A few weeks ago, I asked a friend of mine for her address so that my wife could send her and her family a Christmas card.
“That’s okay,” she said. “We don’t do Christmas cards.”
“Really?” I asked, surprised. “Why not?”
“Well,” she explained, “to begin with, Christmas cards and the stamps to mail them cost a small fortune now a days, and I’m cheap. Plus, I’ve already got a million and one things to do at this time of year and the last thing I need is to have to sit down and sign and address dozens of impersonal cards which will just end up in the garbage anyway.”
“I don’t believe you don’t like getting Christmas cards,” I said, shocked. “That’s one of my favorite parts of the holidays. And I’ll have you know I don’t throw them in the garbage, either. I tape them up on the back of my front door, at a very attractive forty-five degree angle.”
She smiled and asked, “But who actually has to go out and buy all the Christmas cards you send to your friends and family?”
“Well,” I said, “my wife usually does that.”
She nodded her head with a ‘I thought so’ expression on her face and said, “And who buys the stamps, signs everyone’s names on the cards, addresses the envelopes and mails the darn things?”
“Well,” I admitted, “I guess my wife does all of that, too.”
“See,” she said, “and I bet you’re not even the one who hangs them up the door, are you?” When I refused to answer, she added, “You know, you men are all the same. You just don’t realize how much time and effort goes into having a nice Christmas. And I bet if you asked your wife if it would be okay with her to stop mailing out cards every year, she’d jump at the opportunity.”
Well thank you very much, Ebenezer Scrooge, I thought to myself.
Later that evening, as I sat comfortably in my rocking chair admiring all the beautiful Christmas cards hanging on the back of my front door, I noticed that my wife was frantically scribbling away on a piece of paper at the dining room table.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Just trying to come up with a menu for Christmas Eve dinner,” she said.
“Is this our year to have everyone over here?” I asked.
“Of course it is. Why do you think I’ve been running around like a chicken with its head cut off for the past two weeks?”
“So,” I asked naively, “what all do you have left to do?”
“Are you kidding, everything.”
“Like what?”
“Well, to begin with, the house is a complete mess and the whole thing needs to be cleaned from top to bottom. Plus, I’ve got to wrap and mail all the packages that are going up to my family in Oregon, get all the boys a haircut, and borrow a folding table and some extra chairs so that everyone will have something to sit on. Then I have to go shopping for all the kids and your parents. By the way, do you have any idea what I can get your mother this year?”
“Not really.”
“How about your father?”
“Sorry, but I don’t have a clue.”
“Anyway, then, if I live through doing most of the Christmas shopping this late in the year, I have to wrap everything up, decorate the house, and get ready for Christmas Eve.”
“What all do you have to do on Christmas Eve?” I asked.
“Well, I have to plan dinner, purchase all the food and drinks, prepare the meal, serve the food, clean up the mess, and somehow find the energy to stay up after midnight to be Santa Claus.”
“Hey, maybe I could do that this year,” I volunteered, starting to feel a little guilty.
“I don’t think so,” she said with obvious alarm, knowing full well that I would probably screw the whole thing up. “You won’t know where I’ve hidden all the presents, and which ones go in the kids’ stockings and which ones go under the tree.”
“But it can’t be all that complicated,” I said.
“That’s okay,” she said, “you’ve already done your part for Christmas this year.”
“And what was that?” I asked with interest.
Stumped for a quick answer, she took what seemed like a good 30 seconds before she finally said, “You brought home that Christmas tree with the huge gap in the branches, remember?”