Spending the Holidays with People I Want to Punch in the Throat

by Jen Mann

  “No! Our neighbor in Des Moines gave that to me as a hostess gift one year at my Christmas party.”

  “What was this neighbor’s name?”

  “I don’t remember. It doesn’t matter. She picked it out for me and it’s special.”

  “You hate mice.”

  “That’s true. Okay, you can throw this one away. Wait! No, don’t!”

  “What about these red-and-green potholders that are so old and scorched they burn your hands whenever you use them?”

  “No. Marge from church made those for me. They were a wedding present!”

  “Fine. What about this ugly-ass Santa?”

  “Jen! You gave me that!”

  “Was I drunk when I bought it? I apologize for giving that to you. Please throw it away.”

  Last year when we were packing up, I finally convinced her to throw away about twenty items from her menagerie. It was like an episode of Intervention meets Hoarders, because my daughter (the future hoarder) was there that day for my mother’s intervention and she took well over half of the cast-offs for her Christmas decoration collection! So now I have to buy a bin for that shit, too!

  By now we have all heard of the adorable little Elf on the Shelf. Almost everyone I know has one. Some people even have two! I was feeling guilty for not having two—apparently when my kids are adults, they’ll each want one from their childhood. Ugh. I wasn’t looking forward to telling the Hubs why we needed to buy another Elf. Luckily, I didn’t have to have that conversation, because a generous reader sent me a second one to round out my collection.

  The Elf is a handy little thing to have. The little bastard keeps my children in check this time of year. When there is even a hint of rebellion, all I have to do is say “Elf” and my kids snap back in line.

  If he’s so good, Jen, then why did you call him a bastard? you ask. I called him a bastard because even though my children think he’s magic, I’m the one doing all the “magic,” and I totally suck at it. I forget to move him all the time, and when I forget I have to spin even more lies than usual. (“No, Santa can’t give you the four-hundred-dollar Lego Death Star. Even though he says he makes everything, he can’t make Legos and he has to actually go and buy them, and he can’t spend that much money on you” or “Well, I don’t know why he gave it to your friend last year for Christmas. I bet his mommy and daddy paid Santa to do that, and we don’t pay Santa.” Thanks a lot, asshole parents who gave their kid the Death Star from Santa! As parents, let’s all make a pact that any gift over two hundred dollars comes from Grandma and Grandpa rather than Santa, okay? It would make my life a lot easier.)

  But back to our Elf. Our Elf has been a lazy SOB this year. He usually makes his first appearance Thanksgiving night (I get him out when I’m on my way out at 3:00 A.M. for Black Friday). This year we left town and I forgot. He waited until we came back and then he was ready to join our family. Since then he’s only gone away four, maybe five times. I am always forgetting to move him. And it should not be difficult. I am literally moving him from the top shelf in my kitchen to the bottom shelf and back again. I’m such a loser that I can’t even do that right.

  I heard some Overachieving Moms talking one day about how they like to make their Elf do “naughty” things. What exactly did that mean? I asked. “Oh, you know, he bakes cookies in the night and leaves a huge mess for me to clean up in the morning.” WTF? “Yes, and one time last year he took all the ornaments off our tree! Teeheehee.”

  Teeheehee? Why in the world would I make my Elf do something like that? I’m the one who has to clean up his mess and redecorate my tree! All so my kid could ooh and ahh over the magic of the Elf for about three minutes until the next shiny object caught their eye? I decided these women were insane.

  But then I started listening more closely and realized they are not alone. There are entire blogs out there right now dedicated to naughty/fun Elf behavior. I read a blog by a woman named Danielle that really pissed me off. I should have known she’d irritate me when I read her perky-mom-who-loves-to-make-amazing-homemade-memories-with-her-kids-when-she’s-not-secretly-downing-Valium-and-vodka-so-she-can-be-so-damn-perky-and-fun title for her blog. (In case you haven’t guessed, I’m proudly unmedicated, and I have the mood swings to prove it.)

  This site has 101 fun ideas to do with your Elf. One hundred and one. As a friend pointed out, there are only twenty-five days until Christmas—why 101?

  I wanted to punch her as soon as I read her top two:

  1. Have a marshmallow fight (marshmallows everywhere).

  2. Have a pillow fight (feathers everywhere).

  Okay, seriously? Does she have a clue how much a down pillow costs? The hell I’m going to destroy one just so I can sweep it up in the morning!

  Or like I have the time, desire, or resources to make a red carpet entrance for a doll, as she suggested. I can barely get him out of the box and prop him up on the shelf. We haven’t even read the book yet this year and she wants me to literally roll out a red carpet for him. When does she do laundry? When does she work? And most important, when does she sleep?

  20. Make faces on school pictures with a marker.

  I lecture my children constantly on appropriate materials to write on with markers. A photograph is not one of those things. It would take years to undo that damage if I did that. I’d have mustaches on every photograph in my home. “The Elf did it!”

  24. Read a book.

  Yeah, I tried that one on my own the other day (didn’t even need Danielle’s help to come up with that one). The Hubs didn’t see him on the couch reading and he sat on him. The kids couldn’t find him because he wasn’t on his usual shelf. So much for trying to think outside the box…uh, shelf.

  32. Switch clothes from one closet to another.

  And I do this when? At 4:00 A.M. when everyone is asleep and I’m hauling dresses and jeans from one room to another? And we’re assuming my children would even notice I did this.

  42. Take picture of child sleeping.

  This is one I would do just to scare the snot out of them. I’d like to perch the Elf right on their sleeping heads and take a picture of that. I could probably whip that picture out in the summer when they’re being bad and it would scare them enough to knock it off. I’ll bookmark that one.

  44. Knit a scarf or hat.

  When I’m not trashing my house with feathers or flour or drawing on the walls, I’ll whip up a handmade hat, psycho.

  64. Learn multiplication facts.

  Huh? Just set him on the table with flash cards? I guess I could do that, but it sounds just as boring as my shelf.

  80. Elf packs school lunches but mixes up everyone’s lunches. (Each child receives sibling’s lunch—great conversation piece at dinner.)

  Or source of meltdown at school—you pick.

  93. Sit on toilet outside on front lawn—if you happen to have an extra toilet being stored.

  WTF? Who has an “extra” toilet they can put in the yard? Either she’s grasping at straws to get to 101 or she’s white trash.

  He’s called the Elf on the Shelf, not the Elf Who Skydives, Takes Bubble Baths, and Shaves the Dog! Leave him on the shelf so the rest of us slackers don’t look so bad. I think I’m just going to lay my Elf on his shelf, tape wires and hoses to him, and tell my kids he’s in a coma and hopefully he’ll recover before Christmas. That should give me some flexibility.

  I love Christmas lights. In fact, our whole family loves Christmas lights. We love to drive around and look at them. We love the displays that are set to music and you have to park and watch them flash and dance to the beat. We love the crazy, over-the-top houses with icicle lights on the first floor, blinking multicolored lights on the second floor, blue lights on the garage doors, and the chimney outlined in red. We love when just the peaks of the house are outlined with lights. We love the trees lit up with lights. We love those blow-up Santas and snow globes. It’s the cheapest entertainment for us. We have our favorites and we drive b
y them multiple times in the season—although recently one of our favorite houses decided it was too expensive to run its music and light show, and I’ve heard that another favorite display has a glitch this year. It won’t matter, though; we’ll find some other houses to look at. It seems like this year there are more lights than ever. Did I mention I just love them? Because I do.

  When I say I love Christmas lights, what I really mean is I love everyone else’s Christmas lights. I hate putting up our own lights. No one will ever drive by my house and have someone in the backseat beg for a second pass because “it was just so pretty!” Hell will freeze over first.

  A Christmas lights spectacular just won’t happen at our house because the Hubs is the cheapest guy I know. He would never pay for someone to hang lights on our house. I actually checked into it one year. It costs three hundred and seventy-five dollars. And don’t even mention the electric bill. If he was somehow possessed to actually shell out the money to pay someone to hang the lights, then he’d never turn them on because he’d bitch about how much it cost to light them up. We might get an hour of light each night. So not worth the fight for that.

  He’s also not very brave. He would never climb up to the top of our house to hang the lights himself. Really, though, I probably wouldn’t let him climb up there if he wanted to, because it could only go one of two ways:

  1. He falls, but he doesn’t die. Him dying would be too easy on me. Instead he just ends up paralyzed for life and can’t speak. He can only spell out words by blinking at me. He would blame me for making him climb up there to save a measly three hundred and seventy-five bucks and then I’d have to put one of those little sleeping masks on him, because I wouldn’t be able to take his blinking accusations any longer.

  2. He only gets it half done. He’d do one peak or outline half the garage with lights or something like that and then say, “Yeah, that looks pretty good. You don’t need the whole roof outlined. It’s fine like that. No one will notice.”

  Instead, we have two little bushes in the front of our house that we wrap with lights.

  This year for some reason I just could not get into the decorating mode. Not that I’m ever in the mood to decorate for Christmas, but some years it’s more fun than others. There was one year where I just had too much personal stuff that I took on and I really didn’t want to make time to decorate for Christmas. It was overwhelming me, and I just decided, Screw it. I only need to put up one tree for my kids and hang the stockings and, of course, don’t forget that Elf.

  We finally found a day to decorate and I told the Hubs I just wanted the “little tree” that year. That’s the six-footer that we trekked out to Target for years ago when my mother was coming to town. This tree has all my meaningful and keepsake ornaments on it. It’s the “family tree,” as opposed to my “show tree.” The show tree is such a pain in the ass. It can literally take three hours to get that sucker assembled and lit and I just didn’t want to hear the Hubs bitch about it since it’s he who has to do it. He was shocked I wasn’t going all out this year, but he didn’t complain for a second.

  He hauled my bins out of the basement, I put up the tree in a day, and we were done.

  It was cold that day and neither one of us wanted to freeze our asses off to do the little bit of lights outside. We decided we’d forgo it that year.

  Honestly, who was going to care? Like I said before, no one drives by our house and thinks, “Ooh, pretty.” We are on the end of a cul-de-sac surrounded by homes that would make the Griswolds jealous. I was very content to be the dark house. So was the Hubs.

  Or so I thought.

  We came home one night and saw that everyone on our street had lights up and blazing. It looked like a landing strip for the airport. Even the new neighbors across the street had lit up their house. In years prior their house had sat empty, and before that a Jewish family lived there, so we hadn’t had lights over there since we moved into our house.

  The new neighbors were late to the party, but they threw down the gauntlet. They lit every bush, every tree, and around the door, and they even had some light-up reindeer out there. It was actually very tasteful and it looked beautiful.

  The Hubs wheeled into our street and came to a screeching halt when he saw their display. “Son of a bitch! They put up lights.”

  “Yup. Ooh, they’re pretty. Go around the loop again so I can see them better,” I said.

  “Now we have to put up lights,” the Hubs whined.

  “What? No way. It’s too cold. That ship has sailed. We’re perfectly happy being the dark house.”

  “No. No. It’s too much. Now everyone has lights, Jen. We can’t be the only ones. What will the neighbors think?”

  What will the neighbors think?

  Are you kidding me with this shit, Hubs? This is the same man who called our neighbor’s two-year-old child a “liar” when he claimed to be four.

  The neighbor had looked at the Hubs like he was an idiot. “He was just teasing,” the child’s father said.

  “Nope,” the Hubs had said to his face. “He’s a liar.”

  This is the same man who goes to the neighborhood pool and wears full snorkeling gear—including fins—while he swims in five feet of water. With his huge face mask and snorkel he can float around the pool for a long time. He looks like a perv checking out all the ladiez underwater.

  This is the same man who pulls into the garage and immediately puts the door down for fear someone might actually want to have a neighborly conversation with him. If there are neighbors out in their yards, he puts the door down even faster, practically gassing us to death because the car isn’t even turned off yet.

  “What will the neighbors think?” I asked. “Probably not much. It’s not like we’ve ever done a full-on laser light show set to Mannheim Steamroller. I think they’ll just think what they always do. That we’re assholes. A couple of lights in the bushes isn’t going to make a difference.”

  “Yes it will. We’ve got to put the lights up. Tomorrow.”

  And that is how I found myself outside the next day flinging a few half-dead strings of lights haphazardly through our frozen bushes. We stopped after two bushes because our hands were numb and we decided it was as good as it was going to get.

  I stepped back to admire my handiwork and realized I must really love this guy, because it looked ho-ho-horrendous.

  Every year my extended family gets together at Uncle Olaf and Aunt Ruby’s house to celebrate Christmas Eve. We end up staying up very late, eating way too many sweets, and playing games. Now, most families play Monopoly or charades on Christmas Eve, but not my family. Remember, I told you, I come from a long line of overachievers. Overachievers wouldn’t be satisfied playing the same games everyone else plays. Heaven forbid!

  Even though Uncle Olaf isn’t related to me by blood, Aunt Ruby chose well. Uncle Olaf has been forced to learn and adapt to keep up with the bar that my aunt sets. So every Christmas Eve we play a game that Uncle Olaf has made up for our entertainment just for that evening. That’s right. We never play that game again. It’s a new game every single year. It’s usually a family-based trivia game. Meaning that if you don’t know my family well, then you’re never going to win. That being said, it’s pretty much rigged for my grandmother to win. Even the in-laws who have been around for forty years can’t answer some of Uncle Olaf’s questions, because who really knows the name of my mom’s third-grade teacher? Or how much (to the ounce) Aunt Ruby weighed at her birth? Uncle Olaf is no dummy. He doesn’t want to be cut out of the will.

  Just so the new spouses of the cousins don’t feel like complete idiots, Uncle Olaf always includes something easy for them. Like how many children Jenni and the Hubs currently have—and bonus points if you can name them. They’re never going to win, but he doesn’t want them to hate his game.

  The best questions are the video trivia challenge ones. Uncle Olaf will show you an extreme close-up of an eyeball on his big-screen television. He’ll give yo
u a clue: “This eyeball belongs to someone in our family.” You get one guess and then he zooms out and you can see the owner of the eye. It could be himself as a baby from his own baby picture, one of my kids from their school pictures, or his daughter’s dog. You just never know whom Uncle Olaf considers “family.” It’s very rare that anyone gets these questions right. They’re way too hard. Most people can’t even recognize their own freckled nose. I keep hoping that one of these years he’ll feature scars from everyone’s gallbladder surgery or appendectomy, but whenever I mention this as a possible idea, I’m told that I’m weird. He’s showing us pictures of dog’s eyes and calling them family and I’m the weird one?

  Back to the story now. If you get the answer right, then you get to choose a white-elephant gift from the pile under the Christmas tree. Everyone brings several crappy gifts. We all compete to see who can bring the worst stuff. Throughout the year we all hit garage sales, clearance racks, and Freecycle to see what we can find. There are a lot of gingerbread-scented candles and singing reindeer. Very rarely is there anything good that you actually want. Some of the same gifts turn up year after year to be regifted, like the beautifully framed eight-by-ten head shot of Uncle Olaf, the one-thousand-piece panoramic puzzle depicting the Last Supper, or the matching strawberry-flavored edible underwear the Hubs and I received as a wedding gift from my grandparents. Well, really they were from Uncle Carl; he just taped Grandma’s card to the box as a joke. I thought it was hilarious. Grandma did not. Now that I think about it, I haven’t seen the edible underwear in a few years. I think my cousin Zelda received them last. I’m sure she took them out of circulation because they upset Grandma each time she saw them and my kids were starting to ask how underwear could be edible. Either that or she’s a fan of strawberry.