What a very different Christmas from a year ago. What a wonderful Christmas morning.
A year ago, my wife was pregnant, awaiting the birth of a moose child who was already two days late. We woke up on Christmas morning, opened presents and started getting ready for people coming over when the little one decided to kick a hole in her cozy confines. That was the beginning of 28 hours of labor, a c-section and six days in the hospital.
It was around 10 a.m. when my wife noticed the “trickle” and made a call to her doctor. “How quick can you get here?” the doctor asked.
“Now?” my wife replied. “We’re having people over at 11.”
What a very different Christmas this year. So much tamer, thank goodness, and so few contractions. There were no hospital gowns or IV drips. No Jell-O packs or cafeteria food. No hospital smell or nurses checking in at all hours — “Hello! Using the bathroom here!”
This was a real Christmas!
A year later and my daughter is less a baby and more a girl. How does that happen? She was so little, so frail so well she was just a little blob. But it’s all melted away in a year and she’s a big, silly girl.
She woke up on Christmas morning wearing candy cane pajamas with long hair drooping down over her face like water spilling from a fountain.
Her sleepy eyes hung heavy, but woke up as we carried her into the living room and plugged in the Christmas tree. Like most children, my child is a sucker for lights, and she was dazzled.
As a new father who just celebrated his first Christmas, I’ve found that there’s only one thing more fun than waking up as a child on Christmas morning — it’s waking up WITH a child on Christmas. Presents to give are as much fun as presents you get, and even a little 1-year-old can tear through paper like the best of them.
She got Crayons, and promptly drew a line down the shirt my wife was wearing. We’re new parents, so we haven’t learned that you only give presents that lack sharp points, paint and parts that make noise. We should have given her a blanket and a piece of cotton the size of a cannon ball. (For a Christmas morning appetizer she had a purple Crayon.)
What a difference a year makes. Instead of navigating empty streets for the hospital, we were making waffle bits in the new wafflemaker, cursing as they came out in chunks. Actually, I was the one cursing as I read lousy instructions that were leading me to my Christmas morning demise. (Not to mention I had already run the new appliance under water to wash it, which it tells you NOT to do on next to the last page. Who the heck reads all the way back there?)
No matter, I wasn’t electrocuted and everyone else was thrilled by how I had seemed to make it snow in the kitchen with all the flying waffle pieces.
“This can be our new Christmas tradition,” my wife exclaimed with glee as I used a chopstick to pry out one of the stuck waffles. The little girl sat in her high chair eating waffle nuggets. She didn’t care that they didn’t look right, and fed the dog all the same.
We played with presents, we exchanged kisses, we let the dog eat the equivalent of a roll of wrapping paper, and all was good with the world. All was peaceful and quiet. There was no pain. No fear or anxiety over what was to come. There were no worries about becoming parents or knowing what to do. This Christmas we WERE parents, and had it all down pat.
So much more enjoyable. So much more exciting. So much more fun.
What a very different Christmas.