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The Kindest Present in the Midst of Holiday Madness: Grant Loved Ones the Gift of Opting Out

As I compare and contrast me now and me way back then, I barely recognize my former self during the holidays, especially in my 20s, 30s and 40s. Back then, I started playing holiday music and decorating the day after Thanksgiving. I went into major debt to shop for gifts. I baked  and decorated cookies like a crazed woman. I made homemade English toffee and fudge and my father-in-law’s penuche and full-cream caramels. I wrapped beautiful gifts, back before gift bags were born. When my kids were young, I let them invite friends over for cookie-decorating parties. I made homemade stockings and filled them with great care.

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And every year, like the hours immediately after childbirth, I was so exhausted and depleted that I vowed I wouldn’t do “all this” again. In fact, back when I was married to Husband No. 2 – who was Jewish and had no investment in Christmas anyway –  I asked him to videotape me the morning after Christmas, surrounded by the holiday aftermath, so I’d have a recording to consult later, in case I got swept up in the holiday spirit and forgot my tinsel-covered misery. I had caught a cold, so I was sick and tired and felt sad and disappointed. At the core of my sadness was I’d worked so hard to create a happy holiday for my family, and I felt unappreciated and taken for granted. I looked into the camera and was honest about my feelings, and vowed to stop the holiday madness, because it was making me feel anxious and crazy, and what was the point, really?  My marriage crashed and burned the next year, so it was an easy promise to keep. Ever since, I’ve dialed the holidays way, way, way back. I’ve never regretted it.

Instead of a 6-foot Christmas tree loaded with boxes of sentimental ornaments, I now have a small live orange tree on a table that I’ve covered in lights. I’ll plant it after Christmas is over.

Instead of spending money I don’t have on gifts nobody really needs, I give homemade food-related gifts, and try to instill into my grandchildren the joy of making and giving gifts, like the reptile pins I showed you last week.

(I’ll share some other kid-friendly projects in the coming days.)

This year, instead of our traditional Christmas dinner of turkey, gravy, dressing, mashed potatoes, cranberries, yeast rolls and holiday pies, my sisters, youngest son and I are making tamales, followed by a game night.

Is it traditional? No. But if we like it, it may be the start of a new tradition.

I think during my earlier years I was trying to chase this elusive wisp of some cherished childhood holiday ideal; precious golden nuggets mined from an overall train wreck of a childhood: Lying under the Christmas tree in the dark, staring up at the colorful lights in our South Street home. My mother showing my sisters and me how to string popcorn and cranberries for our Trinity Street Christmas tree. Our Butte Street landlady who brought white bakery bags that held ginger cookies shaped like girls, whose flavor I’ve tried and failed to replicate because it’s a precisely balanced spice combination I’ve never mastered. Cardamom? Cloves? Nutmeg? Cinnamon? Ginger? (I’ll know it when I smell and taste it.)

My memory of Christmas and Redding when I grew up in the ’60s and ’70s was steeped in a magical small-town feeling, when Market Street fully bisected the city, and there was a real downtown, with two bakeries, and cafes and stores like J.C. Penney’s and Dicker’s and Sim Nathans and the fancy Carriage House for women and the fancy Giromonte’s and Thompson’s for men. The city’s Christmas tree was inserted in a manhole at Placer and Yuba (or was it Tehama), and every year some drunk driver would plow into the tree, because, well no wonder. Who expects a massive,  full-on lighted Christmas tree smack in the middle of the street? We did. And we loved it.

Woolworth’s was my favorite store of all, because it had everything from comic books and record albums to live baby turtles and cologne. For a kid, $5 could probably take care of our entire family’s Christmas shopping. And, it had a luncheonette counter, which was probably the last place I had a real honest-to-God ice cream soda.

But all those places are gone, and Redding-now doesn’t remotely resemble Redding-then, any more than Doni-now resembles Doni-then. There’s no going back, which reminds me of a recent conversation my friend had with her son — who’s now in his 30s — when he commented that he missed the kinds of Thanksgivings their family used to have, back when he and his sister were kids.

“Well, you and your cousins aren’t little boys playing Nintendo in the garage anymore during the holidays, either,” she said.

Word. The years pass and we all change. The key is adapting to the changes to match the reality of our current lives.

I must say, as content as my Christmas-lite reality is, it sometimes makes me feel a bit like an outsider when I meet frazzled people who breathlessly ask if I’m ready for Christmas, because aside from baking, some knitting and doing Christmas cards, I’ve pretty much retired from my manic old Christmas ways. So when I encounter someone deep in the throes of holiday shopping, their experience feels both familiar and foreign to me.

Much like last week when I bumped into an acquaintance in a store, someone I’d not seen since her recent emergency hospitalization and surgery and prolonged recovery. But there she was, looking completely whipped, with a few items in her arms. We chatted for a few minutes, and I commented that I was happy to see her, but surprised she was out and about. She said she had Christmas shopping to do. I offered the observation that I thought her entire family would give her a pass on this Christmas, and would understand if she didn’t kill herself buying their gifts, you know, what with surviving something that could have been fatal.

“Oh, they’ve told me that,” she said with a laugh.

I asked why she didn’t just take them up on their offer to opt out of Christmas. This year, more than any, is the one where everyone in her life would (should) understand completely, and expect nothing from her except the gift of being alive and making it through a life-threatening ordeal. She got serious and admitted she was running out of steam.

“You know what? I’m going to put this stuff back and go home,” she said. I felt like cheering.

She had a very good reason for opting out of Christmas this year. And many people have had the kind of 2018 — whether because of the Carr and or Camp fires, or illness, or family crap, or heart ache or financial catastrophe, or a million other reasons — to just cash in that pass card and celebrate this season as simply and sanely as humanly possible.

It’s a gift we can give ourselves to go holiday lite, and it’s a gift we can give others to join us and do the same. Together, we’ll have a holiday filled with comfort and joy, and once again, maybe it really will be the hap, happiest time of the year. For real.

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Doni Chamberlain

Independent online journalist Doni Chamberlain founded A News Cafe in 2007 with her son, Joe Domke. Chamberlain holds a Bachelor's Degree in journalism from CSU, Chico. She's an award-winning newspaper opinion columnist, feature and food writer recognized by the Associated Press, the California Newspaper Publishers Association and E.W. Scripps. She's been featured and quoted in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, L.A. Times, Slate. Bloomberg News and on CNN, KQED and KPFA. She lives in Redding, California.

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