I’ll Pout If I Want To

I love Christmas. I’ve always loved Christmas, even the years – the many years in a row – when I was little that I ate too much at my grandmother’s Christmas Eve party and threw up. I loved popcorn balls and Lifesaver books and visiting Santa and waking up Christmas morning to the magical glow of the lights on the tree dimly illuminating a new mound of presents. I loved my mother’s apple puffed pancake and sour cream coffee cake and Christmas dinner at my grandmother’s with the fruit cocktail and the year that I started sitting at the grownups’ table instead of the kids’ table.

Most of my Christmas memories are good, and so I love the season and even though I am an adult myself now, I don’t think all the fun should go to the kids. So every year at Christmas, I do get a little bit sad about one thing. Christmas Eve Eve.

Starting in high school, sophomore year I believe, my three best friends and I would exchange gifts two days before Christmas. This practice quickly evolved into a tradition that we stuck to as faithfully as possible during the years in which we were at different colleges, then living in different cities, and even different states. When we were not together during Christmas, we’d do conference calls on speaker phone. Each one of us would get gifts for all three others, and we’d make it a point to ensure that we all had multiple presents to open, and we’d take turns. We’d have freshly baked cookies and hot chocolate. We’d gossip and giggle and squabble and make up. The gifts my girlfriends gave me were the ones I looked forward to the most.

We’re all married now and each of us has two children. A few years ago the husbands got in on the act and that was just too many people to buy gifts for, so we started drawing names: one girlfriend, one husband, and all the children would be covered. That was the year our tradition lost some of its steam. Our husbands, who did not giggle and gossip and squabble, took their turns opening gifts and it was BORING.

But! It’s not about presents, right? It’s about being together!

Last year we did away with adult gifts altogether and just gave presents to each other’s children, in exchange for an extravagant trip to New York City. All eight adults took the train from New Haven to Grand Central and had lunch, saw a show, and had dinner and drinks. It snowed the whole day, we spent hours and hours together on our little city adventure, and it was wonderful.

This year there was nothing in exchange, at least for me. Our family did not travel back to CT and we don’t have any immediate plans to do so. We mailed our presents back to the kids, and my children opened theirs here, alone. They had no frame of reference to understand that those gifts came from my best friends, or that we sent a big box to the other kids. My three best friends all gathered a few days after Christmas with their families for lunch and present-opening, and then later that day they left the kids with family and the adults all went out to dinner.

I stayed here. So I got no gifts for myself, and I didn’t get the togetherness, either.

Rats.