An OPU Ventures observation on Christmas creep, holiday madness, and the unpaid labor of American fathers.
I love Christmas. I really do. The lights, the food, the music, the family traditions. It’s a wonderful time of year. What I don’t understand is why we’re celebrating it before I’ve finished putting away the lawn furniture. Apparently, the moment the Fourth of July fireworks stop smoking, somebody at Walmart yells, “RELEASE THE REINDEER!”
It’s September. I’m still wearing shorts. The Red Sox haven’t finished disappointing me, and the pool isn’t closed. Yet, in a retail warehouse somewhere, Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” is being thawed out like a Thanksgiving turkey.
There was a time when holidays respected boundaries. Halloween belonged to October. Thanksgiving had November. Christmas arrived in December. Everyone stayed in their lane, nobody got hurt, and Dad had time to recover between financial disasters.
Now you walk into a store looking for Halloween candy and find a twelve-foot inflatable Santa standing next to a skeleton. The witch is wearing a Santa hat, the pumpkins are on clearance, and somebody is selling peppermint-scented toilet paper. Nothing says the birth of our Savior quite like a festive bathroom experience.
And poor Thanksgiving. The forgotten middle child of American holidays. Once a proud celebration of gratitude, family, football, and eating until your pants became a medical concern, it’s now a brief carbohydrate-loading session before Black Friday.
Adam Sandler tried to save Thanksgiving by singing about turkey. Jimmy Buffett actually warned us with “Santa Stole Thanksgiving for Christmas.” The man practically exposed an international conspiracy, and we ignored him because we were busy buying light-up candy canes.
Santa has become the CEO of Christmas Incorporated. Rudolph runs logistics, the elves are middle management, and Frosty handles public relations. Thanksgiving was acquired in a hostile takeover, its assets liquidated, and November reassigned to seasonal merchandising. The Easter Bunny has retained legal counsel.
But here’s the thing. As a husband and father, I have absolutely no authority over when Christmas begins. My wife loves Christmas. The kids love Christmas. They love the lights, the decorations, the cookies, the movies, and turning our house into something resembling a Hallmark movie filmed inside a Hobby Lobby.
And because they love Christmas, I have a job. I am the Vice President of Christmas Operations, Facilities Maintenance, and Heavy Lifting. It’s an unpaid position with no vacation, no retirement plan, and a supervisor who keeps moving the garland three inches to the left.
My responsibilities begin with retrieving approximately seventeen plastic storage bins from the basement. Every bin is labeled “Christmas,” which is about as useful as labeling every drawer in the kitchen “Stuff.”
One contains ornaments. Another contains lights. A third contains broken lights that we’re apparently saving for sentimental reasons. There’s a ceramic snowman wrapped like an Egyptian mummy, three wreaths, and a small decorative village whose residents appear to have been displaced by a housing crisis.
I haul everything upstairs, where my wife has a vision. I have a ladder.
The decorating process involves placing objects exactly where instructed, moving them slightly to the left, then to the right, then back to where they started. Eventually, my wife asks, “What do you think?”
Gentlemen, this is not a question. It’s a test. The correct answer is, “I like it. What do you think?” I’ve been married long enough to know that expressing an independent opinion about decor is how men end up sleeping in the garage.
Then comes the living room Christmas tree, because of course there are several other smaller trees throughout the house. My job is to hold it steady while everyone else determines whether it’s straight. I can use a carpenter’s level, a laser measuring device, and NASA satellite imagery, but if my wife says it’s leaning, it’s leaning.
The kids are meanwhile having the time of their lives. They’re hanging ornaments, eating cookies, singing Christmas songs, and making helpful suggestions like, “Dad, we need more lights outside!” That is, of course, if they stay engaged for more than five minutes. Because teenagers am I right.
More lights. Of course. Apparently, we’re trying to make the house visible from the International Space Station. Outdoor decorating is a magical experience involving frozen fingers, tangled extension cords, and the annual discovery that a perfectly functional strand of lights stops working the moment you attach it to the roof, twenty feet above the clips and spare bulbs.
This is generally when the neighbors hear Dad expressing the Christmas spirit using vocabulary not found in the Bible.
And then there’s the music. I love Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole, and Andy Williams. But after hearing “Jingle Bell Rock” seventeen times before breakfast, I begin to understand why the Grinch lived alone.
Of course, I know every word. I’ll complain about Christmas music while singing along to it, usually off-key and with enough enthusiasm to embarrass the children. It’s a gift.
The Christmas movies are no better. My wife loves them. The kids love them. I sit there pretending to read while explaining that the handsome stranger is obviously the secret owner of the Christmas tree farm and the struggling bakery owner somehow lives in a house worth $1.4 million.
And yet, I stay on the couch. Because the house is bright. The kids are laughing. My wife is happy. There are cookies on the table, the tree is glowing, and nobody is asking me to fix anything. For approximately seven minutes.
That’s the part of Christmas I actually love. Not the shopping, the decorations, or the annual electrical engineering project on the front lawn. It’s watching the people I love enjoy themselves.
Most dads understand this. We complain about the work, the expense, the music, and the decorations, but we’d do it all again tomorrow. We just don’t want anyone to know we’re enjoying ourselves. It would ruin our reputation.
So yes, I’ll grumble about Christmas starting in September. I’ll complain about Santa’s hostile takeover of Thanksgiving and threaten to send Mariah Carey a cease-and-desist letter.And then I’ll carry the boxes, hang the lights, straighten the tree, and move the garland three inches to the left.
Because my family loves Christmas, and I love my family. Besides, after years of marriage and fatherhood, I’ve discovered the secret to a peaceful holiday season. Happy wife. Happy kids. Dad gets to sit down. And if my wife wants Christmas decorations up in October, that’s fine.
I’ll get the ladder, or better yet I will in my most tv dad tone ask one of the teenagers to get the ladder. Go ahead, laugh.