Friends say I don’t like Christmas, but that’s not true. I love listening to Phil Spector’s Christmas album while pigging out on cookies and sipping champagne.
I like opening presents with my husband on Christmas morning. He always gets me an outfit, and I love modeling it. I like baking cookies with my mom, receiving gifts from far-flung family members, making a goofy holiday card, going to the mailbox to see who sent me a card, weeping while I read the Truman Capote classic, A Christmas Memory, and singing along with, “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.”
So I do like Christmas. I just seem a bit Grinchy for the traditions I eschew. I don’t get a Christmas tree. I don’t buy a lot of gifts. I don’t own any Christmas festive wear. I wince at the bags of garbage generated by our “scaled-down” Christmas. I just find it all to be too much. I can get grouchy, sometimes lamenting that I’d rather spend the holiday the way my Jewish pals do: catching a movie and dining at a Chinese restaurant.
But now, I’m a mom. And as my daughter Celia’s second Christmas approaches, I need to find my inner Kris Kringle.
I want Celia to experience the joy of Christmas, and I believe, under all those Toys R Us catalogs, it’s there … somewhere.
Last Christmas, she was only five weeks old. I was so grateful to have her, I would have sung “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer” in the middle of Macy’s, naked, except for the antlers on my head. As a sleep-deprived new mom, all I was asked to do for our traditional Christmas dinner of beef and Yorkshire pudding was, “BRING THE BABY!”
This year, Celia is a joy, as bright as the star that would be atop our tree—if we had one. She loves music and is captivated by anything that shimmers. She is ready for the holidays, if not yet old enough to understand the concept of Jesus born in a manger or Santa coming down the chimney. (The two stories celebrated simultaneously must be confusing for kids of all ages … but that’s for another story.)
