Season’s Greetings! Hopefully, this finds you well and that you are dressed in a very cozy, very ugly Christmas sweater!
As a kid, I believed Santa visited every house in one night. As an adult, I can’t even visit three stores in one afternoon without needing a snack and an emotional reset. If Santa is real, he’s either magical … or he has a really organized spreadsheet.
Nah, I’m just joking, but let’s really think about this. If Santa is real, he’s sending emails like, “Looping the elves in on this,” and no one is happy about it!
Ha Ha! But seriously, folks, if Santa is real, then at some point the government tried to regulate him, gave up, and quietly decided, “We’re not touching that.”
I want to confess to you that I can’t keep a single tree standing in my own living room because we have four cats who look at it like it’s an interactive climbing gym designed specifically to test physics, gravity and my patience.
Santa can manage the entire planet in one night, but I turn my back for 30 seconds, and suddenly there’s an ornament rolling under the couch and a cat staring at me like, “You saw nothing.”
Let’s talk about the tree. We bring an entire tree into the living room and then act shocked when it behaves like a tree. “Why are there needles everywhere?” Because, friend, this plant has been relocated against its will!
The needles aren’t falling – the tree is autographing your carpet. It’s not famous, but it wants to be remembered. You’ll still be finding pine in April. You’ll pick one up, it’ll stab your finger, and you’ll think, “Wow. Christmas left scars.”
Then there are the lights. Christmas lights come with three settings: airport runway, interrogation room, and “somewhere a fuse is writing a resignation letter.” You plug them in, one section goes dark, and suddenly you’re an electrician! You spend 20 minutes outside, crouched in a bush, asking one bulb to “just be a team player.”
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been listening to a lot of Elvis Christmas music this year. Mostly because after about the 15th time hearing Wham! and Mariah Carey, your soul starts quietly whispering, “Enough!” That’s usually the moment when even the happiest person in the room starts thinking, “Maybe Scrooge had a point!”
Wrapping paper is its own sport. You start confident and end up taped to yourself, arguing with paper as it betrays you. Some people wrap gifts beautifully. I use the free gift-wrapping station because I accept my limitations. Wrapping paper actually frightens me. It has never once brought me peace.
Gifts are the main event, and also the annual reminder that the word “thoughtful” has a sliding scale. Kids want something that beeps. Adults want something that stops beeping. I open a present and say, “Oh wow, I love it,” while my face says, “I do not know what this is, but I respect the effort.”
Food is where Christmas becomes spiritual. We cook enough to feed a village, then stand at the fridge at midnight eating ham with our fingers like raccoons.
There is always one dish everybody “has to have,” and if it is missing, relatives speak in hushed tones like the North Pole has fallen. “No stuffing?” my Aunt says, clutching her pearls. “Then what are we even doing here?!”
And somehow, after all of that – the noise, the paper, the lights, the opinions about stuffing – everyone ends up in the same room. A little tired. A little full. Phones face down. Plates abandoned. Someone half-asleep on the couch. Someone else saying, “Well … that was nice,” like they didn’t just eat their body weight in ham.
That’s the part I always forget is coming. Not the perfect moment. Just the quiet one. The one where nothing else is required. The tree is crooked, the gifts are opened, the dishes can wait, and for a few minutes, nobody needs anything from anyone.
So if today feels messy, loud or slightly ridiculous, congratulations – you’re doing Christmas correctly. Wear the sweater. Eat the leftovers. Laugh at the chaos.
Merry Christmas.
• Toby Moore is a Shaw Local News Network columnist, star of the Emmy-nominated film “A Separate Peace,” and CEO of CubeStream Inc. He can be reached at feedback@shawmedia.com.