I must admit that Christmas isn’t my favorite season.
Sure the kids love it, but I’m a Hallowe’en girl at heart.
The first Christmas after I had my daughter I lived in a bare public housing unit with a $10 inflatable couch and so little money I couldn’t afford decorations to put on the Charley Brown Christmas twig that I’d culled from Ingraham Trail.
Although I’m doing better financially now, I still don’t go out of my way to spend a whole lot on Christmas, particularly because my kids get presents from lots of family members. Even if we each just bought them 1 thing, they’d still be drowning in plastic trinkets on the anticipated morning. No one just buys them one thing though, and every year by noon on Christmas day we talk about how we went overboard AGAIN.
So while that’s fine and good, the best Christmas celebration I ever had was with a former roomate who’d moved here from the Netherlands. Instead of extravagant gifts, the celebration of Sinterklaas usually involves filling a kids shoe with candy and little trinkets in exchange for the vegetables they’d left said shoe for Sinterklaas’s flying horse. The evening is celebrated by family and friends exchanging gag gifts that highlight some embarrassing moment that occurred in the past year accompanied by a song or poem composed by the gift giver to make (good-natured) fun of the recipient.
Of course that year was the year I fell off a boat while peeing as an experienced female sailor was explaining the mechanics and logistics of successful over-the-side-whizzing for girls on the radio, so I was an easy target. We had great fun and everyone howled with laughter well into desert.
And it was a far more satisfying experience than the Christmas’s that I’m used to, but when I think about the possibility of incorporating it into my regular Christmas programming it occurs to me that not all of my friends and family would be into it because at the end of the day it’s easier to trade money for plastic, throw a bow on it and call that Holiday Spirit.
