Seasonal Amnesia
Remembering Christmas Past is like remembering childbirth: a certain amnesia sets in. If you asked me yesterday what happens most Christmases, I would have said they were uneventful. Then I looked one up in an old diary.How quickly we forget.That year, I came up with the idea that I should send a card to 192 people, and thus spent every spare moment over a five-day period entering their names and addresses on my laptop so as to generate labels. Finally one morning I pressed “Print” and hurried away to shower. When I came back, the pear-bottomed black cat was delicately shredding the sheets of labels one by one as they emerged from the printer, while sitting directly ON the laptop, causing it to beep frantically, then lose its mind altogether, writing “#!” when you tried to write "the" and %#~" when you tried to type "and."And it kept ON doing this, hiccupping and speaking in gibberish for the next 13 hours.Then I spent five more days of non-existent spare moments working up a newsy collage of holiday greeting and when it turned out to be too big for a conventional envelope, I went and bought bigger ones, on which the printed labels now looked puny and impersonal. So I took ANOTHER five days and made everyone who came into the house help me decorate each one with a bright holiday drawing.And then there were the Disappointing Presents. Our then-sixth grader wanted Army Guys, but when the bucket of them was opened on Christmas morning, I turned out to have bought the wrong kind: guys that couldn’t even lie down in the mud and inch along on their tummies. Our 10th-grader-at-the-time turned out to be hoping for a leather jacket and instead I bought her a big silky Cheese Puff of a thing. Also: the much-wished-for video game was sold out until March, it turned out you couldn’t BUILD Erector Set Number 6 unless you already OWNED Erector Sets Number 1 through 5 and the two presents I thought were sure-fire which I had bought and wrapped super-early I couldn’t even find until three days after the 25th.On climbing into bed that night, our boy’s eyes shone with sorrow. “It’s my fault,” he said, so as not to sadden his mom. “I didn’t get in the Christmas spirit....I should’ve thought more about what I was giving, instead of what I was getting.”So this year we’re all TRYING to do that. Still, you sure can get turned around. It turns out I was the one who wanted a big downy Cheese Puff of a jacket! But while we're at it I’d like a new wallet too, since mine looks like it was mauled by a pit bull and is also covered with ink stains, as literally everything I own, even my very underwear. Also a nice book and maybe some undies not yet written on- Oh wait but see? I’m doing it again. You forget it from year to year, but this season does just makes a person crazy! 
