, and little things like that. Rebekah gave me the new Lennon Acoustic disc, which I’m sure will be wonderful — but to tell more, I’d have to get into a rant about the Revolt O’ The Appliances, which I won’t do just yet. Oddly, nobody got any new PlayStation games — none of the ones we wanted could be found, anywhere.

Then the families came over, and all the peaceful pleasantness turned into Grand Central Christmas. It was, as my mother puts it, as if Santa threw up. There is just no way with that many people, especially children, to have any semblance of order to the gift opening, so it devolves into an orgy of paper-tearing and shouted thank-you’s for about an hour. It’s a shameful consumerist orgy, but we call it our Christmas, and it’s a little bit of a rush. My mother fuels it, mostly, because the rest of us pretty much stick to one or two gifts per person, but she goes overboard. I asked for new pots and pans for Christmas — the ones we have are her leftovers from 10 years ago, and the handles are all cracking or gone — and I should have expected that she would supply us with all the pots and pans in the world. We haven’t a clue where we’re going to put them.

Once that was over, dinner — half-catered, half put together in a panic when the grill suddenly stopped working. I went out to check on the two whole chickens I was supposed to be grilling and found they had reached a summery 80 degrees. Still not sure what was wrong, but it meant I had to put them in the oven inside, which meant the stuff that was going to go in the oven had to be dealt with otherwise — big domino effect that left us eating exactly when I had said we would, but which was about an hour later than we would have had the grill worked. Tasty chicken, though. And pie. I had made two Norwegian Apple pies, and when I thought that wasn’t going to be enough, made a pumpkin as well. Then I ended up with most of three leftover pies from my mother’s the night before. So man, did we have pie. Just because I’m loaded doesn’t mean I can’t have pie! (I could explain, but I won’t.)

Then, miraculously, everybody cleared out by 6:30, and we slumped in exhaustion in the living room and used toothpicks to keep our eyes open through the mandatory (but much enjoyed) viewing of “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

All in all, the perfect Christmas!