Glistening Once Again
© 2002
by
Jeff Stimpson
"You unwrap presents you found in the
trash?! What kind of family are you!?" -
Overheard phone call of a co-worker.
In the interests of teaching the boys where both of
their parents come from, we celebrate a little Christmas. I
indoctrinated the boys to "A Charlie Brown Christmas" shortly after
Halloween. I have a few presents for Jill, including a wooden spatula
and a water bottle for her to take to the gym, and Ned still has scads
of gifts left over from his birthday, and Alex can have a few of
those. Again this year, I also picked up a little tree, on December
23rd.
"Jeff, where did you get this damned tree?" Jill
asks on the phone on December 24th. I hear Ned in the background
crying, "Tree! Tree!" It (the tree) is one foot high, and lives in a
green plastic flower pot. It was $8.
Why?
"Because Ned and Alex are carrying it all over the
house! Alex is pulling it out of the pot. Now he's trying to water it!
You'll have to buy another one. Always Buy Two!"
Always Buy Two has become my motto after Jill has
kept coming home with one red toy truck at a time from the Pathmark
store. Remember how, when you fell for the love of your life, every
single thing in the background faded and all you could see was your
love? That's how Alex and Ned act, simultaneously, over one red toy
Pathmark truck. Always Buy Two. Damned kids.
I return to the tree store for another shapely
one-footer. I get to the register and am informed that the price went
up $10 between December 23rd and December 24th. Merry Christmas.
Damned kids. But Jill's warning rings like a sleigh bell: "Make sure
you bring home another (bad word) tree."
I ask her if she, a good Jewish girl, ever thought
she'd say that sentence. "That particular group of words?" she
replies. "No."
We'll probably start decorating the tree(s) tonight.
Jill has mentioned popcorn and cranberries. I've asked her to corral
the boys into drawing little things on paper that we can cut out and
attach with ribbon. We'll wrap the plastic flower pots in tinfoil, and
string the lights Jill bought. Hard to believe she has
comparison-shopped for Christmas lights. "Hey!" she said over a $1.49
set in a Rite Aid. "The ones I bought were 99 cents. Oh, I see: This
is a hundred lights."
Tomorrow is Christmas. It's supposed to sleet. I
stop at the grocer's for cranberries. They're out of cranberries,
apparently, and instead I pick up colored gummy bears and a red hybrid
dried fruit called "craisins."
On Christmas Eve, we get the kids to sleep
relatively quickly. "Go to sleep, Ned," I call, "so Santa can come and
leave you the presents we never got around to giving you on your
birthday." I tap in the nails to string Jill's less-than-a-hundred
lights while she pops popcorn and digs up a needle and thread. The
oldies station plays the top 101 Christmas songs of all time; my
favorite, "Snoopy's Christmas," comes in at number seven. We string
together popcorn and the berries -- I skewer a few gummy bears for
good measure -- until we have about 10 inches of decorations a tree.
Then I let Jill read the draft of this essay.
"Nice," she says. "But there goes my Christmas
surprise. 'A wooden spatula and a water bottle?'"
"I didn't get that for you! If I'd gotten that for
you, would I have let you read the essay?"
"I think you got that for me," she says. I drop the
spatula, unwrapped, into the kitchen utensil drawer. The bottle I wrap
-- after camouflaging it in Tupperware -- and put by the tree(s),
along with a rolled-up and wrapped Gourmet (I intend to buy
Jill a subscription and let them Bill Me In January).
Next morning, Jill is doing the present thing even
before the coffee is done dripping. "How nice," Jill says, hefting the
package with the water bottle, "you got me Tupperware!" She gets me a
nice tie for parenting conferences. Ned gets a truck, and Alex gets a
wooden magnetic farm set. Or Ned gets the farm set and Alex gets the
truck. Jill seems to like the magazine. Ned stares at the nailed-up
lights. We get coffee. Ned gets cocoa. Alex gets Cheerios. The living
room floor is littered with wrapping paper, toy boxes, fragments of
magnetic farm, and enough wreckage for me to tell myself that the boys
have a better sense of where they come from. My tie is coiled on the
couch. Alex finishes his Cheerios and Ned his cocoa, and they start to
fight over the truck.
Copyright 2001 Jeff
Stimpson, all rights reserved
