Traditional Schmaditional

I always think it’s fun to hear about everybody’s different Christmas traditions, the way their families do things and the fun they have. I think it’s nifty how a global holiday like Christmas sees so many different interpretations. And then I like to watch the shades of confusion, shame, and mild horror pass over their faces as I tell them the way my family runs Christmas.

We, like many families, have a beautiful nativity scene to set up every year. But we, unlike many families, see an inherent flaw. People put the scene out at the beginning of December (or in November, if you do Christmas wrong), but baby Jesus doesn’t arrive until Christmas day. We therefore decided it was improper to place baby Jesus in his snuggly manger – but a problem arose. Where to stash him until then? He sat in a wooden racecar that my dad built for a while. He sat in a wine glass. He spent some time treacherously caught in the jaws of a vicious mounted bobcat, much to the surprise of our cleaning lady. Every year, he wanders about the house. Eventually we realized that the nativity figurines are hollow, so we wrapped him in tissue paper and left him inside of Mary. We figured it was most appropriate to leave him there, safe in his tissue paper womb, until it was time for his grand Christmas day appearance.

Christmas lights have been a bit of a difficulty. You give my dad one damn job to do, and he dies to get out of doing it. Last year saw my sister shimmying up onto the roof to hang icicle lights. That proved to not be one of our better ideas. This year my sister Megan has Boyfriend, and he was conned into doing most of the lighting gruntwork. Then we added some of our own goodies. A couple of little trees by the front door, surrounded by pretty gifts. Big stars sit lit up by the fence.  Snoopy sleeps on his lit-up dog house over by the garage. Linus, Snoopy, Woodstock, and Charlie Brown stand around a Christmas tree. And an inflatable pig is in the flower beds. What?  Bacon makes us merry.

Christmas cookies. Hard to screw that up, right? We can even make that interesting. A couple of years ago, while making the traditional gingerbread person, Christmas tree, angel and star shaped cookies, my sister Megan, for no apparent reason, made a turkey. It confused people. We saw this as an opportunity. The next year we made Christmas penguins. The next year we took it a little further, dying dough red to make Christmas lobsters. We also made jalapeno shaped ones, and put them on toothpicks, in honor of Jeff Dunham’s Jose the Jalapeno on a steeeeek. One of my sisters (I won’t name names to protect the innocent, but it might rhyme with Schmeslie) attempted to paint the jalapenos like the Mexican flag . . . and we wound up with jalapenos on steeeeeks painted like Italian flags instead. It’s become tradition to create non-traditional Christmas cookies. Gingerbread people get frosted to be anatomically correct, or get legs bitten off and frosted to look like gruesome accident victims. Trees get solidly covered with glitter sprinkles. Stars get frosted like certain Nickelodeon cartoon starfish. Last year we found a hippopotamus cutter, but thanks to the beast of a kitchen remodel we underwent, we were unable to make them. We have a new cutter for this Christmas . . . but if I told you what it was before it got used, I’d have to kill you. It’s always a surprise to my mom what we’ve come up with, and I wouldn’t want to ruin the surprise for her. Or ruin the fun of watching her exasperated expression at discovering our tomfoolery.

I’m willing to bet nobody has Christmas like us. We have ornaments honoring dead racecar drivers on our tree. Our Christmas village has an outhouse behind the church, raccoons breaking into the garbage, hobos, and a headless woman riding passenger in a horse-drawn sleigh in the snow. We take pride in wrapping our gifts with enough twine, wire, or duct tape to require a tool kit to open them. Our Christmas is wicked merry.

Merry Christmas to you and yours, whatever your traditions may be,
Sarcasmo

Currently Excited About: Magic Cookie Bars. Yes, still.  And the drawings for the UEFA Champions League round of 16 that came yesterday, particular the rematches between Inter Milan and Bayern Munich, and Arsenal and Barcelona.  Excellent soccer to come!