This morning, Christian asked me when I wanted to open Christmas presents. I looked at him as if this should be a “No, duh” situation and said, “Christmas morning, of course.”
“That’s the 25th, right?” He clarified. You see, we have different definitions of when Christmas actually is. In his world, all the cool stuff: the presents, the tree decorating, and the big dinner fall on the 24th. Whereas in my world (the world that is doing its best to bomb all other worlds into oblivion), Christmas isn’t really Christmas until the morning of the 25th. As you might imagine, seeing as how both our worlds are now joined in matrimony and we plan to force them upon another unsuspecting life form, we may need to make a compromise at some point. Christian recognized this right away and added, “After the kid’s born, maybe we should alternate every other year when we open presents.”
A solid suggestion certainly, but there was an inherent flaw in his plan, “So every other year when Christmas Eve roles around, he’s going to be whining his head off because he has to wait until the following morning to open them? That’s not going to work. Why don’t we just have him open some presents–maybe the ones from your side of the family–the night before and then he can do the rest and the Santa present on Christmas morning.”
“About that,” Christian started in again, “In Austria the presents are brought by the baby Jesus…”
I’m pretty sure that’s the point where I doubled over laughing. Sorry, Baby Jesus followers out there, but come on! A baby? Crawling around while dragging a big pile of presents? How cruel do you have to be to subject that kind of fate on an infant, especially one who grows up only to end up tortured to death? Surely, the poor kid deserves his rest. “Nope. If I’m going to lie, it’s going to have to be a jolly old fat man who comes down the chimney, not a baby,” was more or less along the lines of my response.
“Well, what are you going to do if my parents give him books about it?”
I shrugged my shoulders, “Tell him they’re stories, like all the other books he’ll have. That’s what Chinese teachers do when they get cornered into having to explain religious beliefs in school.” Ah yes, when in doubt, use practices in developing countries to back up your point! As you can see, I’m an expert debater. “Besides, I thought you didn’t want to raise a Catholic,” I added in what may have been a low blow.
You see, once upon a time, before we were married or dealing with an all-too-quickly approaching future as parents, Christian and I had had “the religion talk”–you know, that one where you sum up all the things you liked and didn’t like about how you were spiritually raised and make optimistic plans about how you will improve the souls of your imaginary future spawn by doing completely the opposite with them. During it, Christian had made the mistake of saying he wanted to branch out across several religions and sort of teach a universal spirituality. I, on the other hand, had made the mistake of saying I wanted to ensure that our imaginary offspring had a solid spiritual foundation of some sort, even if that foundation was, well, Christianity.
Now, as we both deal with the chaos that is an encroaching parenthood without a clue of what the heck we’re doing, we tend to retreat slightly into the places that make us most comfortable on the topic of “Bringing Up, Baby.” As such, I think we’re beginning to eat our words a bit. Christian’s eyes glow whenever he describes his December holidays, and I giggle like a school-girl who just heard a dirty word whenever the topic of Jesus pops up.
In a few years, we’ll likely either resolve all this or something’s going to crack. In the meantime, however, we have a new overly optimistic plan: while we live in China, we will celebrate Christmas with presents brought by a fat jolly man who climbs in the apartment either through the window or maybe through the toilet (wouldn’t that be hilariously fun?) then after we leave, we will begin celebrating a different December holiday each year. Hanukkah, Winter Solstice, Kwanzaa… We did get slightly stuck on Ramadan because, well, that doesn’t really fall in December, does it? And Christian got all grumbly at the thought of fasting everyday for a month.
“But it’s so much fun,” I tried to persuade him, “You get to break the fast with milk and dates every evening!”
“I don’t like dates,” said my dear Scrooge. Well, shucks! I suppose that only leaves us with the hajj then if Islam’s going to represent… And you know what that means: ROAD TRIP!