In my efforts to reignite joy in the holiday season, I discover the magical promise of Grandie’s Eve
As a child, Christmas always felt wonderfully magical to me. It was arguably a strange mix of mythologies, all of them imagined and none of them real, but combined, they created a sense of wonder and excitement that was impossible to ignore. You were either celebrating the humble birth of a God who would save humanity, or eagerly awaiting the annual visitation of an immortal, arctic Toymaker who travelled by a flying reindeer-powered sled, delivering elf-made candy and toys to all the children of the world.
I mean, who didn’t love Christmas?
One was the fantastical origin story of an ancient religion that included the first and last known virgin birth of an earth-bound Deity. The other was a former pagan holiday, co-opted by Christians and later embellished by Victorian excess, before being turbocharged by a few savvy marketing executives to convince North Americans to buy cheap consumer goods and caffeinated soda. Fa-la-la-la-la.
Because of my parents’ theological proclivities, we were discouraged from ever mistaking the commercialization of Christmas with its true meaning. We could never be allowed to mistake Christmas for anything other than a celebration of the birth of Christ, the Jewish Messiah born to save our Presbyterian souls.
We were often lectured, sometimes in the middle of a television broadcast, about the relative dangers of Rudolph, Santa, and Frosty. I never believed in these mythical creations, but I did believe that a Jewish virgin had given birth to the Son of God in a Bethlehem stable, and that a Palestinian man named Noah had saved two of every creature on earth in a wooden boat after a catastrophic flood swallowed it whole.
They never bothered to explain the discordant imagery of a snow-encrusted Victorian Christmas with the idea of celebrating the hardscrabble birth of a Middle Eastern Messiah. One was supposedly fake, while the other was apparently quite real. As a child, it was hard to fathom the difference.
There were mysterious shepherds and flying reindeer, wise men and elves, prophesies and fairy tales, talking snowmen, gods inseminating virgins, and mutant deer. We had lowly mangers and fiery trees, chorales and carols, ancient Messiahs and mysterious Elf Lords. We had it all. Hell, if you were a white, Christian, middle-class American kid growing up in the 1970s and 80s, you could expect almost anything. If Santa wasn’t going to bring it to you, surely, the baby Jesus would. It was Christmas, after all, and miracles were part of the program.
The word nostalgia was coined by a Swiss physician in 1688 as a combination of two Greek words: nostos, meaning “homecoming,” and algos, meaning ”pain” or “grief,” to describe what was considered, at the time, to be a serious medical condition found in Swiss mercenaries fighting abroad. Literally, the pain of missing home.
I have sometimes wondered if I haven’t simply aged out of Christmas, having lost the magic of childhood somewhere along the way. I find it hard to admit, but I don’t love Christmas the way I once did. Was it nostalgia for my childhood, and not Christmas, that I now longed for? Had I become a Scrooge in my dotage, because I had forgotten the magic of youth?
Laura Ingalls Wilder, the author of Little House on the Prairie, once wrote, “Our hearts grow tender with childhood memories and love of kindred, and we are better throughout the year for having, in spirit, become a child again at Christmas.”
Wilder was born in 1867, basing her famous books on the real life experiences she’d had as a young pioneer, so the idea that Christmas is child-centric is not an entirely modern phenomenon. Prior to the 1800s, Christmas was purely a religious holiday, but by the time Wilder was born, American Christians widely celebrated Christmas with many of our current accoutrements such as evergreen trees decorated with candles and ornaments, stockings filled with gifts, feasts of turkey and candied fruits, the exchanging of presents, and even an early imagining of Santa Claus, courtesy of a German-born Civil War-era political cartoonist.
“Our hearts grow tender with childhood memories and love of kindred, and we are better throughout the year for having, in spirit, become a child again at Christmastime.”
There are many reasonable arguments for why I might feel a bit nostalgic for my youthful delight in Christmas. It was the indisputable cultural event of the year. Nothing even came close. Most holidays took up a single day, at most, and might involve a church service or a parade somewhere. Christmas took an entire month and transformed the known universe into a magical, friendly place, where gifts were given, feasts were conjured, songs were sung, and dreams were fulfilled. Not too shabby.
I’ve attempted to scratch some of the old feeling back, from time to time, to re-engineer the magic and manufacture the joy through the not-so-clever use of excessive decor, corny music, and gaudy gift wrap — but to no avail. It has remained, for me, an overpriced bit of compulsory consumerism that carries with it too much chaos, too much noise, and an obscene amount of trash. Bah, humbug.
I’ve long assumed that my deflated holiday spirit was due to my advancing years and curmudgeonly worldview, or possibly that my children were now grown and so had families and traditions of their own, or even that childhood is magical all by itself, and I simply longed for my youth. There’s a bit of all that in there, to be sure, but I think there’s a much simpler answer.
Life used to be more difficult, and that made it better.
We had a few nice malls nearby when I was growing up, and they tended to be surrounded by a cavalcade of big box stores and festive chain restaurants. You got bundled up, crawled into a freezing car, complete with plastic bench seats, and joined seemingly every other person in town for a communal exercise in mass retail exultation. It was a show.
There was magic in the air and carols on the radio. The shops were all decorated, and we were on our best behavior. Everyone made an extra effort to be kind and hospitable to one another. We held doors for people, smiled at strangers, and wished everyone a Merry Christmas. We were all celebrating at once, and that made us feel like a community coming together in harmony.
Once inside the mall, you went your separate ways, with plans to reconnect later at a scheduled time and place. You were each on a personal quest and had to find your own way among the throngs of shoppers, holiday decor, and displays overflowing with soft goods. You had a list of people to shop for, a pocketful of crumpled currency, and possibly some vague idea of what you were looking for, but it was that spirit of discovery to find the one treasure that could delight the recipient that drove you.
It took thought and empathy to find the right gift. Occasionally, you were filling a need or meeting a request, but most of the time, you were making independent choices based on your intimate knowledge of their idiosyncratic personality. The closer your gift connected with their innate desires, the more rewarded you felt for having given it.
I believe that our deepest desires are rarely fulfilled by others, and certainly not through the organized exchange of gifts between family and friends. If it’s something that can be purchased, and we want it badly enough, we’ll likely find a way to possess it. The best we can hope for in a gift from another is something that contains intrinsic value, that has been chosen with care, and that aligns with our personal tastes.
Because of this, I find that the giver of the gift is often more excited about the exchange than the recipient, because there’s more riding on it. It says more about the giver (active) than it does the one receiving the gift (passive). Our worth in that moment becomes dependent on discovering how well we truly know the other person. Will they like it? Will they hate it?
One can only hope.
I’ve never been comfortable with high-pressure stakes when it comes to personal enjoyment. The more an event is amplified, the less I want to be involved. There’s simply too much pressure for it to be grand, memorable, and indelible. It’s why I don’t like birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, vacations, and professional sports championships. Anytime there’s a lot at stake, with so much riding on its success, it makes me anxious. It’s just Tuesday, for Pete’s sake. Let’s all take a deep breath and settle down.
For this reason, I’m slightly allergic to buying gifts for a particular holiday or occasion. I’d prefer to buy you something special that I found by accident, and deliver it serendipitously whenever the mood strikes. The unexpected gift at the unexpected time. A tried and true endeavor that never fails to satisfy everyone involved.
Christmas is different.
“Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before. What if Christmas, he thought, doesn’t come from a store. What if Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more.”
When you are still quite small and have no real understanding of money, gifts of all kinds are a magical elixir that requires little logic or explanation for their providence. Life is amazing and mysterious, so why shouldn’t you deserve abundant gifts? Once Santa Claus gets thrown into the mix, you don’t even have to consider how your parents can afford these extravagances. Santa takes care of all that, not your feckless parents.
Eventually, you realize that there’s a lot more grunt labor and sacrifice involved and a lot less magic in the way of credit card debt and layaway plans, but until you understand that, the only reason you haven’t received everything you’ve ever wanted in life is that your parents are too stupid, cruel, or just plain selfish to care. We’ve seen them do it before, so why are they making this so difficult, we think. Just give the store the plastic card you keep in your wallet, and let’s get the hell out of here.
I believe that human beings enjoy difficult things, despite the modern insistence that we remove all obstacles from life in the name of efficiency. In truth, we enjoy the sense of accomplishment and pride that comes from solving a problem or overcoming a hurdle. It’s why 21st-century hipsters gravitated toward film cameras, phonographs, and fixed-gear bicycles. It was precisely because these things were more difficult and offered a greater sense of accomplishment. You felt like you were actually doing something. It felt honest.
I don’t think this attitude is specific to any generation, but a core feature of human nature. It’s why our grandparents regaled us with stories of their difficult childhoods, walking to their one-room schoolhouse, barefoot, in a snowstorm, uphill, both ways. I can’t even imagine what the kids today will be telling their grandkids about their challenging upbringing, but I’m sure it will sound harrowing, like enduring some sort of epic streaming lag of 0.3 seconds.
More than likely, they will react with horror and resentment at the inauthentic virtual world we’ve left behind after basking in the authentic experiences of our own youth. They will yearn for the real and the difficult, and this is where we may still be able to help them.
My epiphany, you see, is that the thing that got me into the Christmas spirit and that made the whole experience feel special was all the hard work that went into creating the magic in the first place. We were the magic, or at least our Herculean efforts were. Think Clark Griswold and his exterior illumination program, or cutting down a real tree and bringing it home, squirrels and all. Now you buy a device that projects a preprogrammed display on the front of your house, and you drag the plastic tree down from the attic and plug it in.
Back in the day, we didn’t order a bunch of shit online during a work break, only to have it wrapped and drop-shipped to its recipient. We went shopping for days, even weeks, at night, after work, and on weekends, then stored our loot in secret hiding places that we struggled later to remember. We stayed up half the night, wrapping it all drunkenly, with blunt scissors, and tape you could never find the start of.
It was fucking exhausting, and we loved it.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but we didn’t have a lot growing up. In fact, there were years that if it weren’t for my grandmother sending my mother a check, we might not have had anything at all. Funds were scarce, and our options were limited. As a kid, you searched through the JCPenney and Sears catalogs, made a few choices, and hoped for the best.
Occasionally, you’d get ambitious and request the impossible, but mostly you understood the limitations. You were going to get a bunch of practical items like socks and underwear. There would be an ancient stocking filled with decade-old, reused nuts and a few oranges to fill the space, a toothbrush, and, if you were lucky, that holiday gift box of Lifesavers. There would also be one or two cherished gifts, things that made your day if not your entire year. A bike, perhaps. Once, a guitar.
It really wasn’t about the stuff, though. It was the anticipation, the pageantry, the pomp and circumstance of the whole affair. The candlelight church service where you were asked to hold a burning candle and sing Silent Night. After church, your family drove around the better neighborhoods to see how the beautiful people decorated their homes, the smell of woodsmoke in the crisp night air. It was a magical experience.
I did my best to pass along my various holiday traditions to my own family, but none of them quite took. I was an add-on, a stepparent, and apparently, not a strong enough influence on the culture of our tribe. My wife never cared much for family traditions, so I got no support there. Whatever made everyone happy, she thought. Just let everyone do what they want. Like a psychopath.
My time in charge of Christmas has long since passed, so there’s really no point in trying to change anyone else’s game. We no longer host big family functions, and there’s no one else here on Christmas Eve or Day. I’m sure the grandkids all run downstairs the minute they wake up and rip open all their gifts before their parents have even stirred.
For my grandkids, there is no massive breakfast to finish before they can open their presents. No rule of watching each person open each gift, one at a time, ooo-ing and aaa-ing because there aren’t that many gifts, and they want to drag the whole thing out as long as possible. No assumption that half their gifts will be necessities such as underwear, socks, deodorant, or a winter coat. There is an expectation for game consoles, flashy sneakers, cell phones, drones, e-bikes, and gift cards. Lots of gift cards.
I have been trying to salvage some semblance of my Christmas spirit, but haven’t quite been able to see it through. I can’t say that everyone else feels the way I do, but I would venture that a lot of people, my age or older, most certainly do. The younger generations only know their own traditions and care little for ours. Such is the way of things.
I yearn to find a way back to the wonder of innocence and the magic of childhood, but that may be an impossible dream. I have no key to entry into the lives of today’s youth, and my own peers are all old men and women, shaking our collective fists at the heavens.
One of the things you don’t necessarily count on is that when your kids grow up and have families of their own, there’s a good possibility they will adopt the traditions of their spouse’s family, and not your own. This is especially true if your spouse is agnostic about the whole thing. So I have been forced to become a bit of a subversive. I have been sneaking my own traditions back into the lives of the grandchildren. You never know what might take hold.
“He who has not Christmas in his heart will never find it under a tree.”
There’s an old aphorism, oft misattributed, that says they might not remember what you said or did, but they’ll always remember how you made them feel, and I think this is undoubtedly true. We get lost in the business of magic making—the decorating, shopping, wrapping, and attending recitals and pageants—and we lose sight of our intention to spread joy among those that we love, or should. As the Grinch himself once pondered, maybe Christmas doesn’t come from a store, maybe it means a little bit more.
In our first year of marriage, my wife and I made all our Christmas gifts by hand. We conjured flavored vinegars, infused olive oils, and handcrafted mustards, all delivered in adorable bottles and jars, adorned with handmade labels and bits of raffia. I think half the recipients that year just assumed it was crap we found in the checkout line of our local discount retailer, and the other half just put them on a shelf for a year, and then threw them out. No one was impressed. No one was amazed by our hard work and creativity.
The problem wasn’t our execution. It was that the gifts were all about us, and not the recipient. No one had asked for, or even expressed any interest in, stone-ground mustard or raspberry vinegar. That was something we were interested in. We weren’t trying to make anyone else happy. We were just showing off.
Presumably, we hoped to be congratulated on being so creative and industrious, or at least I did. We hadn’t just made it ourselves, we’d made it about ourselves, and that’s never going to make anyone feel special, or seen.
You learn after a time that if you want to celebrate an event, it’s best to do it before it takes place and not after, or everyone loses interest. A few years ago, I suggested we have everyone over to our house before Christmas to exchange gifts. I had previously disliked seeing our measly gifts just tossed in with the rest of the mayhem, surely to be forgotten, dismissed, or lost. If it wasn’t going to be magical, I didn’t even see the point. I have no interest in contributing to wanton consumption, and they need nothing.
Christmas dinner has long since moved on to one of our kids’ houses, and everyone has all manner of outside family obligations on Christmas Eve. I decided that we should celebrate on the eve of Christmas Eve, or as we began calling it, Christmas Eve-Eve, which really needs a better name. Maybe we could call it Grandie’s Eve, which I find fitting.
I’m Grandie, by the way.
I’ll happily concede that Grandie’s Eve is almost entirely about me. It’s my way of imposing myself on the holiday experience for my own benefit. But I also endeavor to create lasting memories in the process, and that some day, the children might look back on these silly little traditions with fondness. It’s how traditions are made, after all. Someone has to insist on something and impose their will on the culture. No overbearing father. No Mozart. They’re not my rules.
Rather than have another big formal meal, which no one needs or wants, we decided to do something simple and casual, before letting everyone open their presents. A reasonably truncated affair.
The first year, we created a taco bar, and I had authentic, flour tortillas, made with actual lard, shipped in from Mexico. This year, I’ve decided on this amazing fried chicken from our local market, along with mashed potatoes, green beans, biscuits, and gravy. No part of this year’s feast will be homemade or even gourmet, but it will be easy and delicious. Like a KFC two-piece. Who’s going to argue with that?
My wife, Uppie, often buys the gifts, but not always, and this being Grandie’s Eve and all, I thought I might as well handle it this year. I wanted to do something thoughtful, but also something that didn’t just come from Amazon. Ironically, I chose books. In fairness, I bought these books from an independent bookstore in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, called Nooks. It’s owned by friends, a Mennonite couple who are both published authors, and their five children. They even helped me pick out each book, based on the age, gender, and personality of each person, so I feel confident about the quality of the choice.
I’ll sign each one, from Jane and me, wrap them with care, and put them under the tree, where they will look disappointingly small, then on Grandie’s Eve, we’ll make an appropriate fuss when they open each one of them, disappointedly.
You might be wondering if I’ve simply done the thing I just warned you against moments ago, and chosen gifts I think they should have, rather than the things they think they actually want. You could even argue that I’ve made it about me, once again, but I don’t believe either thing is true, not entirely anyway.
Part of the job of being an elder is the transfer of knowledge from one generation to the next. Rather than just giving them knowledge, I’m trying to teach them how to discover their own bit of wisdom. I’m teaching them how to fish, rather than just giving them the fish. By encouraging a love of books and stories, I’m doing my best to expand their minds. If you can open a person’s mind to the world of books, there is no limit to what they can accomplish. This has taken on even greater importance in the tidal wave of AI the world is facing, where everything is fake, and nothing is true.
Admittedly, what I didn’t do was drive to a store, after work, in the dark and dreary cold, and spend a few hours poking around various overheated stores before leaving in disgust with nothing to show for it, and I think we can all agree, that that’s my loss. I could do better.
At the end of the day, I think what I miss most about Christmas was wandering around Toys“R”Us in an exhausted daze, picking up stupid crap and asking my wife, “What about this?”
For the record, no one calls it Grandie’s Eve, but still, I think they should—don’t you?
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