Wow, it’s Christmas. 

When I was a kid this was like the focal point of my existence:  thinking about Christmas, wondering what I’d get for Christmas, judging my Christmas against reports of my friends’ various Christmas’s, etc.  On December 26th the year would turn into a tragically, infinitely long timeline, with the next Christmas somewhere invisible over the horizon.  How could a young imagination ever know how little time 364 days really was?

I have spent a lot of my life thinking about self-control, self-improvement, self-involvement and other ways to use your mind to subtly alter the quality of life. I would do my best to forget that there even was such a thing at Christmas, hoping that suddenly I’d wake up and it would be November–high season for Christmas anticipation!  But just a casual glance at a Sears Roebuck catalog, which my mother got for some reason (she would NEVER buy something that wasn’t deeply discounted) would start my Christmas longing up afresh.  One year I carefully laid out on graph paper my dream BMX bicycle, with annotations for all the accoutrements–including disc wheel covers, personalized license plate, pedal flair thingies, etc.–and casually left it lying in various places around the house.  Such as:  the kitchen table, on top of all the telephones at different times, in the driver’s seat of my mom’s car…  Something about Christmas inspired impossible dreams of avarice in me.

And I have to say that my family was really good at Christmas.  My mother missed no opportunity to remind us of how poor we were, et cetera and so forth, and how this Christmas would be particularly dismal, and so on.  But every year there would dozens of gifts under the tree.  Most of them wouldn’t be exactly ”brand-new”, but my mom was a pro at cleverly boxing things for maximum impact, making sure a certain yard-sale-acquired toy had all of its accessories, etc.

Today, as adults, we have an unspoken tradition (as I bet many families do) of making somewhat tedious but not unpleasant small-talk about each gift for about 3 minutes after it is opened and vocally appreciated by the recipient:

GIFTEE:  “Oh, this is exactly the same color as that pillowcase I like so much.  It’s PERFECT!”

GIFTER:  “Well I’d heard you say that Miss Simpson at church was loving hers, and of course I know how you love that pillowcase!”

Besides being (I think) very classy of us, it has the secondary benefit of really stretching out the time it takes to open presents.  This surely must hearken back to our habits back when I was a kid.  There were five Harbin sons and daughters (there still are), although there were 8 years between me and my next older sibling, so my younger sister and I were kind of the stars.  In order to make the gifts “last” longer, we would cycle through the entire family–seven people!!–as we opened gifts, so each person would be in the spotlight for a little bit, and everyone else would coo and ahh and make polite noises. 

Now this all sounds polite, but it surely was not.  I mean, speaking from a 7-year-old’s perspective, nothing could make less sense than looking at a big stack of presents–it’s here man Christmas is here it’s really happening!!!–and NOT opening them right away, immediately, as fast as you can. 

One Christmas in particular, I must have really been making a nuisance of myself, whining and puling and just generally finding it grossly insulting that the other 6 people in the family should have timed their own Christmas’s to rudely coincide with my own.

My father is not generally a harsh or cruel man, and rarely punished us.  I only make this assertion because I told this story to a friend the other day, and they looked a little concerned, as if I’d revealed some buried memory of child abuse or something.  Not so!  But on this particular Christmas I’m describing, after I’d really made myself insufferable, he did something which I will remember until I die, and one of the better lessons I’ve learned in life.

My dad stopped everything.  He shut down Christmas and said, “Okay everybody look at Dusty.  We’re going to let Dusty open all his presents.  Pile up all your presents, Dusty.”  I already had of course, and while I was confused, I was still too greedy to realize how I was being tricked.  “Okay go ahead and open them all up while we watch.  Everybody watch Dusty open up his presents.”  I mean, SRSLY?  It’s funny how well I can remember my own reactions to this–I really remember being confused but delighted, like I imagined sweepstakes winners felt when confronted at their doors by those giant checks:  “I’ve never won anything in my life!!!” 

But I sure did open those presents.  And the family still made those noises of appreciation, and my older sister took photos of everything as usual, and then I was done.  No more presents.  I remember looking around, poking under other boxes–maybe I’d missed one?  “Okay, now it’s your turn, Shawna.”  And Christmas went on without me.

Now again:  this sounds very cruel in retrospect.  But when you’re wrangling 5 kids, and one of them is ruining it for the other 4, you have to make hard choices.  When I’d realized my awful mistake, the waterworks began, and I ended up getting sent to my room–on Christmas morning–to play with my suddenly very uninteresting pile of toys. 

If anticipating Christmas is hard, then listening to Christmas go on without you is really rough.  But to this day, I am a tireless and energetic slower-downer of Christmas morning.  No gift goes without its due, and each person gets plenty of time to open, appreciate, and discuss that gift.  “Come to think of it, I think this goes with my blue pillowcase, too!” 

And maybe weirdly, to this day that’s one of my favorite Christmas memories–after that I really appreciated Christmas.  While I’m sure I still thought of it as a time to rack up new loot, and still made lengthy and pain-staking Christmas diagrams for my mother to find, if nothing else my dad taught me that Christmas was about more that just getting presents–it was about being with my family.  This is the kind of lesson that dads are good at teaching, and I hope that one day I’ll be able to teach my own children the same thing.

But it sucks that I’m blogging on Christmas morning instead of opening gifts with my family.

When I was a kid, our house was full of plants. On every flat surface there was something in a pot, something which needed water, something that would get you yelled at if you got caught pulling it’s leaves off. My mother would bustle in with a spray bottle and mist her plants, humming to them, occasionally explaining to us how much her plants loved these little baths.

This was all Mom-stuff–I don’t think my father has the slightest interest in this sort of thing, at least not inside of the house. Today their house, the house we lived in throughout my high school years, and which they still live in today, is jammed full of houseplants. In fact, the seven or so acres are pretty jammed with flora of all kinds–my mother has practically terraformed their property, including a small man-made mountain covered with flowers and shrubs, numerous ponds small and large, each surrounded with rocks and statuary, and paths going every which way, all lined with carefully husbanded plants.

You hear about people getting older and hoarding newspaper clippings, or books, or just whatever, but my mother is hoarding plants. Trees, bushes, flowers, vegetables. Junipers, oak, azaleas, apple trees. It’s crazy. But it’s crazy beautiful. When I go to visit, and she walks me around the yard to show me her most recent additions/corrections (there are always corrections, always), it is always stunning the sheer volume and variety of what she has wrought in her vast yard. And it’s humbling, in a way, to see so clearly the underpinnings of my own occasionally obsessive behavior, mirrored in the garden of this small woman who’s pushing seventy.

My parents have a famously (for us kids, anyway) contentious relationship. Not the sort of thing where they hate each other or anything, but definitely the sort of thing where they have fought constantly all my life. Throughout my childhood I constantly expected them to get divorced at any time. I still remember vividly my older brother explaining to me that “that’s just the way some people communicate”, when I expressed this idea to him. He was right, though, and it was a good lesson.

I mean, 50 years! Whoa!

So to celebrate, there was a big post-service burger-and-hotdog dinner after church last night, so I drove down to Monroe to sit through church with my family and celebrate. Super weird, highly emotional, with a bunch of crying all over the place, localized mainly in the two Harbin pews. You could hear sniffles all around you in a diminishing Doppler effect.

Once the main crying was done, everyone dried their eyes and repaired to the gymnasium for some grub and fellowship. I had a great time hanging out with my family, although my brother and I almost edged into a political discussion (”Dusty, Obama wants to REDISTRIBUTE THE WEALTH! I heard the guy say it! That’s Marxism!”), but I edged back out of it somehow.

Speaking of edging out, the night’s sermon was on how everyone should be doing more to witness to people and just generally put the people around you into awkward positions by stressing how hot and fiery Hell will be for them. Much emphasis was put on family members, which I am one of, so all night I kept expecting people to corner me by the water fountain so they could talk earnestly to me about my soul. I wanted to take pictures of the gym (here’s one here:)–

–for posterity’s sake, but I seriously was worried whenever I’d get too far away from the crowd, as I knew that’s when a proselytizer would strike! You can never be too careful.

Anyway: if this is thoroughly uninteresting to you, then DO NOT go look at the entire set on my Flickr page, which has even more tedious description and reporting. No extra charge!