The Raging Elitist

It all starts with the damn tree. Last year you ended up with the Charlie Brown tree, so come Saturday after Thanksgiving you hit the tree lot with all the doomsday bunker types, feeling like a foreigner in their midst. When they stop to examine a tree as if searching for the tiny, faded expiration date printed on a can of ravioli, you do too, thinking that they must know something you don’t, that maybe these trees aren’t all exactly the same, that maybe the perfect Christmas tree does exist.

Scared of being exposed as a fraud, you finally pick one and pay too much, awkwardly tipping the tree dudes to cut its stump, put that net around it, and load it up in your car. Back at the house, you argue with your wife while trying to get it through the front door and into that fucking stand. Then you realize you didn’t get the perfect tree – You got one with erectile dysfunction.While you’re decorating it, it gets performance anxiety, and you somehow avoid injury when you leap to prevent it thumping a child on the head. This is only the beginning. Once you’ve accomplished all these things, then you get to plug your tree in every night and look at it in your living room and remember: Christmas is coming.

Part of you thinks “No big deal, I’m an adult. I got this.” Another part is like a stressed-out Santa: “Fuck, this road trip is gonna be brutal, and then we have the parties and family gatherings here to manage. How am I going to deliver for all these people?” About a million little parts are reminiscing on all the memories of Christmases past, good and bad, colliding with each other as they whiz around in your mind, all yearning to get back to the time when Christmas was exclusively hopeful, good, and innocent. Then you think of the kids: “It’s not about me anymore,” you remember, and then, “That’s how I can make it. Just remember it’s about the kids. Do it for them.” And then “How am I gonna make sure I don’t fuck this up like my parents did?” And on top of everything, or rather underneath everything, is the undercurrent of Christian symbolism, the knowledge that people believe that the God man was born on this holiday and that he would eventually die for all us sorry sinners, murdered by mortals like us. It’s not the smug idea that we can all sit around and be grateful (Looking at you, Thanksgiving); it’s the idea that we all need saving from that demon that dwells within and ceaselessly whispers, “You’re actually a giant piece of shit.”

I’m not sure which is more egocentric: to believe that my Christmas Demon is akin to some common struggle shared by all of us, or the thought that perhaps it is merely my own personal sickness. The former projects my struggle onto the rest of the world; the latter separates me from it entirely. Regardless of which it is, an archetypal or personal demon, I really don’t want it fucking up Christmas, especially not for the kids, because as far as I can tell, at ages four and six, Christmas is still pure joy in their eyes.

Oh, how I’d like to keep it that way. More than anything I want for my boys not to be burdened by the Christmas Demon in their adulthood, for them to set their tree in its stand with ease and gaze upon it with a sense of wonder and bliss as the season unfolds. It’s stupid, the idea that I could save them from the pain of Christmas, that I could preserve its innocence for them, and yet, I try.

My wife Danyelle and I have the shared joy of being children of divorced parents, and never is the psychic fracture that accompanies this fact in sharper relief than at Christmas time. It means hauling our kids to Virginia to visit one half of one family, celebrating Christmas Eve with the other half, and choosing which side to honor in the battle surrounding the more recently divorced set of parents, all the while wondering how the hell it could have happened and how we can avoid it happening again, the kids looking at us with eyes like saucers, expecting that we know everything and that Christmas will be magical forever. Maybe I’m projecting again, but it seems only natural to bury the stress for the sake of appearances. You might even fool yourself for a while that way, but, of course, you won’t fool the Christmas Demon. Denial just makes him stronger. Denial is at the base of the Christmas Demon food pyramid, sitting underneath perfectionism and frustration, with self-loathing perched atop them all.

By Christmas Eve, with tree decorating, travelling, and shopping in the rear view, my Christmas Demon is well fed. He’s so well fed, in fact, that I find myself surprised at the sound of my own voice volunteering for a job that has traditionally fallen to my wife: filling paper bags with sand so that we can line the street in front of our house with luminaries and fit in with all, literally all, the neighbors in our subdivision and thus not be known as assholes.

We’re about to have to leave for the party at my dad’s house; Danyelle is busy with her sister who’s been in our kitchen playing Holiday Baking Championship for the last five hours; and the never-ending job of entertaining the kids has fallen to me. When I open my mouth to speak, I sound like Judd Nelson impersonating the perfect dad in the movie The Breakfast Club: “Make hot chocolate for the kids!” I say. “I’ll get them to help me prepare the luminaries! The sand is in a bin in the shed? Ok, here I go! Come on kids!” I should already know something is off. It’s not like me to be so enthusiastically in the Christmas spirit, but all I can think is, Yes! Brilliant! A perfect Christmas memory is about to be made!

Opening the door to the shed, I spy a bag full of sand-like material lying in the corner, and I continue channeling the mocking Judd Nelson voice: “Ok kids, scoop it up with your cups and pour it in these little white bags. I’ll hold them open.”

I don’t know how much time passes. The bags are ripping. Somehow the sand is going everywhere, all over the floor in the little corner of the shed, all over the kids’ clothes, all around us. I watch as the kids obediently, even happily get covered, knowing that they’re breathing the particulate that’s filling the small, enclosed area I’ve selected as our workplace. I hear my words repeated back to me gleefully by their innocent little voices: “This is a nightmare!” Pretend perfect Dad is long gone. How many bags are left?! I think. Dammit, there’s no turning back now! Finally, with a bag or two still undone, I flee and direct the kids to do the same.

Barging through the back door and into the kitchen, the demon isn’t whispering from down below anymore. It’s out and shouting: “I am never fucking doing that again! Don’t even say anything to me!” etc. etc. Danyelle’s and her sister’s eyes go to where the kids are standing on our brand-new patio trying in vain to dust themselves off, looking like victims of a cartoon explosion.

It was mortar mix, concrete. The sand was in a bin like Danyelle said, not in a bag lying in the corner. The masonry crew that just finished the patio had left a bag of mortar, and I’d somehow pretended it was sand.

Now, this was undoubtedly a stupid thing that I did, and rightly or wrongly, I don’t consider myself a stupid person. I knew something was wrong as soon as the first cupload exploded into a cloud of ash in my four-year-old’s face, yet I persisted. Why would I do such a thing? And afterwards, why would I do exactly the thing I most wanted not to do, i.e. act like an asshole in front of the kids on Christmas? Washing the silica dust off in the shower, I mull possible answers to these questions. It’s because Claire has been over here baking for hours! It’s because I’m having to take care of the kids alone! I drove them up to Virginia by myself, and this is the thanks I get? Danyelle is supposed to do this fucking chore! The Christmas Demon tells me all these things, but I know. It’s because I’m trying too hard, trying to arrange a picture of Christmas as it should be, trying to right all the wrongs of Christmases past and to preserve the joy of all the Christmases to come. Yes, despite what I may think, it turns out that I actually am an idiot.

Pride bruised, rage in the early stages of waning, I have new questions racing through my mind. Just how bad of a father am I? Have I done irreparable damage to my children’s respiratory systems? Will they be terrorized by Christmas forever now?

Rage has given way to fear by the time I emerge from my lair to receive the kids from their mother. I help them bathe while Danyelle tends to the ruined clothes and handles the luminaries. To my guilty surprise, the boys cheerfully undress, wash, and change themselves, apparently unperturbed, even a little thrilled by the outlandish turn of events. A bomb went off in the shed! What a nightmare! 

Their pleasant mood somewhat reassures me that their lungs are not permanently scarred, but it also serves to deepen my shame. By the time we’re all gathered in the kitchen again, I see only one possible thing to do: apologize. While the boys sit at the kitchen counter swinging their little legs under the stools, I tell them I’m sorry. I tell them that I acted really dumb and that I shouldn’t have gotten angry like that in front of them. I expect blank stares or nodding of heads, but the response I get instead is genuinely humbling, not only the words themselves, but the ease with which they’re delivered: “It’s ok, Daddy. We forgive you.”

If denial is the Christmas Demon’s biggest food source, my kids’ forgiveness is like the onset of famine, sending the beast retreating to unknown depths where it will hibernate until next year. The Leaning Tower of Treesa is plugged in behind me, its lights twinkling in my boys’ eyes. The kids keep looking at me, hot chocolate mustaches accentuating the calm anticipation written on their faces. They instinctively know what’s so hard for a person like me to grasp. Christmas is coming, and by some miracle, I’m forgiven.