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Jeff's Life
Archive
Jeff Stimpson, 39, has been a working journalist for 15 years. He lives in New York with his wife Jill and sons Alex, 3, and Edwin, four months. He maintains a site of essays, Jeff's Life, at:
JEFF'S LIFE
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Monthly Column... |
by
Jeff Stimpson
"You unwrap presents you found in the trash?! What kind of family are you!?" - Overheard phone call of a co-worker.
In the interests of teaching the boys where both of their parents come from, we celebrate a little Christmas. I indoctrinated the boys to "A Charlie Brown Christmas" shortly after Halloween. I have a few presents for Jill, including a wooden spatula and a water bottle for her to take to the gym, and Ned still has scads of gifts left over from his birthday, and Alex can have a few of those. Again this year, I also picked up a little tree, on December 23rd.
"Jeff, where did you get this damned tree?" Jill asks on the phone on December 24th. I hear Ned in the background crying, "Tree! Tree!" It (the tree) is one foot high, and lives in a green plastic flower pot. It was $8.
Why?
"Because Ned and Alex are carrying it all over the house! Alex is pulling it out of the pot. Now he's trying to water it! You'll have to buy another one. Always Buy Two!"
Always Buy Two has become my motto after Jill has kept coming home with one red toy truck at a time from the Pathmark store. Remember how, when you fell for the love of your life, every single thing in the background faded and all you could see was your love? That's how Alex and Ned act, simultaneously, over one red toy Pathmark truck. Always Buy Two. Damned kids.
I return to the tree store for another shapely one-footer. I get to the register and am informed that the price went up $10 between December 23rd and December 24th. Merry Christmas. Damned kids. But Jill's warning rings like a sleigh bell: "Make sure you bring home another (bad word) tree."
I ask her if she, a good Jewish girl, ever thought she'd say that sentence. "That particular group of words?" she replies. "No."
We'll probably start decorating the tree(s) tonight. Jill has mentioned popcorn and cranberries. I've asked her to corral the boys into drawing little things on paper that we can cut out and attach with ribbon. We'll wrap the plastic flower pots in tinfoil, and string the lights Jill bought. Hard to believe she has comparison-shopped for Christmas lights. "Hey!" she said over a $1.49 set in a Rite Aid. "The ones I bought were 99 cents. Oh, I see: This is a hundred lights."
Tomorrow is Christmas. It's supposed to sleet. I stop at the grocer's for cranberries. They're out of cranberries, apparently, and instead I pick up colored gummy bears and a red hybrid dried fruit called "craisins."
On Christmas Eve, we get the kids to sleep relatively quickly. "Go to sleep, Ned," I call, "so Santa can come and leave you the presents we never got around to giving you on your birthday." I tap in the nails to string Jill's less-than-a-hundred lights while she pops popcorn and digs up a needle and thread. The oldies station plays the top 101 Christmas songs of all time; my favorite, "Snoopy's Christmas," comes in at number seven. We string together popcorn and the berries -- I skewer a few gummy bears for good measure -- until we have about 10 inches of decorations a tree. Then I let Jill read the draft of this essay.
"Nice," she says. "But there goes my Christmas surprise. 'A wooden spatula and a water bottle?'"
"I didn't get that for you! If I'd gotten that for you, would I have let you read the essay?"
"I think you got that for me," she says. I drop the spatula, unwrapped, into the kitchen utensil drawer. The bottle I wrap -- after camouflaging it in Tupperware -- and put by the tree(s), along with a rolled-up and wrapped Gourmet (I intend to buy Jill a subscription and let them Bill Me In January).
Next morning, Jill is doing the present thing even before the coffee is done dripping. "How nice," Jill says, hefting the package with the water bottle, "you got me Tupperware!" She gets me a nice tie for parenting conferences. Ned gets a truck, and Alex gets a wooden magnetic farm set. Or Ned gets the farm set and Alex gets the truck. Jill seems to like the magazine. Ned stares at the nailed-up lights. We get coffee. Ned gets cocoa. Alex gets Cheerios. The living room floor is littered with wrapping paper, toy boxes, fragments of magnetic farm, and enough wreckage for me to tell myself that the boys have a better sense of where they come from. My tie is coiled on the couch. Alex finishes his Cheerios and Ned his cocoa, and they start to fight over the truck.
Copyright 2001 Jeff Stimpson, all rights reserved
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