by Mike Adams (2005)
So you're ten years old, and you can't go to sleep. You're lying in your Star Wars pajamas, underneath your cozy Power Rangers comforter. You've been watching the clock on the living room wall through the crack in the partially open doorway, waiting for the clock to strike 12. When it does, you can finally rest your eyes and fall asleep, comforted by the fact that soon enough you'll be surrounded by boxes wrapped up with ribbons and the works. Yup, December 1st. Now there is only 25 days of angst and anticipation until good ole' Saint Nick will land on your roof and come down through the chimney that your house doesn't even have.
All month you make sure you point out every little slightly interesting action figure, erector set, board game, and unnecessarily large piece of candy in sight so that your mom knows what kind of task she's got ahead of her. And every night you re-write your Christmas list, alphabetized, complete with pictures and prices.
So time passes, as do a few Christmases, and before you know it, you're all grown up. You're a young adult and you happen to be up watching re-runs of the Real World. You realize it's 12, and it's the 1st of December. We teens look at it as, "Thank God in heaven, only a few more and I'm out of school for a
month, sweet!", which ultimately means, "Thank God in heaven, soon I can party on weekdays!"
All I want to know is where did my childlike giddiness for the Christmas season go? Where did my Christmas spirit run off to? Maybe he hitched a ride on the Polar Express with Frosty and the gang, but he could have at least left a note. Now as the season approaches, I feel no different than I would on the days counting down to June 25th (disregarding the bitter cold of a Boston winter). The only plus that pops into my head immediately are those ever-so-cheery Christmas tunes, and even those ones, the same 4 or 5 you know I'm speaking, seem to chase you wherever you go. Two weeks before Christmas, you're up to your ears in Figgie pudding and red-nosed reindeer anyway. Christmas lights are pleasant, too, I suppose, excluding those lights that come in the single shade of blue: whose bright idea was that (no pun intended)? Personally, I think the Grinch is behind that one.
Now we throw money into the picture. Do you have enough? Do you know what to buy? "Is my girlfriend going to hate this, and is she as cheap as I am? Why is everything so damn expensive, 30 bucks for the Santa With Muscles DVD?" Stress, stress, stress. The only thing we had to worry about when we were 10 was making sure we put out the Oreos and milk in the back of the fridge, so no one ate Santa's Christmas dinner. Now that we're older, we're so preoccupied with so much that's going on, the special day arrives before we know it and we haven't had a chance to sit back and enjoy it.
Guess what? December 25th arrives, Christ's B-day. Hip, hip hooray. Right off the bat, you get a great start. Your little brother feels the need to wake you up at 5 in the morning and you walk out of your room barely conscious, and you look like a zombie once the Christmas morning pictures are developed. You go through the insincere, ritualistic, half-hour long scripted process of "Thank you so much, I had no clues!", and "Oh my Gods!", and then you go back to bed. You sleep for a little bit and roll out of bed around 12, 12:30. You walk into the kitchen where mom tells you, "Wash up, we're heading over to 'Auntie Kathie's place." God bless her, but her house is about as boring as a stone dungeon. You would rather get a tooth pulled, but for some reason year after year your family (who are about as exciting as a stone dungeon themselves) decides to have some annual festivities take place there. This usually means you're sitting by yourself, acting like an anti-social miser, while you eat dry turkey. You spend your time there watching really bizarre and cheesy Christmas "Classics", and you know you're going to drop cranberry sauce on your new white Old Navy T-shirt.
You get really thirsty from that dry turkey and you go out for some sparkling cider, and what a surprise, the evening's entertainment is beginning. The relatives are drunk and starting to argue. Soon there's yelling and your parents decide to leave. See you guys next year, thanks for the tube socks. That's some high quality Christmas cheer, if you ask me.
All in all, you manage to make it out of 2004 alive, and you resume your normal, boring life. The lights are taken down and the jolly Christmas carols are no longer in rotation. Out of sight, out of mind. All you've got to show for Christmas is 5 extra pounds and a purple stain on your new shirt.
I wish for only one thing. I wish I could count down the days once it's December 1st, and be completely and utterly fascinated when I wake up on the morning of the 25th. I wish I could wake my older brother up way too early, and be greeted by mounds of decorative misshapen boxes surrounding the tree like a red and green fortress. I wish I could leave Rudolph and his friends the carrots and celery they deserve (after all they must be hungry with all that hard work they're doing). And most of all, I wish I could have that same sparkle in my eyes that I got when I read the thank you note from Santa. He was always grateful for the milk, whether it was warm or not.
Who knows, maybe when I have children of my own, they'll rub some of their Christmas cheer on me; I can only cross my fingers and hope for the best. Maybe even this year will be a different story. But now that day most of us are looking forward to draws near, what do you say we dig in to some Figgie pudding and have us a time. Heck, we're up to our ears in it anyway, right?