When I was a kid every day on the road to Christmas Day felt like an eternity. It was always stinking hot and my little sister (Sister Sledge) and I used to amuse ourselves with activities such as riding our bikes past the neighbours' house on the corner (the only one with the pool in the street) and shouting to each other, “OH, IT’S SOOOOOOO HOT!” in the hope that our passive aggressiveness would yield us a swim in the pool. It usually did!
And on one particularly long and languid pre-Christmas December Day in the 80s, Sister Sledge and I took the bikes for a spin down to the corner shop to buy craft materials – to cut into miniscule pieces – to create a Mr. Squiggle board game. Yep, the days were very, very long!
What I don’t remember is when the days switched from being long, hot and languid to frantic, air-conditioned and chaotic? When did I stop lying on my stomach, creating a board game, in the middle of the lounge room for an entire day, and start trying to cram multiple events on every given day in the lead up to Christmas?
I only have one husband and two children and yet I feel like I am project managing a large corporation. Between my work and Pineman’s work and day care and pre-school and school orientations and birthday parties and Christmas parties and more Christmas parties and Christmas shopping, I am starting to feel like I’m on a conveyor belt which is creeping toward some dark and ominous pit and inside the pit are metres and metres of tinsel and an inflatable Santa.
I am quite debilitated by the chaos this year. And my coping mechanism seems to be: inane shopping expeditions and popping ibuprofen (in no particular order).
I used to be quite a productive Christmas shopper, but this year, in the small amount of time I have had to shop, I have been faffing about, coming home with random items and forgetting things like the milk.
The other day it took me at least 45 minutes to walk from the bike section of Toys R Us to the end of ONE car aisle. It was not a great distance, but this is what I achieved in the process: I bumped into someone I knew and had a chat. Waited whilst The Ranga drove a large plastic car around. Idly threatened said child out of large plastic car. Waited whilst The Ranga AND Miss C drove large plastic cars around. Idly threatened said children out of large plastic cars. Was accosted by woman wanting to know all about electronic guinea pigs. Delivered winning sales pitch to not one but THREE women regarding electronic guinea pigs and up-sold matching accessories. Witnessed a little boy piss himself all over his bewildered father and the floor. Offered all spare wipes, pull-ups and shorts to bewildered father who had a little boy, a baby, a pram and NO nappy bag! Dictated the makes and models of the entire range of Matchbox cars to the eager Ranga, then promptly forgot why I was there and walked out with nothing!
I have also found myself getting all antsy when I can’t find particular items, begging shop assistants to just check one more time please, trying to materialise a Jessie and Bullseye (from Toy Story 3) double pack when I know full well that Jessie on her own would be quite adequate. And having loud conversations on my mobile in aisles that sound like this, “DO YOU THINK THE RANGA WOULD LIKE A STAR WARS DOUBLE PACK WITH R2D2 and C3PO WITH A BATTLE DROID HEAD? NO, IT HAS AN INTERCHANGEABLE C3PO HEAD. NO, IT’S NOT FROM THE ORIGINAL TRILOGY, BUT DO YOU THINK HE WOULD LIKE IT??”
If I have achieved nothing else this Christmas, I’m pretty sure I gave the poindexter father in the aisle next to me an erection.
But it’s not really the kids’ presents that pose the greatest problems, it’s all the tricky gifts like those for pre-school teachers and day care teachers and ballet teachers and even when they have been carefully selected, Miss C wants to value add with some homemade craft. I commend her for her thoughtfulness, I really do (season of giving and all). But her idea this year is to make individual paper doily people for her pre-school teachers, which involves glue and pom poms and large paddle pop sticks and cutting and pipe cleaners and oh my GOD, between that and the writing of Christmas cards when she cannot yet write, is causing me to reach for the ibuprofen quicker than Frosty the friggin’ Snowman can meet his demise in the Australian sun.
We are eight days into December and we haven’t even put up the tree!! This never would’ve happened when I was a kid. The tree went up on the first day of December, and Mum would’ve patiently encouraged the Mr Squiggle board game craft. Hell, she would’ve even cracked open the glue! I don’t remember my parents being this harried around Christmas (although my mother did line up at a shop at midnight on Christmas Eve 1984 to secure a Cabbage Patch Kid for me – I’m sure that was relaxing). Maybe they were and I just didn’t notice? Maybe my kids won’t notice?