It’s coming up on the season of giving, the final act to the seasons of shopping, buying, hiding and wrapping. It is a season most associate with warmth and joy. I tell myself every year I will be one of those merry folk drunk on spirit. I put in a great effort yet mostly end up frustrated and annoyed.
There is some part of my genetic code or personal history that has stripped Christmas of its essence. It might be called parenting. Sure the first few years are adorable but then they catch onto this whole system of wanting and receiving which, when fuelled by maternal guilt and a complete lack of planning/gift-tracking, can result in year after year of mounting expectations I inevitably fail to meet. (I once had a boyfriend whose life advice was to never expect anything from anyone, that way no one ever disappoints you. So at least one of us left the relationship unperturbed.)
I have much to say on Christmas and my inability to tap into its hoopla which I continually put it off saying because self exploration through writing is a hundred times more intense than therapy and you typically don’t come away with hope. But this is not my Grinch McScrooge story where, in the end, my heart has grown so big that I need a new rib cage. This blurb is about stuff. Particularly, my distaste for it.
It starts with the decorating. I can’t decorate until the house is free of clutter. I want the space to be devoid of distractions so the only thing we (I) see is Christmas. I don’t want to see Christmas and, for example, the two bins of aged-out electronics that have been sitting on the dining room floor since I was warm and in shorts waiting for *someone* (who cares about electronics) to decide what to do with it all. I don’t want to see in a corner of the kitchen counter, the two pumpkins I rescued from our frosty front porch with the intention of… I’m not sure what… disembowelling and turning them into pie? Since when am I that industrious? I don’t want to see the pile of random papers, school photos and children’s art that I periodically separate into smaller piles only to recollect in defeat when we need the table back.
This is why decorating typically happens in a panic mid-December and not with joyful Hallmark energy oozing from my every pore the moment Advent begins. It’s also why, starting sometime in November, I get Mrs. Hannigan level grouchy (but not drunk) when people (children) leave their stuff everywhere. I’m not talking explicable stuff like homework. I’m talking used Kleenexes on whatever surface was close by when their nose was dripping (yes, the Kleenex is a step up from the t-shirt which, until recently, was seen by one as a convenient body-sized handkerchief). I’m talking open books left on the couch. I’m talking cereal crusted bowls left in the basement. I’m talking socks found everywhere socks do not belong.
I don’t want to be a nag but I also don’t want to get dinner ready in the company of someone’s socks. So I implore them to pick up after themselves, everyone loving me less (myself included) with each nagging direction that comes out of my mouth.
“If you don’t want me to nag you, just do the things you’re supposed to do,” I reason.
“If you don’t want to be a nag, stop giving us things we’re supposed to do,” they reason back.
One makes an egg sandwich for breakfast. There’s a win! It’s not cereal. It’s not Halloween candy. There’s protein. This is progress. But the eggy pan sits on the stove with egg bits scattered all around and the plate remains on the counter above a dishwasher desperate for something to clean. I suggest this situation could be improved. The pan gets washed and now all the eggy bits are clumped to the dishcloth that hides in a soggy lump of shame in a corner of the sink.
It reminds me of a lesson in flow charts I got in grade three or five or who knows. To get from the start to the end, you have to take several distinct steps. At each step you answer the question - am I done? If yes, Hallelujah. If not, get your ass back in the chart. You can’t go from hunger to clean kitchen in one step. You have to wash the pan and rinse out the cloth and dispose of shells. So I become a flow chart of instructions, continually yanking them back into the process until we finally reach the end. Suffice it to say, I don’t run a very tight ship.
I came up with what I think is a brilliant analogy to give the kids a sense of how futile this all feels. It came to me after my daughter expressed envy that I am able to spend my days cleaning the house instead of enduring grade seven. Fair point, but grade seven is about making progress. Cleaning the house is not. It is, in fact, the opposite of progress. It might even be the definition of insanity.
“Imagine you’ve baked us all a batch of delicious cookies,” I relayed to the girl who loves baking, though in retrospect I should have said cake. “You worked hard and they are gorgeous. Then we all come home, take one look, toss them in the trash and walk away.”
At this, she is aghast. But it gets better.
“The next day, as we’re walking out the door, we turn to you and say, ‘Hey can you bake us some cookies today?’”
She slouches down in the seat, jaw agape, eyes wide staring forward into the morning sun.
“Who would do such a thing,” she exhales.
Who, indeed.
I came up with this a week ago and wish I could tell you so much has changed. Yet I am right now in the living room looking at a giant mixing bowl housing a collection of leftover popcorn kernels that just didn’t have it in them. Nestled among them is an empty cereal bowl that’s spoon is so cemented in position it could be a piece of art.
Brilliant and relatable as it may have been, my analogy did not inspire change. I should probably just ask them to bake some cookies and then ceremoniously throw them out, but I could never do that to a cookie.