Anyone who has seen National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation knows that Clark Griswold spends the entire holiday season valiantly trying to make Christmas a magical holiday for his family, even while his house literally falls down around him. His character is a hyperbole of all of us at times as we try to meet our own holiday expectations. But, oh, how all of those expectations can turn into a disaster faster than you can say, “We’re gonna have the hap, hap, happiest Christmas.”
Last year, in true Griswold fashion, a few of my Christmas wishes turned into a “full-blown, four-alarm holiday emergency.”
It started off with an ugly Christmas sweater. A feud with a family member – similar to the one Clark has with his neighbors – was casting a black cloud over the holiday season; I was bound and determined to put some holiday cheer in the season via the ugly sweater. After scouring thrift shop clothes racks, I found the perfect one: a tunic with a pleasantly cheesy polar bear. He was wearing his own Christmas sweater and toboggan hat that had two cute Pom Pom tassels dangling from the entire ensemble. I didn’t even look in the mirror before leaving the house for its first public debut. It wasn’t until I took a bathroom break at a preschool function for my daughter that I noticed the Pom Pom tassels were strategically placed in perfect alignment with my breasts. I turned to the right. They shimmied. I turned to the left. They danced and sashayed merrily. I picked one up and gave it a little twirl. Yep, I looked like a member of “Mom’s Unite for Pole Dancing.”
The rest of the party was spent with my arms crossed, and my ugly sweater now has a special spot forever in the back of my closet.
If I couldn’t have a great ugly sweater, I was going to take pride in giving the best stocking stuffers for my family this side of the Miami Valley. I stock-piled and bought clearance throughout the year and ended up with such an abundant stash of stocking stuffers for my family that they didn’t all fit. We hang our stockings on a shelf… and have for seven years. So I simply hung the stockings with care and placed the extra stuffers on top of the shelf.
My husband and I had finally finished the last-minute wrapping and laid down for the night. Our heads had no sooner hit the pillow when a crash came from the living room. My first thought was that the dog had finally knocked over our tree, something she’d been trying to do all season. But when we jumped out of bed, there, lying in all of its broken glory, was the shelf and all of its excessive stocking stuffers, strewn across the floor. Apparently this was the year our shelf finally decided to call it quits. We swept up broken bits of glass from shattered ornaments and picked the remains of a gingerbread house out of the carpet, all while hoping our 4-year-old wouldn’t wake up and catch us. If you’ve never tried to quietly screw a shelf back into a wall at midnight, I’ll just tell you now that it’s not an easy task.
In the morning, we spun a tale that Santa ate one too many cookies and broke our shelf. Until we finally fixed the gash in the wall seven months later, it was a constant reminder of the “Santa incident.”
Last year’s Christmas story thankfully didn’t have a cousin Eddie or a cat being electrocuted in the tree, but it still wasn’t quite the Hallmark holiday I intended. That’s ok with me. I’ve decided the mishaps and plans gone awry add just enough spice to each holiday to make it memorable for years to come.
What are your Christmas Vacation moments?
