I was fond of the Christmas season as a young adult. It was still fun and festive. My friends and I would meet and go together to midnight mass. There was always a crowd at that mass, and inevitably we well-bred young folks gave up our seats to the elderly folks who arrived after we did. You would think that after the first time I had to stand for an hour during mass, I would learn to wear boots instead of pumps to the service. Oh, no. It was Christmas. It was a festive time. I dressed accordingly. After mass, my friends and I would trek through the neighborhood stopping off at one another’s homes where our parents had spreads of Christmas goodies for all of us. Between stops, we had half-hearted snowball fights—half-hearted because we all wore our good “Sunday go to Meeting Clothes.” At the last home of the night—early morning, to be accurate—we had a group breakfast, and then we scattered to our own homes to thaw out and then sleep in on Christmas morning. Fun and festive.

I wasn’t quite as fond of the Christmas season as a young parent. I wasn’t the one having all the fun anymore. I was the one providing all the fun and excitement. I was the one convincing a kid not to scream and cry on Santa’s lap so the photographer could take a decent picture. O joy. I had no idea how much work was involved. It looked so easy when my mother did it—the decorating, sending out the Christmas cards, the gift shopping, the grocery shopping, the cooking—so much cooking—and the baking (Did I mention that I cannot bake worth a darn?). And then there was the gift wrapping, the gift hiding where Firstborn and Little Brother couldn’t find them, being a kid wrangler for my two boys who couldn’t sit still during Christmas Eve service, and cleaning up the mess after the Christmas morning gift unwrapping frenzy. After a few years of this, I stopped looking forward to the Christmas season. Christmas equaled stress. I began to dread it.

I believe I know when I became a Christmas Curmudgeon. It was the last year we had a huge live tree—one of Firstborn’s friends dubbed it “The Christmas Sequoia.” On Christmas morning, I looked under the tree to see that Baby Jesus was missing from the manger. I alerted Macho Guy and the boys, and the hunt was on. We eventually found Baby Jesus behind a sofa in the family room—gnawed almost beyond recognition. The perpetrator of this desecration, our American Eskimo devil dog, had gone into hiding. We flushed him out and scolded him but the damage was irreversible. Of all the figurines under the tree, why did that wicked little monster choose to chew on Baby Jesus? I was appalled. It was sacrilege, no doubt about it. The boys, who adored the evil four-legged assassin, broke up laughing at what they felt was the absurdity of the situation. It was about then that I snapped. It was Baby Jesus’ birthday and instead of receiving a gift, he was chewed up by an unrepentant four-legged, white-furred spawn of Satan.

It struck me then that this incident was only one indication that the true spirit of Christmas was missing in action, replaced somewhere along the line by a secular white-bearded icon in a red suit who came down the chimney to become a symbol of crass commercialism. A holy day had become a holiday instead.

Until Christmas is once again the way it used to be, the way it should be, and the way it was meant to be, just call me Scroogette. Bah! Humbug!

To be continued next week.