Christmas Sanity

I'm sitting on the sofa, comfortably ensconced in Christmas. Colored lights--which the British call "fairy lights--twinkle like, umm, little fairies and the various miniature Nativity scenes (most of them Mexican, testimonies to Keith's many spring break trips to Mexico with college students when he was a university chaplain) and Santas and Christmas-themed Beanie Babies and nutcracker soldiers and snowmen and angels all jostle together in a glorious mishmash of folk art and children's drawings and drugstore tacky.

Over it all glows the 8 1/2 -foot tree. I suggested maybe a table-top tree this year as I'm having foot surgery in a couple of days. . . Hugh reacted as if I'd proposed that we cancel Christmas and spend a week digging latrines in Somalia. Needless to say, Hugh won; Hugh always wins--and this time, at least, I'm glad; it's a beautiful tree. Like the rest of the decorations, it's far from elegant or tasteful, just a jumble of clashing ornaments: here a ceramic Snoopy that I bought in high school, there a silver penguin that Hugh and I picked up last year in Sea World, San Antonio; on a branch below sits an olive-wood manger scene that a friend bought for me in Bethlehem while I was lying, feverish and stricken with debilitating diarrhea, in a nun-run traveler's hostel in Jerusalem, and just above it perches the glass bird my mom brought me from her trip to Austria when I was in junior high. And over there, see, by the real-life-size glass McDonald's French Fries ornament? Next to the picture of Owen in day care, wreathed in glitter glue? That's a clay Viking, bought during one of our many family trips to York when we lived just a short train ride away in Manchester. And on and it goes. No overall design, no aesthetically pleasing pattern, just the haphazard relics of our haphazard lives.

(In contrast, Hugh tells me that his girlfriend's family's tree is black. With all-white ornaments. In an all-white living room. Poor Hugh. Once again his slovenly, academically-inclined, fashion-challenged, interior-design-handicapped family fails to measure up.)

I genuinely do enjoy Christmas and all that goes with it. It strikes me as odd and fundamentally sad that the most common interchange with casual acquaintances, colleagues, neighbors, and so forth is something along these lines: "How ya doin? All ready for the holidays?" "[groan] Oh lord, no. I can't believe how much I have to do. [roll of the eyes] Ho ho ho, right?" And then will come the competitive listing of how much must be done and what a drag it is to do it.

I don't get it. There are no Christmas police. No one is going to come fine you or arrest you for failing to ice the cookies or not sending out cards or deciding against populating your front lawn with gigantic inflatable snowmen. I am not really a very laid-back person (to put it mildly). Maybe it's because I'm so neurotic, almost professional in my neuroticism, really, that I regard Christmas anxiety as purely for amateurs. It's a bit bizarre: The one time of the year when everyone else goes slightly crazy, I feel somewhat sane. Kinda nice. I can see the appeal of this sanity thing.