Happy Barfmas!
The one where (almost) everyone puked.
How is it at your house?
Shit. Yours?
Same.
My best friend and I had met in the frosty December air for a quick walk and to exchange Christmas gifts. It was a December 24th in the mid 90s. Christmas Eve. The day most Germans celebrate Christmas was fraught at both our houses for different reasons. But what we had in common was that the much anticipated day usually sucked ass.
Presently my mother was at home cooking, which she hated. The years we just went to our grandparents instead were better. We just ate potato salad and sausages. The grandparents knew that no kid would sit quietly for a fancy dinner that had taken the whole day to prepare. All we wanted were presents!!! But that year, for some reason I didn’t understand, my mother was hosting Christmas. She couldn’t cook and hated cooking so the food would be bad. We had no Christmas tree because my mother was a hippie and didn’t want to murder trees for this special occasion. (I see her point on this one, sorry trees!) One year, she got a Christmas tree with roots still attached so she could later plant it in the yard.
My mother hated Christmas and told me so many times. Every year I hoped Christmas would be magical. It rarely was. As a parent myself, I understand why. Holidays are so much work! It’s so easy to overcompensate. It’s so easy to try and make holidays into what they were when we were little (if we loved them) or the opposite (if we hated them). Both mean that we are doing all this stuff for ourselves in some way (and telling everyone else that we’re doing it for them). And by they and we I mean me. I do this. I try to give myself the magical Christmas I wanted as a kid. But because I didn’t think I deserved to have the Christmas I wanted, I had to tell myself and everyone else, that I was doing it for them. Which then made it okay for me to be upset at everyone for not helping/not helping correctly/not helping at the right time, and of course, not appreciating my efforts enough.
When the kids were little, I planned Hallmark Christmas movie re-enactments every fucking year. These always included a bunch of holiday activities for our family (weirdly nobody wanted to go ice skating in matching sweaters), trying to get everyone to help clean the house for dinner (unsuccessfully), and going totally overboard with the variations of complicated German Christmas cookies I decided to bake at the last minute. I would get progressively more irritated as Christmas Eve wore on, until my frustration would escalate into a full-blown fight with Rob. I would scream about how I was doing all the work and nobody was helping. He yelled back about how nobody asked me to do all this stuff. I finally asked myself why AM I doing all this stuff? Who is it for? What am I trying to prove here?
Now, activities are optional. We make a bunch of finger foods and family favorites. We limit the number of presents. I gave up on my idea of a perfectly magical movie Christmas.
I consider it a good year if nobody throws up under the tree.
The One Where (Almost) Everyone Puked
Our very first Christmas together with six little kids was a smelly disaster. That Christmas Eve, we were making pigs in blankets, when the first kids started complaining about feeling sick.
And then the vomiting started. I’ll spare you the gruesome details, but if you had come by the house, this is what you’d found:
A washer churning vomit stained clothes while I’m on the front porch trying to shake the chunks off the last blanket.
Several children clad only in underwear sitting under a tree with a puke bowl next to each of them.
An open door leading into the bathroom with a dad holding onto a little boy who will vomit against the wall (instead of the toilet) in 3…2…1!
Two small children on the floor in the next room watching Lilo and Stitch while burping and farting out a rotten egg smell that rivaled Yellowstone National Park.
Much, much later that night, really, in the early morning, when everyone had stopped puking and farting and burping for a second, the two of us sat squished together in a fluffy chair. Hugging. Kissing. Laughing. And drinking strong coffee with vanilla creamer because we still had all of Santa’s presents to wrap. That’s when I knew we’d make it.
The One With The Bare-Ass Tree
I was a fake tree owner before I met Rob. My tree came out of a box every year. Maybe because of my hippie mother. Maybe because my perfectionistic self at the time wanted the plastic symmetry only Walmart can provide.
But that second Christmas (where nobody barfed), we all piled into the old truck and drove up the mountain (after spending a good two days stuffing everyone into their snow suits). We walked around in knee-deep snow until our noses were red and our toes numb. We finally picked a tree. A gorgeous, tall, fluffy thing. Only after the kids all got a turn with the hatchet, did we realize that our tree had looked beautiful because it was standing in a small grove with others. It was not full. It was not fluffy. In fact, it was only 3/4 of a tree with a bare ass. It’s ugly! the kids yelled. It was. At home, we wedged it in the corner and tied it to the curtain rod so it wouldn’t fall over.
Our One and Only Christmas Tree Rule
We lean into ugly. The one rule about our tree is that only homemade ornaments or heirlooms go on it. No matchy matchy bulbs and balls. No color theme. No whole new set of ornaments every year. No fucking tinsel. Ever.
Just the same drunk reindeer made from popsicle sticks with the googly eyes hanging on for dear life, balls crudely painted with stroke-y Santas by preschoolers with questionable fine motor skills, stars held together by a goopy mix of Elmers glue and glitter gems, and the sparkly Christmas spider Rob made as a little boy. THAT’s what Christmas is all about for me. Vomiting children and homemade ornaments and crying because some of these vomiting children are now tall enough to put the star on the tree without a chair.
My best friend? I still talk to her every Christmas. A whole ocean separates us now and has for so long. One of us will ask how is it at your house? And the answer doesn’t even matter. Depending on the year, sometimes it’s shitty, sometimes great, usually both. And every time I hang up, I hope that one Christmas in the future, we can celebrate together.
This is my favorite German gingerbread. There is a store in my town that carries German food and candy and when they bring out the Christmas stuff, I walk through all the aisles and cry. I found my favorite German gingerbread, glazed on the top, chocolate dipped on the bottom. I buy bags of Marzipan (in the background) for all my Christmas cookie baking.
It makes me happy seeing other items in the “ethnic” food section. Foods I’ve never heard of, boxes with foreign words I can’t pronounce. It makes me feel less alone to imagine there are other people from other places speaking other languages, a little homesick just the same.
I can almost see them walk through the aisle and get choked up like me by the sight of something familiar that feels like home.
”To the family we’re born with, and to the family we make along the way…”
I hope this holiday season is as kind to you as my friend Amy who knows me to the depths of my hot pink soul and sent me all the hugs via proxy blanket.
