None of Us Really Know how to Save the Ornaments

Today I found myself disciplining my child over hoarding Christmas ornaments.

While I was cooking us lunch she decided that she wanted Minnie, C-3PO and a few other decorations to join her collection of toys. I, being the observant father that I am, didn't find out until I was picking up her purses and putting them back on their hangers, hours after lunch. I noticed Minnie, sitting in a pile of blocks, no longer with her hook, no longer on her branch.

As I found the other 10 or so ornaments she had hidden away, my daughter came into view. I pulled her up close to me and I pointed at her stash and said, "Baby, these are for decoration only. No touching."

To which she responded with her characteristic, "No touch, no touch."

So I put all the hooks back on the ornaments and turned back around to the tree to put them back on their branch pedestals just to see her casually removing my UCF candy cane with a mischievous grin.

Now I have a conundrum facing me. Do I applaud her choice of ornament or spank her for obvious insubordination? I mean some of these things are glass and we've already lost half a dozen to my clumsiness...I decided to go halfway and placed the black and gold plastic candy cane back on the tree and told her again, "No touch. Not for Emma."

I sat down on the couch and turned on a Christmas episode of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse I've already seen twenty times this week but she has infinite patience for. And wouldn't you know it, she's at the tree, grabbing down Winnie the Pooh and Friends.

So I take the ornament away from her, place it back on the tree and spank her hand lightly. "Emma, no touch."

Now, I don't know if you have children. I don't know what kind of children you do, will or would want to have. But my child is going to compete for an Oscar.

She opened up that mouth as far as it could go, squinted those baby blues and let out a soundless yell before beginning to choke out a wave of tears that would break your heart if you weren't laughing at the silliness of  the situation. She's obviously not hurt, she's just so sensitive to me raising my voice or being displeased that she can't contain the tears...

But she also really wants to play with the Christmas Tree and my opinion on the subject doesn't matter.

So here I am, holding my sobbing, calculatingly manipulative little girl, thinking--not for the first time, not for the last time--about what kind of parent I want to be.

We all ask ourselves these questions of personal philosophy and morality (about parenting and life in general) and I think we all fall somewhere on the line of "disciplined, but cool." Like, I'm going to spank her when a spanking is needed, but she's going to love me for it in the end. Or maybe, I'm going to be so intimidating at my worst, and so understanding, lovable and funny at my best, that I'll never need to physically discipline her. She'll just be awesome because I'm awesome. She'll be a perfect angel because I'm willing it to be so. But we never really know what works and what doesn't. We just take our best guess and swing for the fences. I'm pretty sure I've struck out with the ornaments and I'm resigned to losing a few more over the course of this Holiday Season. (Which, if I have my way, would last sometime until mid-March.)

I think I have to come to terms with the fact that my kid is going to be who she wants to be and my job is to keep her as close to whole and happy as possible.

If I can keep my ornament collection intact that's just a really sweet bonus.

Grandmommy's Gifts, When I'm Right, I'm Right.

Like most Christmases, this Christmas was over by the 26th, and it now being the 27th means that I only have so long to write about it before it becomes old news, or worse, old fake news.

I don't know why I was so surprised to be exactly right about something, as I so often (Ha!) am--yet again, my grandmother managed to fill up multiple boxes worth of gifts, wrap them in Holiday themed paper, and hand them over to us with a huge smile on her face while she sung out the oh-so-familiar chorus of "this Christmas is the last Christmas I'm doing." I have a feeling that just as she said that last year, and this year's Christmas still arrived with a doting Grandmother in tow, so too will next year's Christmas drag her into the Holiday festivities, kicking and screaming--or, entirely more likely, she will find herself at a garage sale, or in front of a product at a store that she knows one of her grandchildren just has to have, and she will buy that product saying: "This is the only thing I'm buying so-and-so this year. And they can just deal with getting only one gift." She is likely to repeat this process two dozen times (per grandchild) throughout the year until this happens yet again:

You might notice the very practical nature of some of these gifts. I'm relatively sure my cousin got six pairs of scissors. Well, five. I stole a pair. I think she noticed, because she gave me a very questioning look that asked: wait, you actually want one of them? Go right ahead. How do you feel about this whisk?

It might sound improper, or even borderline rude, to complain or joke about a gift, and sometimes it is, but in all seriousness, I have a paring knife sitting at the bottom of my shorts drawer, that has been sitting there since I was twelve. It's not that we don't like the gifts, it's not even that we don't need them. What it comes down to, in truth, is that she gives me and my cousins these incredibly useful packages, for that mythical day she just calls "the day you own your own home." While it may be a buyers market, none of us are, or anytime soon will be, in the market for an actual house. And yet, each and everyone of us are now the proud owners of a fully stocked and decked out gourmet kitchen, even if the kitchen itself is (and for the near future, is like to remain) entirely imaginary.

We all love these gifts, we always have and always will, and seriousness, that paring knife will find use someday, maybe even in paring, if I ever figure out what that is. It's almost impossible for us to even consider not getting "grandmommy's boxes."

The only problem with my grandmother's gift giving system (outside of the obvious storage issues that inevitably occur) is what I've come to call "the Favre Effect." Brett Favre has long been one of my favorite players in the NFL, however, it is widely known that the man throws a put ton of interceptions. When you hold the record for touchdowns, and passes thrown, it's logical that you'd also at least be "up there" on "picks" as well. My grandmother has come across this same problem, in regards to her own unique sport. Each year, every one of her many giftees receives somewhere around a half-thousand individual presents. Statistically, not every gift will be a hit. And even if the gift is perfect, it might not be entirely applicable. For example, take one of the pictures above. It is widely known that I am an avid gamer. I enjoy the video games. However, I do not now, or have not ever, owned a Zelda game. Despite my love of that particular platform, I haven't ever owned a system with that series even on it. My experience with Zelda comes entirely through friends and their respective experiences. And yet, this Christmas Eve found me the proud owner of a Zelda strategy guide. (Strategy guides being one of the five great gamer sins non-withstanding) I had no way of using this. But throwing it away, or giving it away, seems somehow wrong. Plus, I find it entirely too cute that I got a video game guide from my grandmother. She clearly had the thought process of "He plays video games. So he plays this video game." But beyond even that, the cutest thing of all (or most insulting, depending on where you sit) is that she thought, well, if he plays video games, he probably needs help. And so I came into ownership of a guide, for a game I've never touched.

However, the awesome reality of it all still remains: I'm overjoyed that my grandmother continues to think of me, it's great to know that someone does, that there is a veritable wall of love always lurking, looming, somewhere in the distance, ready to shower me with gifts and mixed statements about what I should be doing with my life and who I should vote for in the next election, with a pinch of "I love you" thrown in for good measure.

Grandmommy's Gifts

My mother is talking to me about my Grandmother again. Or more accurately, talking to my Grandmother when I'm around (which in this case translates into the same thing.) Grandma is upset (again,) my older sister took some things (things that were also gifts) from my younger sister, and my younger sister gave them willingly. I would understand Grandma’s issue, if she were a normal person, that gave a normal amount of gifts.

But she’s not normal. She’s Grandmommy, and she is what I have come to call a "thriftaholic." She shops for deals, at garage sales and thrift stores, if it's cheap, she’s interested. My Grandmother personally kept the Salvation Army afloat from ’83-Modern Day. The day Grandma stops shopping for deals is the day we take away her car keys, her money and her cell phone (my aunts and mother are enablers to their cores.)

Don’t take this all negatively—it worked for her, a little too well. When I was five years old, I would sit down on her multi-colored carpet in front of the Christmas Tree, next to one of my cousins, and open a box I could fit my bed into (suffice it to say this was not a typical Christmas present.)

The children would spend the rest of the evening digging through our presents, trying to catalog what we got, a task, I might add, we nearly always found to be impossible unless we got incredibly general. “This is a box full of gifts,” one of us (the cousins) would say. And the rest of us would look on and say “She is wise, mine is also a box full of gifts.” Without this very political approach you could quite easily spend the rest of the year opening one Christmas gift.

I have a theory that somewhere in her house, is a secret room with about twenty or so cubbyholes, with my family's name tags taped across the top. Each one is filled to boiling over with random toys, books and gadgets. Each year, sometime in November, I imagine she goes down those stairs with as many boxes as she feels she needs, and just reaches in and pulls out whatever it takes to fill each one. She no longer has an inclination to even look at what she’s giving to whom.

This may seem like a very efficient system, but she has caught herself in what I think of as the “Thriftshopper’s Spiral of Doom that Leads into the Penny-Pincher’s Abyss." It's a Working Title. You see, she buys more than each family member needs in a year, so she is essentially buying in advance for years to come. This would work swimmingly, if she—at some point—stopped buying. But she doesn’t. Ever.

So each year, she buys half again what she actually gives each of us. So what’s the end result? Run-on gifts. You get gifts in 1994 that you were supposed to get in '93, and so on, until eventually you're getting gifts you were supposed to get three of four years previously.

So here we are, adults in our twenties and beyond, getting boxes full of action figures, Mr. Potato Head and friends-with a few priceless gems mixed in. When I was twenty, I got my older cousins gift. A ceramic vase, printed with roses and an actual gold-enameled rose. There were recipe books for women being in shape-and a small sweatshirt. Grandma claimed she didn't mix it up. I still have the vase, it holds my favorite pens.

It’s hard to say I have any actual complaints about her system. Every Christmas for 24 (and counting) years I’ve been getting a box that outweighs me (And this is no small feat! Hah! Puns!) of some of the coolest gifts you can believe. Grandmommy's boxes are always a joy to open, it’s the grab bag of Christmas. A recipe book about only PB&J, why not? A ceramic rose? Sure. The first model of camera Kodak ever made? Every year Grandma’s boxes serve as a reminder, firstly that my Grandmother is still alive, still bringing happiness to our family, and secondly that there is no such thing as a bad gift. We’ve been told since we were children, by every Christmas movie ever made, that it’s the act of giving that counts, the spirit of the Holiday. My grandmother is the pinnacle of this feeling, the epitome of what we should want to be during the Christmas—or whatever you celebrate--season.

I hope my grandmother keeps bargain shopping for the rest of her life, it's good to know someone's out there, thinking about me. And out-shopping the average Costco Corporate buyer on her slow days.