January 09, 2004, 8:42 a.m.
Post-Season’s Greetings!
Comments.gurdon@nationalreview.com

"Thok...thok...thok..."

For a moment, I think an alarm is going off somewhere. Then I remember the children, bouncing up and down on the sidewalk, and get up to look out the window.

"Thok...thok...thok...sixty!"

"Great, Paris!"

A shout rises two floors. "Mummy! A new world record!"

"Excellent!" I call out the window, and get back into bed. It is one of those mornings when the little girls were climbing on our heads before dawn, and my husband has done the noble thing. A whiff of coffee drifts up the stairs.

"Thok...thok...thok..." go the Christmas pogo-sticks in clumsy harmony, interrupted by the occasional crash and someone yelling, "Aw, did you see that?"

I am experiencing that peculiar bliss associated with the end of what euphemists are, irritatingly, starting to call "Sparkle Season." In the days after Christmas, there is a lull, a kind of rapt stillness, a Nirvana, that signifies one's release from the great crushing Wheel of Festivity. And when I say "one," I mean, of course, "one who is married, female, and probably a mother."

In December, millions of American women develop a kind of mania that by Christmas day will have exhausted both themselves and their family's bank accounts. They rush about buying gifts (first checking what everyone else is "getting," as in, "What are you getting Rickie this year?"), throwing Christmas-themed coffees, assembling costumes for school pageants, and booking exorbitant seats for the Nutcracker Suite. Many otherwise elegant women inexplicably take to wearing chunky red sweaters embroidered with angora Santas and gold-lame reindeer. Children open lunchboxes to find that their mothers have cut their bologna sandwiches into the shape of snowmen.

Perhaps it is being married that brings on the frenzy; perhaps if a civil-unions candidate wins next November this terrible miasma will pass from the mind of American womanhood. I am not sure. But it is certainly the case that only after marriage do you realize you may be relied upon to find, wrap, and send — with tender inscription — Christmas presents not only to your own, but to your husband's large, far-flung family. You will have enjoyed many cozy Christmases at home, yet will be amazed at the rapidity and abundance of the Yuletide dishes which you, now the Lady of the House, will need to produce.

What you will really not have taken into your lifelong calculations is that upon your shoulders will lie the responsibility for everyone in your household having a warm, jolly,
Currier-and-Ives Christmas experience. It is bootless to ask whether someone else is responsible for making you responsible, whether Society is to blame, or whether it's a burden you've created yourself — the fact is, you're stuck.

Now you are not just celebrating Christmas, you are manufacturing it: for your children, in whom you hope to implant nourishing memories; for your someday-grandchildren, in the awareness that they will receive a simulacrum of the Christmas you give their parents. You may be compensating for your own or your husband's childhood sadness or deprivation by laying on massive portions of figgy pudding. Meanwhile, at no point must you lose sight of the reason for the season, Christ's Mass, the wonder and truth of which you must also transmit to the young and impressionable.

It's enough to make any woman put on a Bing Crosby CD, spike the eggnog, and seek oblivion. But she can't; she has too much to do. She has to "get done."

So come December she is in the supermarket, pushing a trolley piled high with ducks, geese, turkeys, cookies, cranberries, marzipan, mince, stollen, plum puddings, sausages for stuffing, sweet potatoes for roasting, nuts, clementines, fruitcake, stilton, cider, and wheels of brie. You may glimpse her sprinting out of the photo shop clutching boxes of copies of a snapshot of her tousled-haired children taken last summer, as NRO contributor Jennifer Graham has amusingly described. She will rush home to slip each photo into a pre-printed card, lick 150 envelopes, stick 150 stamps, and try to make the post office before it's time to pick up the — "Almost done?" says a wan voice. My friend is hollow-eyed from another late-night bout of Internet gift buying. We are waiting in the school parking lot before the Christmas vacation.

"Almost," I say, grimacing, "But I still have — "

"Coming through!" another mother calls with a bitter laugh, teetering towards us beneath a load of gaily wrapped and carefully calibrated teachers' gifts. The conceit is that these goodies come from her children, whom she ordered to sign the festive enclosure.

"This is it!" she calls on her way to the school door, "After this, I'm done!"

"Wow," we say admiringly, "Done."

Then my friend remarks, "My sister-in-law is done."

"What, with everything?

"Presents, cards, decorating, the works. She did most of it in September."

"Oh," I scoff obediently, in accordance with the invisible script that women are issued each December, "Well, that's hardly in the spirit, is it?" We laugh, part ways, and silently shoulder our burdens again. I can't remember who was still on my list at that point, was it a godchild? A half-forgotten niece? And come to think of it, am I really supposed to tip the newspaper carrier; what about the garbage men? And the mailman? Oh, and better get more milk —

"Thok...thok...thok...one hundred!"

And then — so long anticipated — Christmas slips towards you — suddenly so quickly! — and rushes past, like water in a stream. And it's over. The fever dies away, and you are left with this delicious lightness of being "done."

School starts again, and the first day I am giving a ride home to a friend of Molly's. Their teacher stands at the classroom door and hands each departing child a sealed envelope. As we walk away, Molly's friend rips hers open and reads aloud: "Dear Amy, Thank you for the present."

"But I didn't give the teacher a present," she remarks, amused. "My mother forgot."

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