Last year was my daughter’s first Christmas and, God-willing, next year will be my son’s first (he’s due in February).
That alone is enough to fill a cup with cheer and greatly offsets the sorrow I feel from missing so many of our usual traditions this year.
Any other year it would kill me to break my life-long streak of attending Christmas Eve services at the church near where I grew up but with an 8-months-pregnant wife who’s transitioned our moving into a new house right into her pre-birth nesting and with me now constantly watching over a potty training-ish toddler, the break feels like a relief.
While we’ll miss our usual church services, family get-togethers, and flights to see the in-laws, enough of our traditions remain to fulfill me.
Like how half the blinking strands stop blinking a week after the tree goes up or my encroaching dread that an important package hasn’t arrived yet when there’s snow in the forecast and I don’t have a backup gift.
Then there are the traditions I’ll strive to avoid like irritating my wife Jenny by making her sit alone on Christmas Eve because I’ve put off my gift wrapping until the very last minute.
I consider this year a filler Christmas sandwiched between two baby’s firsts with no real sense of what Christmas will look like going forward as a family of four.
I’m grateful for having a chance to look back on all my Christmases past.
My favorite abandoned Christmas tradition came with the great gift card truce (circa 1998) where me, my two brothers, and two step-brothers each handed each other identical $25 Best Buy gift cards.
Faced with the absurdity of walking in with the same number and value of gift cards as we walked out with, we calmly and unanimously declared a gift-giving truce that lasts to this day.
Though spouses and significant others have tried to dissolve it, that moment still stands as both the greatest gift I’ve ever given and received: a life-time pardon from ever having to buy a loved one a gift again. A true Christmas miracle.
Since that truce unfortunately didn’t carry over to our offspring, my new annual tradition is saying, “wait a second, how many nieces and nephews DO we have now? Let’s count them… That is WAY too many to buy each one a gift.”
This year the number climbed to 15 yet still my wife overrules me and buys them each something.
I’m taking an unhealthy amount of joy from the fact that half my family is celebrating in-person next July so I’ll have one more kid and a little more skin in the game against the 15:1 ratio that’s clearly stacked against us.
Though it’s less than a week out, I don’t know what this year’s Christmas will look like.
We ordered a frozen turkey breast but Peapod didn’t deliver it so it’s still an open question of what we’ll have for Christmas dinner.
Despite repeated requests, Jenny refuses to cook me a goose even when I offer to lean out the window and bribe a random street person to fetch us the biggest one hanging in the butcher shop window.
One new tradition I hope to continue is reading my daughter The Night Before Christmas. I can easily picture the next few years but after then it gets murky.
Will it be a joke by the time she’s 12? Will I insist on it when she’s 16, 20, or older?
If I do, will she obey, or will she just say, “whatever Dad, there better be an iBall under the tree tomorrow (an iBall obviously being an Apple device you jam directly into your eye socket to avoid the processing lag that comes between thinking and texting).
Will she someday bring a romantic partner home who I’ll invite to join us, or will it awkwardly be “our thing” that her partner has to silently watch pretending to enjoy?
Or will we miss it for the first time because she’s chosen that partner over me, or because of another global pandemic, or (heaven forbid) because I’m dead?
If so, will she stoically hold the book in her hands and read it aloud while fighting back tears? Or will it just end up in one of the inevitable boxes to be donated after I’ve passed?
It’s impossible to tell and just as likely that I’ll wait too late and she’ll be too tired to sit through the story this year so the tradition dies before it ever takes root.
If so, I’ll roll with it. That’s what I love about holiday traditions: every year is a chance to push the reset button by either creating something new or choosing which ones to repeat.
If you enjoy my humor writing, please subscribe below.
If you want to syndicate this column, you may contact me here to discuss the details.
You may notice that I’ve disabled commenting on this post. I’d love to hear your thoughts by email at [email protected].