I learned a few things over the Christmas holidays — things like this:
• That teaching a kid how to ride a bike without training wheels is harder than … well … having a kid in the first place. My wife might dispute that — I was on the much easier end of that one, I have been told. But she also wasn’t there the fateful day when I unscrewed the training wheels, took my daughter out and tried to set her loose. “Why are you doing this to me?” she screamed as she careened out of control, barely in my grasp. It was the kind of scream you make when you’ve been tethered to a castrated bull. “Give me back my training wheels!”
“No, this will be better for you,” I distinctly remember saying. This was moments before she toppled off the bike, performed a back summersault and scraped her hindquarters on a bolt, which also tore her pants.
This might be a long-term process.
• That it is much easier to go buy a six-pack than to brew one yourself. I learned this five minutes into my first batch of home-brewed beer. My aunt got me a kit for Christmas. They were apparently sold out of moonshine stills. She got my brother a turkey fryer, which he promptly returned. Dipping a raw turkey into a boiling hot pot of cooking oil is infinitely more dangerous than his other hobbies, like racing vintage motorcycles off-road.
Me? I kept my gift and now get the chance to alcohol poison myself to death. Or worse. My beer (or is it “wort” at this stage? Not a particularly delicious sounding word) is currently sitting in the pantry “yeasting,” or fermenting, or preparing to explode. The yeast I poured in is turning my wort’s sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide. The last time I conducted a science experiment like this was high school chemistry class and I distinctly remember my face turned blue for a month.
It will be at least two weeks before my beer is ready to be bottled, and then another two weeks before I can taste it. Only then will I know if I made pale ale or pond scum. Fifty-fifty odds there. In the meantime I’ll be drinking store bought beer while staring at my burping keg in the pantry.
• That there is a critical mass when it comes to stuffed animals, and my daughter’s room has now reached it. I realized this while I was trapped for three hours under an avalanche of Pillow Pets, American Girl animals and a battery-powered dog who I think was trying to whiz on me.
• That 1980s classic claymation Christmas DVDs set to automatic replay will cause irreparable damage to the cerebral cortex after three hours of constant watching. It will make you speak in a Creole dialect and want to remove all of your clothes in the grocery store vegetable aisle.
• That there is no way to take a Christmas tree down that does not involve a massive flood requiring an insurance adjuster, a mile-high dust storm of dead needles, and a puppy who thinks it is her sole responsibility in life to get underfoot and nearly kill you as you carry the shedding beast out the door.
• That there should be a “Crazy House Christmas Hotline.” This would be a 1-800 number that you can call to ask questions like this: Is it appropriate to start drinking whiskey at 9 a.m.? Do you recommend a chain saw to open stubborn toy packaging, or is an ax OK? If my Internet goes out the week of Christmas, do you have any suggestions for bankrupting the phone company in retaliation for all the time I wasted on hold with technical support?
• That backyard chickens lay some mighty good eggs. And they keep laying those eggs … those good ones … every day! FOREVER!!! Which means you have to start eating eggs morning, noon and night (even as a midnight snack,) just to keep up with production. I’m starting to hate eggs.
• That for all the headaches, it’s worth it, and wonderful, and over far too quickly. I can’t wait for next year. (And for my pond scum beer.)