I love seeing all the Christmas pictures and paintings my Facebook feed. Houses are beautifully decorated inside and out and spotlessly clean. Children are well-behaved and looking right at the camera. So are the pets, for that matter!
Of course, Christmas for most of us - or at least for me - has little resemblance to these images of perfection. Maybe that's why I like "A Charlie Brown Christmas" so much. He tries so hard and can never seem to get it quite right.
I don't even remember my first Christmas fail, but I've heard the story so many times I feel like I do. Apparently we had waited hours in line to see the one Santa I would agree to visit when I was very little. When it finally was our turn, I refused to go sit on his lap. Or even say hello. The outing certainly was memorable - although not in the way my parents had hoped.
Fast forward to senior year of high school, when I am thinking as much (or almost as much!) about the gifts I'm giving as those I will receive. I fall in love with a sweater in one of the department stores in the mall where my boyfriend and I work and I buy it for him. We're heading home after work one day and see the sweater on a mannequin. I ask him what he thinks of it, and his response is something along the lines of "That's the ugliest sweater I've ever seen."
As punishment, I make him unwrap his gift when we get to my house. I'm sure I got him something else instead, but that's all I remember of the story.
Years later, the first Christmas Dan and I owned our own home, I wanted to make an impression. So I created an elaborate menu featuring turkey and gravy, ham, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes and more. I managed to get all the food on the table, and everything was reasonably warm. Success!
Then it came time for cleanup in my tiny kitchen with no dishwasher. My outburst of tears was not quite the sweet end to the meal I had hoped for - but it did lead me to a dramatically simplified menu that I serve to this day.
We served many Christmas dinners on a fold-out table in the basement family room of our home in Berwyn, and I always did my best to dress up the less-than-formal space. One year I created an arrangement of greens and ornaments to run down the center of the table.
And it looked great - until our beagle, Daisy, jumped up on the table and ate a few of the glass orbs. Fortunately she didn't get sick, but the arrangement definitely suffered.
I've made cinnamon log cookies that were shaped like squares and created a very small fire in my mother-in-law's oven one year when I needed to finish baking a cheesecake at her house. (That might have been on a different holiday, but it's a good story!)
When we attend the live nativity service on Christmas Eve at Hinsdale Covenant Church, all is not calm. With sheep, a donkey and kids who have not rehearsed their parts in the Christmas story, things don't always go smoothly. Pastor Lars Stromberg always reminds us that the very first Christmas did not resemble the beautiful, peaceful images we see on Christmas cards.
Of course, as we know from our friend Charlie Brown, it almost always turns out OK in the end. And that is something to celebrate.
- Pamela Lannom is editor of The Hinsdalean. Readers can email her at [email protected].
