Warning: “bad” language ahead.
“Fuck!” I said, starting to get irritated.
“Goddamn it.” My five year old said, sitting on the counter and watching me. Yea, we definitely could not be featured on the family friendly television channels.
I burst out laughing, all irritation vanished, and I remembered this was supposed to be fun.
We were building a gingerbread house today. You know, because I don’t already have enough to do, and I couldn’t just buy the damn graham crackers and icing in the package like a normal mother of two with a heaping plate of December to manage.
No, I had to make the gingerbread from scratch. Chill for a day. Roll it out, bake it, construct a house, make royal icing, and decorate the house all on the day my students begin studying for finals.
What the hell was I thinking?
Here’s what I was thinking. For me, personally, if I had bought the graham crackers and packaged icing, I would have ended up pawning the job off on my husband and brother to do with the kids while I was at work. I would have justified it as necessary because of how much I’m already doing.
By insisting on baking, on rolling out dough, on making royal icing, on getting messy and sticky and way too high on sugar (Celaya, not me), I know that we will laugh, curse, make messes, and laugh some more.
I enjoy memories of gingerbread in my infant’s fingernails because I let her play with dough.
“Celaya, turn away when you eat it so your sister doesn’t realize she can put it in her mouth.”
“Okay.” And she does, sneaking bites of gingerbread dough while her sister just glops her hands in the leftover dough, treating it like the kinetic sand her sister usually plays with.
A Disaster
A beautiful disaster. The gingerbread pieces didn’t fit perfectly well together because I wasn’t careful enough trimming them again once they had baked, while they were still warm. I wasn’t patient enough with the construction and icing process, so the house kept falling apart, roof slats gently sliding off, dragging royal icing with them.
I am almost forty years old, and I still have to make my own mistakes, sometimes more than once, ignoring directions clearly printed out for a reason, to learn how to do things. I am the female Tim Allen from Home Improvement.
Sure, now I know that I should construct the walls of the house first, wait til they dry in place, then add the rooftop. When I finally did that, my ill cut pieces actually stuck together quite nicely.
Whatever.
Family Friendly
What I am great at, in contrast, is letting these kinds of experiences, birthday parties, holiday preparations, travel, be about the kids. I am not a perfectionist when it comes to decorating. I want my kids to throw stuff up where they want them. I give Celaya her own seasonal decorations for her bedroom and let her do what she will.
My husband has gotten really good at following my lead. Sometimes a little too good.
The day after we got our tree, I came home from work to find that he had let Celaya hang the ornaments on the tree. All of them. At her discretion.
Okay, so I’m not that enlightened yet. I had to fix the tree. But I made it a family affair, and Celaya and I reapportioned the tree together. Come on, we take our Christmas card picture in front of the tree.
Life Lessons
Christmas, in all of its hustle and bustle and “fun,” is, in my mind, a perfect analogy for the entire rest of our lives. We are “supposed” to be enjoying life, enjoying each other, enjoying our time spent as a family, and instead we are rushing through decorations, light seeing trips, plays and ballets.
We get angry in traffic, bothered by crowds, frustrated with the cost of things, annoyed by our spouses, touchy about our perfectionism. It loses its fun, its light, its luster. Christmas becomes just another thing we have to do. We forget to stop, to breathe, to live in the moment.
So I do with Christmas what I do with everything else in life. I make my plans well in advance, book the dates, buy the supplies, and then I tell my kid about all of it so she can harass me to get it done.
And we do. And every single moment I think (or say) “fuck!” I end up, somehow or another, and often because of one or the other members of my household, laughing at myself, loving the fact that I have a kid who knows how to swear appropriately, and, once again, living in the moment.
I mean, let’s be real, you can’t get this kind of perfection from a box of graham crackers and packaged icing.
