A Pierce family Christmas (in retrospect)

So. About Christmas.

I’ve blogged quite a bit already about Anya’s present (which turned out to be as much for Kristina as for Anya), but I had a lot of fun with the other kids, too.

Back before Dessie and I separated, I was always on the road trying to make enough money to keep up with expenses, and then last year Christmas was Dessie’s and New Year’s Day was supposed to be mine, though the less said about that the better, I think. But the point is that this is the first year I’ve been solely responsible for making Christmas special for the kids – a particular challenge this year given that I’m still writing checks to various lawyers and working on paying off debts that got run up before I managed to get my finances and Dessie’s separated, and also given that I thought it was important for each of the kids to be able to give their mom a Christmas present but was afraid they wouldn’t be able to if I didn’t set some of my own funds aside for that purpose. So for the last about a month and a half I’ve been trying to put together a Christmas celebration that wouldn’t be too brutal a disappointment.

Now some of our Christmas adventure you already know, if you’ve been reading the blog. You know, for example, all about the hunt for Anya’s and Kristina’s dad, including its post-Christmas day sequels (here and here). And you know the whole first part of the Christmas stocking saga – though I can’t believe I forgot to take a picture of how those stockings wound up looking after the kids, with an enormous amount of glee, spent about two days apiece on the mind-bogglingly boring apparently fascinating task of decorating their stockings with glitter paint. Take Sean, for example: Sean lobbied for a trip to Java Dave’s, where he scoured the web for an acceptable picture of a panther (his new favorite animal, recently supplanting the wolf), printed it out, took it home – and proceeded to freehand-outline, on his stocking, a line-drawing variation on the panther theme using that picture as inspiration, and then to finish it out with three different colors of glitter paint. (This gives me an excellent opportunity to remind you that Sean and Kegan are the only sibling pair ever to both make the annual state capital art show in the same year as having one – make that two – of the top hundred works of student art from all public students in the state of Texas from kindergarten through twelfth grade.)

My own artistic efforts, meanwhile, consisted of trying to use gold glitter paint to write Natasha’s name on her gift-wrapped-in-silver present; this was meant as a variation on my use of scrap pieces of wrapping paper to serve in place of the tags I had forgotten to buy. The Voice of Experience Speaks: glitter paint doesn’t stay three-dimensional on wrapping paper because the wrapping paper is too slick. Instead the glitter paint just spreads itself out and kicks back for a nice relaxed nap in the sun, or at least in the twinkly tree lights. So what I originally wrote like this (thanks to what Douglas Adams might call a “miscalculation of scale”)...

...looked fifteen minutes later like this:

Actually, that wasn’t my only artistic effort. There was also Merry’s present. See, Merry is a gift person, and I try very hard to get good presents for her because I know they’re important to her. This is hard work for me because I’m terrible at the gift-giving thing, and it’s made worse by the fact that the two kids who are gift people – viz., Merry and Natasha – both have their birthday-present days in December, right when I’m having to come up with their and everybody else’s Christmas presents, too. I had done decently well with Merry’s birthday present (I got her a copy of Händel’s Messiah and printed out the complete vocal score for her and promised to take her to a Messiah sing-along of her choice whenever she decides she’s ready for it), and thanks to Natasha’s passion for anime I had been able to come up with good presents for both her birthday (the first three Wallflower books, acquired used, and therefore within budget, on Amazon) and for Christmas (a homemade gift certificate good for use at any of three anime specialty shops located in and around West Houston). But I just couldn’t come up with anything for Merry’s Christmas.

And then I saw it, being worn in Wal-Mart by a young girl more or less Merry’s age: a T-shirt that read, “Dear Santa: Define ‘good’...” That struck me as being something that would tickle Merry’s sense of humor; and I thought, “That’s what I need for Merry’s present.”

I still had a couple of days before Christmas, and I set about calling every Houston-area T-shirt shop I could locate on the internet. But, to my disappointment, none of them had that particular shirt. So Kinya and Natasha and I headed for Jo-Ann’s (where I got the stockings), and we hunted through the iron-on letters until we had managed to put together enough letters to spell “DEAR SANTA” in red and “DEFINE” in blue and “GOOD” in gold (there wasn’t any one color in which we could do the whole thing because this was Christmas Eve and the letters had been well and truly picked through already by persons with more forethought than I). And I thought it would be cute to have a halo over the “G;” so I got gold fabric paint and a yellow fabric pen.

That night after the younger kids, including Merry, had gone to bed, Natasha and I went to work on Merry’s shirt. Near-tragedy struck when the adhesive on the “N” in “SANTA” turned out to be inadequate. But here Natasha bailed me out – to my surprise, she turned out to have a stockpile of craft supplies that included the right kind of glue; and so we glued the “N” back in place and ironed it all over again and as far as I can tell the “N” is now permanently part of the shirt.

Natasha headed off to bed before I did the halo. I stood there with the paint in my hand and I looked at the shirt and I looked at it some more and I finally decided, “You know, I think I’d better get one of my own T-shirts and practice this a couple of times.” Which I did, and upon inspecting the results…well, let’s just say there’s no halo on Merry’s Christmas T-shirt. (I can do a lot of things but we can all just resign ourselves to the fact that art of any kind is not my department.)

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But to go back to the beginning: Under the terms of the divorce decree, Dessie kept all the Christmas decorations, which was fine with me. It wasn’t until a couple of weeks later that I realized that it would be a pretty poor Christmas for the kids if I had no decorations at all. So I started furiously trying to calculate how much I could budget for decorations (answer: none, actually, except that I didn’t have much choice). Then I saw that Lowe’s was doing a big sale on the day after Thanksgiving: all Christmas decorations 50% off. So Anya and I headed out the day after Thanksgiving to Lowe’s, where we accomplished two things. (1) We acquired, at a far more reasonable cost than I had feared, a pre-lit artificial Christmas tree, and one lonely little strand of LED outdoor lights that was just enough to outline almost the whole front door of the house, and a couple of boxes of tree ornaments, and some tinsel because Anya insisted that a yólka just isn’t a yólka without tinsel. (A yólka is a Christmas tree – or, as the guys over at Paralink translate it, to my long-standing delight, a “fur-tree.” Now there’s a visual for ya...though, hey, maybe that would solve the problem of how to produce PETA-friendly fur coats.)

A helpful Paralink translation

And (2) I was forcibly reminded of why I never go shopping on the day after Thanksgiving.

Now, with the decorations out of the way, there was the issue of affording presents. I dealt with it by (a) giving the kids $10 each so that they could buy presents for Dessie, (b) basically deciding that the kids’ communal gift to me was going to be allowing me to keep the money I would otherwise have spent on their presents to me (I had gotten away with this in November for my birthday and thought it was a perfect solution – as I say, I am emphatically not a gift person), and (c) instituting a Secret Santa approach to the kids’ gifts to each other.

The Secret Santa thing in particular helped with the financial issue – at $10 per present, it knocked my budget for kids-presents-to-each-other down from $720 (eight times nine times ten, don’t you see) to $80 (eight times ten – not nine times ten because Kasia had no intention of spending Christmas with me and therefore I couldn’t figure out a good way to include her in the Secret Santa, though she had a stocking that Rusty decorated for her and that got sent home full of Santa’s presents). But it posed a troublesome logistics problem that had never occurred to me until I found myself trying to solve it – you can’t take the kids shopping for Christmas presents all at once, because they’ll see what each other is buying. This means, when you the dad are the only available person with a driver’s license, that we’re talking eight separate shopping expeditions. And even then, you bring a kid home, she wraps the present, she puts it under the tree – and everybody knows who just bought whose present, and what’s Santishly Secret about that?

So in the end I came up with a variation on the Secret Santa that wound up working out very well: instead of having each kid tag his present with the recipient’s name (e.g., “To Rusty, from ???”), I had each kid tag his present with the giver’s name (“From Rusty, to ???”). And then on Christmas morning when I was handing out presents, whenever I came to one of the Secret Santa presents, I handed it to the giver and said, “So, who are you giving your present to?” And then each kid got the fun of announcing his own recipient and of handing his own present out his own self.

I suppose that you, Gentle Reader, are saying, “Well, duh, of course that’s how you should do it;” but it took me two days to come up with this. [rolls eyes at own cluelessness and inexperience]

Here was another complication: Sean and Kegan had announced that they didn’t want presents; instead they wanted the cash to go into their X-Box fund (they’re trying to buy an X-Box, or maybe it’s a PlayStation, I can’t remember for sure because I’m not the one buying it). So the Official Random Secret Santa Assignment Generator had its randomness tweaked just a bit, and by the most coincidental of coincidences, Sean drew Kegan and vice versa. And, to the astonishment of all, each one chose to give the other one ten dollars in cash.

The original plan for the twins’ presents, actually, was to just stick bows on two twenties and two tens and drop them under the tree. But later I decided that wasn’t any fun; so instead I wrote up suitably smart-aleck gift certificates on index cards, folded ’em in half with the certificate on the inside and the to/from info on the outside, and put the bows on those. So, for example, you got dialog like this:

DAD [handing to Sean a bow-equipped index card labeled, “From Sean, To ????”]: So, Sean, who are you giving your present to this Christmas?

SEAN: Mine goes to…[in his best “surprise!” voice] Kegan! [tosses card to Kegan]

KEGAN [rips the bow off with an exaggerated gesture, opens the card, and reads]: “This card entitles the bearer to TEN DOLLARS from Dad’s account, just as soon as Dad’s account has ten dollars in it.” Hey, thanks, Sean!

DAD [handing to Kegan a bow-equipped index card labeled, “From Kegan, To ????”]: Okay, Kegan, who are you giving your present to this Christmas?

KEGAN [milking the moment for all it’s worth, because, after all, he’s Kegan]: Hmm, let’s see…[gazes at each other child in turn as if in doubt, to much eye-rolling from the other children]...I think this year I’ll give my present to…SEAN! [tosses index card to Sean]

[I should mention here that Sean is studying Spanish at Seven Lakes this year, which is a big part of why I’ve decided I need to clean the rust off my Spanish and helpfully talk to him in very badly-accented Okie Spanish. Therefore his card reads, “Con esta carta puedes recibir DIEZ PESOS MEXICANOS del mano de su padre (o, si tú prefieres, diez dólares norteamericanos).”]

SEAN [opens the card, double-takes, and then translates carefully]: “With this card…you get…ten pesos…” [looks up at me in mock outrage] Ten pesos? How much is that? Like, a dollar?

DAD: More like a penny, I think – maybe you’d better finish reading.

SEAN [looks back down at the card and then looks up again in some confusion because, after all, he’s only in Spanish I this year, and I think he’s lost his place, plus I probably didn’t write it correctly anyway]: Um...

DAD [translates helpfully]: “Or, if you’d rather, ten gringo dollars...”

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I thought that, all in all, the kids did really well with their presents for each other. Kinya had taken her first (and, so far, her only) paycheck, cashed it with me, and then proceeded to divide it between herself and Natasha on a big trip to the mall, where pretty much the entire wad got blown on presents for family members, including a present each from Natasha and Kinya to each of the other kids. (My Kinyechka is a pretty sweet kid, all in all, despite her attempts to hide it behind that put-on, 24/7 tongue-in-cheek obnoxiousness.) I wish I could remember what each Secret Santa gift was...I remember that Merry got Anya exactly the kind of earrings that Anya really likes, and Merry did the dance of joy when she opened Rusty’s present and found an entire sheet of Twilight magnets, and between me and Anya Rusty landed a thunder-making machine that he had fallen in love with a couple of months ago but had thought he wasn’t going to get, plus a DVD of his favorite movie The Black Cauldron. But I can’t remember how the Sally / Kinya / Natasha triangle worked out exactly, even though I was with Sally when she picked out her Secret Santa present.

Did I mention I’m not a gift person?

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Well, the presents got all handed out and opened except for the presents for persons absent that got set aside (that is, presents for Kasia and Dessie and my parents), and then we all scattered to get everything cleaned up, and Anya went outside to call her half-sister in Germany. I called my parents to wish them a Merry Christmas, and then I got an idea...

...and so it came about that we all gathered once again in the living room, and I called my parents back on Roma’s cell phone and switched it to speakerphone and set it in the middle of the coffee table. Then I handed to Sally and to Rusty and to Merry and to Sean and to Kegan and I think to Kinya one present each of the presents that had either Grandmother’s or Granddaddy’s names on them, and one by one each kid opened a present while I provided play-by-play. And thus Granddaddy and Grandmother got to “open their presents” with the grandkids on Christmas morning, even though they couldn’t come to Houston for fear of infecting Granddaddy’s artificial knees.

After that, there was nothing left to do except...

(1) Anya cooked borsch and did the Russian cucumber-and-tomato-and-mayonnaise salad that’s a family favorite.

(2) I cooked my spaghetti à la Peril with Italian sausage and mushrooms, forgetting to add the basil into the sauce until after everybody had had firsts, whereupon I then proceeded to spill into the remaining sauce about five tablespoons of basil instead of the two tablespoons or so that has by prior experimentation been determined to be optimal. Also I tried my mom’s suggestion of buying frozen cook-’n’-serve dinner rolls, which were universally deemed a spectacular success; so, thanks, Mom.

(3) We all devoured the traditional spaghetti-and-borsch Christmas dinner, by which I mean lunch. It having been discovered that I had accidentally put the pre-bought cookie dough into the freezer rather than the refrigerator, the devouring of cookies and ice cream was postponed until evening in order to give the cookie dough time to thaw.

(4) We cleaned up after lunch.

(5) And then Rusty and Natasha and I all more or less simultaneously realized, “Oooo, I don’t feel very good,” and thus found ourselves joining the Sick Pierces Club along with charter members Merry and Kegan. So Christmas afternoon, I’m sorry to say, pretty much fell apart on us.

But at least the kids seemed to enjoy Christmas morning. And it’ll be two years before I’m responsible for another one.

[pensively] Maybe I’d better start planning now...