Ah the holidays. A time where you get to spend more time as
a family, a time when routines get messed with, and a time where at least
someone in the house gets sick. This
year, it was me first and my wife second.
The kids? They managed to stay remarkably
healthy. That's right, the walking
cesspools of germs that they are skate away from the holiday season unscathed
while I spend three days of the week leading up to Christmas alternating
between chills and sweats and my wife, bless her, spends all of Christmas Day
barfing every hour, on the hour, beginning at midnight.
Other than that though, Christmas was awesome.
Remember the old stories of your dad staying up all night
Christmas Eve putting together some toy of yours that had 1000 some-odd pieces?
Well I have my wife to thank for saving me from this fate. Thing 2's four foot tall doll house took a
full three hours to put together. Luckily, she pressured me to do that a couple
days before the big day. I almost wanted
to wait just so I could have such a story to pass on, like some fatherly rite
of passage. I have dumb ideas
sometimes. I probably could have put the
damn thing together faster had a had a proper screwdriver. The good one was in
a drawer no less than 5 feet from the spot I was labouring on with one of those
useless quick-change screwdrivers with all the stupid bits inside. I found the proper screwdriver days later as
we were de-Christmasing the house.
Ever notice that I make up a word in pretty much every one
of these posts?
So every year I seem to have a moment where I become a
classic Christmas movie dad. There was the time I fell off the roof messing
with the Christmas lights à la Clark Griswold.
This year it was George Bailey.
If you've seen It's A Wonderful Life, (which if you haven't, what the
hell is wrong with you?), you'll know the scene where George calls the teacher
and gives her shit after Zuzu gets sick when she walks home without her coat
done up. Well I kind of pulled a similar
overreaction when I gave the caregivers crap when I picked up Thing 2 from
preschool and found her playing outside without a toque on when it was -10
Celsius. Turned out that was the night I
got sick. Coincidence?
And a final thought: At what point did a Christmas pageant become a winter
concert? When I was in kindergarten in
public school circa 1988, we did the full nativity scene (a shepherd à la
Linus). Fast forward to Thing 1's
kindergarten winter concert in 2016 and
the word Christmas can't even be uttered.
Instead they performed the Olaf song from Frozen with altered
lyrics. Still cute as hell mind
you. Especially cute since Thing 1 is at
least 4 inches shorter than each of the other 63 kindergarten kids and they
stuck him dead centre in the front row.
Priceless.
