An imperfect Christmas

I've just posted final grades so now I can start thinking about Christmas--a little late. I have not written a card, mailed a package, baked a cookie, or put up the tree. This is bad. If I do nothing but prepare for Christmas 24/7 until the 25th, I still won't quite get everything done. So I've decided not to try.

Oh, I'll get a few things done: I'll write some notes and send some gifts and put up a tree (especially now that the Texas kid is home to help and the Kentucky kid is coming Wednesday), but I refuse to beat myself up for once again failing to produce the perfect Christmas that exists within my imagination. We'll settle for an imperfect Christmas, and if the young'uns complain, I'll just gather them at my knee and remind them of what happened on the first Christmas after the old guy and I got hitched:

It wasn't really our first Christmas. We got married (25 years ago tomorrow!) a week before Christmas, so we spent our first Christmas on our honeymoon. A year later, we were living in a horrible tiny upstairs apartment under a roof with a slope so steep we had to bend over to get out of bed. We were both in school and therefore had no money except the pittance we brought in from part-time jobs, including my holiday fill-in work as a typesetter at a small-town newspaper.

Now the publisher of this newspaper was an old-fashioned skinflint, and he saw no need to switch over to newfangled computerized typesetting equipment as long as the ancient punch-tape machines were still running. I spent long days sitting in front of those machines, surrounded by their incessant clatter and vibration, typing letters and codes on the stiff and sticky keyboard, which translated my typing into perforations on a long skinny sheet of tickertape: punch the tape with one machine, carefully remove the tape without tearing it, and feed the tape into the other machine, which translated the ticker-tape into long columns of justified text.

The room was big and poorly lit, with a cold concrete floor, and I sat with my back to the door so that every time the door opened, I felt a cold draft on my back. I went home every day stiff, sore, and frustrated, because often the tape broke or the machines messed up, and the only solution was to totally re-type whatever got wrecked. I had been in love with journalism for as long as I could remember, but my idea of a great jouralistic job was more like the one Rosalind Russell filled in His Girl Friday: exciting work that could make a difference in the world (and it wouldn't hurt to have Cary Grant as a boss!). Instead, I worked for a crusty old skinflint and shivered in front of a piece of noisy, cranky equipment and typed (and re-typed) articles about the impending increase in water rates and the village Christmas parade. (My favorite sentence: "The winning float will not be chosen.")

So I was inclined to feel a bit sorry for myself that Christmas--and to make it worse, we had no tree, and even if we'd had the money for a tree, we had exactly two Christmas ornaments, both wedding gifts. So it didn't look or feel much like Christmas.

Until one day my husband brought home a Christmas tree--a sad, scrawny, bare tree, the last one in the lot, which was why it cost him only $10. With only two ornaments, though, it looked pretty meager. Where would we get more?

The next day I came home from work with a grocery bag full of discarded rolls of used yellow ticker-tape, and we spent the evening twisting it into paper snowflakes and angels and stars and garlands. In the end it was the oddest Christmas tree I'd ever seen, festooned with yellow perforated paper that barely covered the bare spots, but it looked festive, so we dimmed the lights and lit the candles and sat in front of the tree sipping eggnog, and nothing could have looked lovelier.

Now we have an artificial tree and so many boxes of ornaments that we won't use half of them, and it will look far more sparkly and colorful than our yellow ticker-tape tree, but even then, our Christmas won't be perfect. It's never perfect--but it'll be festive, and that's enough.

Eggnog, anyone?