An American Christmas Carol.

Christmas has always been a very odd time for me and--by extension--my family. Since we hold no particular religious attachment to the holiday, I've always marveled at the way Christians choose to celebrate the birth of their savior. (I can't fathom, for instance, Objectivists erecting trees and buying gifts, even for themselves, on Ayn Rand's birthday. Not that she's an Objectivist's savior mind you.)

Starting in July, I'm bombarded by pictures of snowmen and stars atop greenery, little funny, leprechaunish people in weird hats with primitive tools and Santa Clause. It has gotten so overwhelming that I have decided not to fight it. This year I would do the Christmas thing. Buy presents for everyone I know, hold a Christmas dinner, attend Midnight Mass. I even went so far as to break down and buy a Christmas shirt. Green, Dickensian Green, with white writing, complete with snow flakes and holly. Across the front of it, emblazoned in five-inch tall letters are the two words that made *this* Christmas *my* Christmas: bah-humbug.

My child, inquisitive as she is, asked why I didn't particularly care for Christmas. I shrugged, dusted the tree-flocking off my shoulder, and sighed. "Because people don't know what this holiday is really about," I replied.

We'll pause here for a brief note on "my child". She belongs to a good friend of mine, whom I've known for many years and I've become over the years a sort of surrogate father. When I introduce her, I introduce her as my daughter. Her mother, for all her wonderful qualities, is a 'practicing wiccan' (which has now, thankfully, topped Mormonism as the fastest-growing religion in the world). My daughter has been brought up in a house free of the guilt of killing the Messiah, therefore she's a little bit immune to all the nativities featuring multi-cultural wisemen/women, strange combinations of farm animals and sea life, and even one nativity in which Jesus was swaddled in a Gay Pride flag and Mary was wearing an AIDS Awareness ribbon. One of the wisemen looked like a transvestite and the other two were carrying a copy of the Qu'ran and the Bible respectively. Even the Beetles were making a stop at this particular Adoration. The displayers of this nativity were one Susan G. Komen button away from offending everyone with that little whopper.

Back to my child. She's inquisitive and, given that she attends Catholic school, is well-familiarized with the Nativity story- emotionally detatched familiarity. Which is good. Because she can look around and see what Christmas is 'really about', or at least what it is *supposed* to be about.

"Because people don't know what this holiday is really about?" she scoffed, in that way only a pre-adolescent can do. "Whadda ya mean don't know? Look at all of these people. They are buying gifts and giving to others and shopping, being nice and all."
 
A rather-stark looking woman of about fifty brushed into the shelf before which we were standing, examining incense burners, nearly sending it tumbling to the ground. The shopkeeper looked up and the woman scorned my child. "You should watch what you're doing, young lady!" she said.

I paused, considered my reply, and then politely suggested she should get Lasik and enjoy a couple of years on Weight Watchers, before wishing her a Happy Christmahanukwanzakahs and ushering my child from the store.

Once back in the crushing flow of shoppers angrily pushing and shoving their way from one over-crowded, price-gouging retail boutique to the next, I embarked on explaining Christmas to her in a not-so-subtle way.

"You see, babe, it goes like this. For 11 months of the year, the entire economy of the world goes into hibernation, storing up goods and useless shit that people really don't need. Big companies wait and wait until about September, when they begin spending their saved up advertising dollars on convincing the American public of the dire need for an underarm-hair removal kit or a cell-phone boosterpack to recharge your batteries while you shop. Then, there is the sort of 'détente' period (you know, like the first four or five moves in Risk when we're just reinforcing our troops?)."

She nodded. Encouraged by her seeming understanding, I pressed on.

"Well, détente lasts from about Halloween until the last week before Thanksgiving. Then it starts. Christmas trees signal the coming of the most important day of the year: Post-Thanksgiving Day Sales at McRaes. Everyone goes to the mall and begins spending all of their money on other people, buying them not clothes or a new pair of Doc Martens like they would really appreciate, but buying them rank, second-rate colognes and a plethora of picture frames--usually filling said frames with pictures of themselves or worst, their obnoxious children."

She stopped me. "But people *like* getting those things don't they?"

I shrugged. "Some of them, yes. But go to the return counter the day *after* Christmas and you might wonder. Because that's when the world goes *back* to the mall and gets what they really really want: the useless shit that they bought for other people!"

She nodded. "I get it now! So when you gave me that sweater for Christmas last year, I should have taken it back and traded it in for a Playstation2?"

And then I knew that my child had understood the true meaning of Christmas. As a final test, I steered her into a store. "So what should we get your mother?"

With a gleam in her eye, she smiled. "Cash."

Merry Christmas all.

The Game of Life as a metaphor for living.

Since Colleen was off work tonight, we decided to give the kids their presents tonight. Tomorrow evening, after she gets off work, they'll do presents again with the extended family on her side, and then the next day with their dad and his family. I always marvelled at Christmas when I was a kid. A product of divorce myself, I knew something at a very young age: the Jews don't have nothing on goy divorce-Christmas celebrations. Sure, they get 8 days of gifts from their family. But we have road trip after road trip, hotel stays, and at least three nights of presents--not to mention Santa Clause.

After hearing Kya, the oldest, spend the last twelve months begging for a cell phone, all the while telling her that she cannot have a cell phone until she's dating, (understand she's 12), we decided to teach her that most American of lessons: whine loud enough and people will give you your way, if only to shut you up. Yes, our twelve-year old has a cell phone. The younger ones got a series of board games (all per request) and will get gifts from Santa that are sure to make the easy-bake recipes given tonight make much more sense. ("Don't worry, Gabbie. We don't know why, but Santa called and told us we should buy you easy-bake meals. I wonder why?")

After spending the better part of ten minutes setting up the board, sticking stickers, and otherwise reading rules, we embarked on the first trip around the looping yellow squares of Parker Bros. "Game of Life". Anyone who played Life as a child should throw everything you know about game play out the window. Parker Bros. has 'improved' the game, with new features and new rules that have transformed the Game of Life into a fitting metaphor for living.

Gameplay goes as follows. First, you have to set up the board *every time*. The houses, spinning wheel, bridges, and mountains all fall off the board every time you close it because of poor design, meaning that every time you play, you have to reconstruct the game. Don't loose the instructions, because the houses and bridges are remarkably similar in size and, without the reference map, you're liable to wedge a mountain where a bridge goes or put the wrong house in the wrong place. After putting the board together, everyone spins to see who goes first. Much like the real world, the highest number gets the prize. You have to then decide if you're going to go to college, and fall hopelessly and irrevocably into debt (by borrowing $100,000 before you graduate), or start your career.

It is here that the first major parallel takes place: you pull your career and your salary out of a deck of cards. If the colors match, you get to keep them. If not, you keep drawing until the colors do match. Anyone who has recently entered the workforce will immediately recognize this as the time when you pull your career out of your ass, your employer throws a number at you, and if you decide you're paid enough to put of with other people's shit, you stay. If not, you pull another job out of your ass and start over.

So you spin, passing paydays, getting married at the prescribed time. The game still has it's hard stops. No matter what you want to do you will still have to get married--whether you want to or not. Your choice is irrelevant. You don't even get to pick your bride. I want to ask my gay friends if, when they play, they put a same-colored peg into their plastic cars or if they decide not to be too out and chose an opposite colored partner-peg? Given the state of our great nation, their preference of spouse is largely irrelevant, so I'm betting they put a member of the opposite sex in the car. The rules don't mention anything about same-sex partnerships, so I'm assuming Parker Bros. has ruled this one out.

One of the new additions to the game is life tiles. You land on a square with a particular big event (having children for example--which is completely by luck. You don't get to chose this one either), and take a 'life tile'. On the small, (we're talking microscopic cat snacks if you leave the game out too long), there are impossible dreams that you have 'fulfilled' like running a world-record mile or winning a Pulitzer. The kinds of things that we all say we'd like to do but aren't willing to give up reruns of "Friends" to accomplish. And you collect these for later in the game.

Buying a house is as complicated a process as it is in real life. There are rules, there are new denominations, and it's all so frustratingly complicated that the children who are playing learn the most valuable lesson in life: because of pointless rules, life is so mundanely complex .

Think about it the next time you're playing The Game of Life. Think of all the false expectations that we set up for our kids when we talk about college and jobs and work and kids and houses and retirement. We don't talk about term papers, long hours, co-workers, labor pains, house notes, insurance, prostate exams and funeral expenses and, when they finally learn of these things, its too late for them to go back and decide they would have been better off playing Twister.

Happy Holidays, guys. I'm still young enough to know a good choice when I see one. I'm going to go play Twister with the kids.