When growing up, I didn't realize how weird my Christmases were, they were just Christmas the way that Christmas should be done, but after getting out of the house, and going to college and having to spend Christmas with families that were not my own, I realized just how much my Christmas was a weird event, and it explained a bit more of why I didn't quite get it.
That's the thing, Christmas at my house was always a big deal. ALWAYS. To the point that when growing up, even well after the period where I should even be thinking anything about Santa Clause being real (sorry kids), a punishment for not getting good grades or being rude around the house was that Christmas was going to be postponed. The weird part about that was that for a few years we moved Christmas two or three days later because we wanted the after Christmas sales to buy gifts for each other. But the hype of Christmas wasn't what made my Christmases weird, it was what happened during Christmas break.
Christmas break was when the entire family would be stuck together. Mom wouldn't have to work, the kids would be out of school, and Dad would typically take off a bit of time to be there too, and our family can't really quite do family at a normal level and that's when the weird starts to leak out.
First, there is the traditional Christmas Olympics. No, I don't mean winter Olympics that show up every four years, I'm talking about the Christmas Olympics. Now don't confuse these with the Thanksgiving Olympics because those are a shortened weekend warrior bastardized version of the official two week long Christmas games. Before Christmas break would even start, at least five events (as picked by each member of the family, hopefully doing something that they could win at) would show up on a large sheet of paper taped to the wall with brackets next to them. If you didn't know any better and you weren't paying attention you'd think that it was March Madness and we were posting up who we thought was going to win, but again that's a different holiday tradition (yes that's a holiday in my family. . . or at least March Madness is for my mom, not quite sure about how my dad feels about it).
Now, you have to remember a few things about these Christmas Olympics. First - this was started when we were small kids. This tradition was meant to keep the little ones busy instead of just sitting around punching each other. Second - we were in the desert, normal winter sports don't apply. Third - the more random and obscure the competition, the better. See rule #1.
When I talk about random Olympic games, let's go back and revisit a few of the classics of the Christmas Olympics. Balancing a broom handle on your open palm, you drop you loose. The sock matching competition, get 12 random pairs of socks and see who can pair them the fastest. The Lego shuttle shuffle - put five lego bits across the room and you have to run over, pick them up, and put them back into their tub of legos using only your feet. Then, of course, we can't forget the year that my wife joined in and was a write in on the bracket and cleaned house on the book balancing competition and played a game of Uno (which was also part of the Olympics, but a different game) while balancing a book on her head. She was doing so well in the book balancing she decided to double down and play some Uno to pass the time.
When you pick out the games you try to stack the deck in your favor. It has to be random, because we almost never use the same game twice, but at the same time, it has to be competitive enough that everyone thinks they have a shot. The most recent version of the Olymics had me signing up everyone for a speed typing competition to see who could get the fastest WPM. This might sound unfair but considering my mom made it a point to make sure all of the kids could at least do 60 wpm, it was bragging rights time as I stepped up and pulled out a 110 wpm session.
The Olympics are weird enough, but it doesn't stop there with the Christmas break. There's the angel food cake decorated with a nativity scene on top that is Jesus' birthday cake that we sing happy birthday to on Christmas Eve,
the Christmas puzzle that is either bought before the break or given as a Christmas day present that has to be the hardest puzzle you can find (the harder, the better, there are still stories told about some of the hardest puzzles we've ever done) and must be completed before break is over, the double Christmas trees which lead to a double Christmas (morning Christmas and afternoon Christmas), the cooking traditions which include a very specific menu and who must cook which dish and if they're not there can't be cooked (my dish is rolls, I don't show up for Christmas and they have horrible store bought rolls) and let us not forget about the Christmas nativity pageant.
There's, of course, the church nativity where the sheep are small little four-year-old kids that are waving to their moms in the audience, and then there's even the live nativity in a church parking lot complete with donkeys, camels, and a group of guys dressed in white robes standing up on top of the church with a giant spot light in their eyes trying not to get vertigo as Handel's Messiah is blasting over the loud speakers, but this is my family we're talking about, even that isn't weird enough. This is the family ran Christmas pageant. Each year, one of us was in charge of organizing and directing a Christmas pageant that would star our family. We'd get together, grab the costume box, and dress up to reenact the nativity scene from the Bible. If that wasn't weird enough, because 4/5 of us are super musically inclined, we would even have music to go along with it. Gwen would play something on her violin, my mom would accompany us on the piano as we sang from the hymn book, I'd pull out my cello and dig my way through a song that I'd never see again for another 365 days, and Katie (not to be outdone by just how weird things were going) would bust out the beer bottles.
Now, let me start this by saying that Katie, the middle sister, when she was younger, would play her oboe as part of the musical section of the pageant, but one year while in high school she decided to mix things up and started to collect bottles. Without any warning, during the pageant she pulled them out, handed each of us two of them marked with tape that had a number on them and water filled up to a precise pre-measured location to produce the note she was looking for. With a small lesson on how to blow on top of a bottle to get the right notes to come out, we were given a sheet of paper that had a list of numbers on it and she directed us in piping out Jingle Bells on bottles. This was such a hit, every year that she's around for Christmas, it's a must have as part of the show.
This is all perfectly normal for my family, and I'm sure that as I sit here writing this list of weird things my family does just for the Christmas holiday, that I'm missing at least a handful of them, in fact instead of modifying the list above, I'll just add a few down here - the 12 days of Christmas where we get 12 gifts and then drop them off at a person's door and run (there are different variations on this, most years also included putting a scripture that was related slightly to the present on top of the gift, and I mean do mean SLIGHT relationship. It's hard when you go to the dollar store to find 12 of something that you think might be related to the scriptures, but thank you Proverbs and Isaiah for giving us scriptures that can be interpreted to mean just about whatever you want! Next, is the Christmas card wall decoration. My mom would save the Christmas cards that she got for a year, and then cut the front of them off, tape them all onto a ribbon, and then hang them on the wall the next year. All of the generic pictures of trees covered in snow and Santa hung from one (or sometimes two) strings of thin ribbon. Next - the piano student Christmas recital. When younger, my mom taught piano lessons to a lot of kids, and each year she would pack all of them into our front room and have a Christmas recital. Last, but certainly not least, was the fire place. Remember, this is Las Vegas winter. The coldest that it would get is maybe late at night when it could freeze a puddle, but it'd get up into the 50's or 60's by noon, but each year for Christmas we would have a roaring fireplace.
With all of those traditions, and with Christmas never being associated with being still, it was a mild shock to me my first Christmas married with my wife. We told our families that for the first year we would do all holidays by ourselves as newly weds. That first Christmas, alone, in our tiny apartment, was one of the weirdest experiences that I had ever had.
Christmas was relaxing.
Instead of feeling forced to keep moving. To have to prepare musical programs, to have to worry about having to sit through another viewing of White Christmas and hear my mom sing every, single, song, or trying to find a book to read to make it look like I was doing something, I could just sit. I could sit and enjoy the time away from school, and it was a break. I still can't remember all of the details, what we ate, what happened, or anything like that, but all I could remember was while sitting around watching TV with Alicia lying against me, I looked at the empty wall and wondered if I could take her at a competitive game of folding the laundry.
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