Another Perfect Christmas

By John O’Bryan

Photos Courtesy of the O’Bryan Family

I love Christmas but at one point years ago, the music that plays non-stop from November 1 until December 26 almost completely ruined the holiday for me. It has taken years of therapy and navel gazing to get me to the place I am today, where I don’t flinch when I enter a northern Idaho store to the sounds of Christmas music.

 The beginning of my aural holiday dread started in the first years of our marriage, when the kids were little, and I had to work in a very busy retail establishment to help pay the bills. There I first experienced the endless droning of yuletide songs. Since there aren’t many new Christmas songs being made, the same songs kept playing over and over and over. The offerings of the festive music channels differ only by artist and not by song. I often heard the same song played three or four times in a row by what could have been Michael Jackson, Alan Jackson, Janet Jackson, and the Jackson Five.

Each interpretation of the song, “I saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” may have been completely different, but this didn’t stop it from worming its way into my brain so that I would wake up screaming in the middle of the night with my own version blaring in my head. Given that the entire Christmas song list repeats itself every three to four hours for the six-week holiday shopping season, it’s no wonder some people who work in retail drink so much. 

All that time I spent standing behind a counter with an endless stream of the same Christmas songs droning in the background gave me a lot of opportunity to think about the songs themselves. The one that bothered me more than any other was, “The Little Drummer Boy.” There are eight versions, by the way. 

I wondered what Mary must have been thinking when a kid with a drum set walked up to the manger. Why would anyone think it would be okay to play the drums next to a sleeping newborn in the corner hayrack?  “Hey, lady,” he must have blurted, “want me to play drums for your baby?” The image I have is of the Muppets drummer, Animal, going into his patented solo, “Pa rum pah pum pum!”  Symbols crash. Bass drum thumps. Away in a manger, the baby awakes, but this time a huge crying he makes. “Waaaa!”    

Mary just gave birth in a stable. She is weary and tons of people have come to visit. She has finally gotten the baby to sleep, and this stupid kid starts to play the drums. If I’m Mary, I ask one of the wise men to drag him through the streets behind a camel. Maybe next time he visits he’ll call himself “The Little Hummer Boy” and not get thrown out.

At home the music was more peaceful and as we got ready to deck the hall, my wife Kelly put on the Canadian Brass Christmas CD, which didn’t hurt my head. We always began with the ritual of placing the nativity scene on top of the piano. A pad of white cotton was laid upon the top, because everyone knew it was snowy in Bethlehem when the baby was born.

Then the lean-to was built and placed upon the pad so Mary had something to protect her from the snow. This done, each of our children in turn got to choose and place a figure on the snow around the lean-to. They placed figures one at a time until all were set. All, that is, save one, the baby.

One year I had an inkling something wasn’t right as I watched all four of the kids wrestling on the floor. It was like the quarterback had dropped the ball, only it wasn’t a ball—it was the baby they were scrumming over. In this melee of screaming, crying, and writhing they battled for the glory to be the one to put the Prince of Peace, the Wonderful Counselor, the infant with the upturned arms onto the waiting bed of ceramic hay.

The author as a young day enjoys the moment with Molly.

The girls with their Christmas stuffed toys.

Stuff and more stuff.

Christian and Wesley hard at work.

Every Christmas tree needs a pig ornament.

Many years of names on the box.

The children thank Grandma Carol profusely.

Allison (left) with Molly, looking scary.

The O'Bryan kids (from left), Allison, Wesley, Molly, and Christian.

I did what all good parents do: I took the baby away from them and gave it to the one who cried the loudest. Our youngest, Molly, got to do it. It wasn’t that she deserved it, quite the opposite in fact, but if she hadn’t been chosen, she would have pitched a royal tsunami of complaint. To be perfectly honest, I was a bit afraid of her at that time…come to think of it, I still am. To keep the festive dogpile from happening ever again, I wrote her name on the box and then explained to “all the dear children in thy tender care” that every year from now on they would each take turns putting the baby on the manger. 

The building of the nativity scene used to be a sweet and touching tradition but in later years, as the kids got older and indulged in what they considered to be funny, it turned into something more preposterous. As they placed each figure, things started to happen. The ox and the ass were prone to wander into the manger, where they would try to eat the scarf off Mary’s head. The three wise men huddled in the corner, either throwing dice or trying to decide on which play to run next.

Joseph, stuck on the outside of the shelter and far away from his wife and son, looked dolefully at the camel, as if wondering why it had just one hump. Mary was the only one who sat calmly beside the cow amid all the chaos and serenely gazed upon her infant who lay on the manger with no blanket even though the ground was covered in snow. 

Kelly loves Christmas like no other holiday and would wade into the fray with her ruler, slapping hands away from the scene with the practiced rhythm of one who would have been a good nun. She quickly restored order, and peace was to be had once again in Bethlehem. Peace, that is, if you consider Christmas music peaceful. She had turned it on and for the first few minutes it was soothing and familiar. But only for the first few minutes. 

The Christmas boxes had been pulled out of storage and she had sorted the items to display for the next few months. There are things in these boxes that haven’t seen the light of day in decades but we can’t get rid of them because they are in the magic box and somehow sacred. It just doesn’t seem right to throw away the ornaments that my creepy Uncle Lyman gave me five decades ago, so we keep them in a box in the dark all year.

Each year the kids opened their boxes of ornaments and slapped them on the tree in a whirlwind. Every year we gave each child a new ornament until at this point in our lives, we are awash in festive tree adornments. We used to hope they would take these gifts with them when they left home to create their own lovely Christmas trees filled with decorations from Christmas past, present and future, but we still have most of them. 

In their frenzy, the kids placed their ornaments as high as they could reach, which wasn’t very high. When all ornaments were hung, the tree looked bottom heavy but it was beautiful and in the eyes of our children it sparkled magically. The next morning, when they ran downstairs to look again where they had placed their ornaments, disappointment quickly set in when they realized the Ornament Fairy had come in the middle of the night and moved everything equidistantly up and down the tree.

“Mom, why did you move our ornaments?” they would whine in unison. 

“Well, you didn’t put them in the right spots. The Ornament Fairy made everything perfect. Doesn’t it look better?” 

It did look better, and I would tell the kids to quit whining or Santa wouldn’t bring them anything this year and they’d laugh at me because I told them years ago I was Santa. Whenever I tell people we dispelled the Santa myth when the kids were little, they look at me as if I am a very bad man. I always respond by asking these critics how Santa knows when their kids are sleeping and when they’re awake, and isn’t that a bit creepy…especially in this day and age?  

Not only did that bit of Santa logic save my children the heartache of hearing from one of their friends that we lied to them but I also wasn’t about to give credit to some old fat guy in a red coat when I could take the glory for each and every amazing gift we bought.

At the time, this seemed like an excellent strategy but in practicality it hasn’t worked out. I had lost sight of the fact that almost everyone in the world tells their kids Santa is real and whenever my kids heard one of their friends talking about what Santa would bring them this year, they broke the hearts of those misguided youth. This happened to countless friends and even to family members. It got so bad that we threatened our children with bodily harm if they didn’t stop doing it. We counseled them to just smile and nod when people talked about the Jolly Old Elf. They dutifully promised they would, but the sideways glances and sneers we saw whenever some kid told them Santa was going to visit them assured us our problems from this Christmas sector were far from over. 

And they weren’t. Unfortunately, our kids had young relatives who still believed in Santa and even though we said not to mention anything, they did mention it. Wailing cousins and angry aunts and uncles were the warning sirens that the proverbial cat was out of the bag. They not only did this once but twice…maybe three times, crushing little hearts along the way and making parents mad that we would be so insensitive as to teach our kids Santa wasn’t real. It made no difference that he isn’t real. It only mattered that they wanted to be the ones to tell their kids they had lied to them all those years. 

Once the ornament frenzy and its aftermath were settled each year and the house was festively adorned from floor to ceiling with Christmas fare, we would watch Christmas movies. There were some I liked and some I tolerated but I sat and watched and smiled and said nothing because everyone else loved them. We watched movies about an angel who got his wings and about a very angry old man (whom I relate to) with lots of money who couldn’t stand Christmas music either but got visited by ghosts and then saved a small boy from dying. There were movies about Uncle Eddie, Snoopy, and Rudolph, South Pole elves and a green guy that got a heart transplant and Kevin who got left home by uncaring parents. There was also a Christmas movie (the best one, by the way), about a guy who saved an entire building from terrorists. 

And then we would wait, and the kids would wonder how many “sleeps” until we got to open the presents. 

When Christmas Eve finally arrived, I’d relax a bit. Everything was ready, there would soon be no talk of Santa or music, and the movies would be put back into the CD rack until next year. But I was really, really excited. There had been moaning and complaining about why Christmas was taking so long to get here and why can’t we just open the presents now, but that had all been from me. The kids were fine and had gone on about their lives with only an inkling that something amazing would happen in a few days.

I vibrated with excitement. We didn’t have a whole lot of money back then, when we were young and the kids younger, but through meticulous saving and deal-finding and the judicious use of coupons and discounts, we were always able to stuff the tree with more presents than needed. I could never help myself. I love giving good gifts to my kids and we gave good gifts and lots of them. There were often so many gifts under the tree that we had to stack them around it instead of under it. I could never wait for Christmas morning. 

The kids were excited too, probably more so on Christmas Eve. We sent them to bed, knowing full well no sleep would be had by any of them. I couldn’t sleep either. This lack of slumber resulted in tired and grumpy kids and a grumpy dad on the day when everyone was supposed to be happy and cheerful. To get the kids to sleep we came up with the brilliant idea that we would give an extra gift to whichever child slept in the longest. It didn’t work. They all faked being asleep and Molly, once again, was the best faker and, much to the dismay of the other fakers, always got the extra gift. No matter, they stayed in bed longer and we (by we, I mean Kelly) got to sleep in on Christmas morning, and by “sleep in” I mean until 5 am and not 4 am. 

We loved watching our kids open presents and the excitement that grew in their little hearts because they knew the last present was always something big and meaningful and awesome. And it always was. Some of these presents our kids still have and now our grandkids play with them. Not all of them have worked out this way, like the pair of GI Joes with Action Grips that my boys refused to play with (it was my toy of choice as a youth), but aside from that, most of our choices were good and timeless.

My mother-in-law gave underwear and socks, which is standard MIL fare but not very exciting to young kids. We loved her gifts, because underwear and socks can get expensive when you’re trying to clothe four little kids. The boys, not so much. This led to teachable moments as the socks and underwear got tossed aside while they waded back into the pile of good presents. One year we were adamant that they be appreciative when Grandma gave them these items. We waited.

When they opened the packages of underwear that wasn’t fun to wear, our boys turned into Shakespearean actors. They thanked their grandmother for being so thoughtful as to give them such useful things and ran to her and hugged her and may have even shed a tear. They hugged her as if she had just rescued them from a dungeon and as they hugged her, they looked at us out of the corner of their eyes. I nodded in approval, and they broke off and headed to the tree to gather what they were sure were new Lego sets. Grandma may have cried, too. 

 At the end of the day, when the presents were unwrapped, the wrapping paper and boxes had been stuffed into bags and set by the curb, the food had been eaten, and the kids put to bed, Kelly and I sat on the couch with a mug of hot toddy and surveyed the damage with a satisfying sigh. Things were in disarray, but we had done it. We had pulled off another one of our perfect Christmases. As we sat in our satisfied stupor, a miniscule bell on the tree rang and the words of Tiny Tim came to my mind.

“Look, Daddy. Teacher says that every time a bell rings an angel gets its wings.”  

“That’s right, that’s right. Attaboy, Clarence!”