…and scoring a field goal.
Oh, who are we kidding? Thanksgiving isn’t the Holiday kick off anymore, Halloween is. The stores around here replaced their spooky orange and black decorations with tinsel, holly and red ribbons by dawn of November 1st. And of course, the eating season begins as soon as the discounted Halloween candy sales begin in September.
Is it any wonder Americans are so fat?
I said years ago that Thanksgiving really is the perfect American Holiday: first we eat stuff ourselves silly then we go as deep into debt as we can.
For some reason this year, I feel no overwhelming compunction to buy lots of Christmas gifts. Maybe it’s because all my kids are adults. Maybe it’s because I spent the last three months buying things for the expectant granddaughters. Maybe it’s because the weather has been so nice right up until this week. I prefer to think it’s because last year, we finally over did it. When we spent the night at Ty and Megan’s, we all brought all our Christmas presents along. In the morning, the pile under the tree looked not so much like a mountain but an entire range. It took us nearly three hours to open everything and even the grand kids were bored with opening new packages before we got around to making breakfast. This year, I’m thinking one or two things people really want and skip all the greed gifts.
Okay, not skip: The Pivec family Christmas Eve Extravaganza is all about greed gifts.
Greed gifts are a tradition that was started on my side of the family back in the mid eighties when we were all either unemployed or newly employed with tiny kids. Either way, none of us had five dollars to spare. I don’t know who came up with the idea of greed gifts but the idea was to spend as little as possible (spending cap was $2.00) so as to give everyone something just so there would be more presents under the tree. Greed gifts ranged from nice things picked up at garage/estate sales to zip lock bags full of the fat trimmed off a corned beef brisket. Very quickly the goal was simply to make everyone else in the room laugh. For a few years while we lived in Montana, we didn’t go home for Christmas but I still liked to make an impression: one year a craft shop in town was going out of business and among the deeply discounted items were bags of crafting feathers in every color of the rainbow. I bought ten bags of feathers (.49c per), wrapped them in individual, beautifully wrapped packages of different sizes and shipped them all home. I didn’t get to see it but I was told the feather storm was prodigious and guessing what color would be next a highlight of Christmas morning. There was a string of years where I thought about greed gifts all year long. My favorite two greed gifts were the long, red-haired wig I gave my brother Andy (estate sale, $1.50) the year he realized he was going bald, and a painting my sister Katie did, which I stole, signed my own name to and then gave to my mom, making sure Katie saw it as Mom opened it. Somewhere in my photo archives I’ve got her reaction.
Eventually, as more and more grandkids joined the picture, the greed gifts went by the wayside: there were now so many of us that greed gifts are unnecessary to create an insanely large pile of presents to be opened.
It took me 25 years to convince the Pivec side that greed gifts were the way to go, so now our Christmas Eve party is highlighted by the Game. Every guest brings one gift to be exchanged. The gifts are non-specific and anonymous. The range every year is from gag gifts pulled out of someone’s closet to lovely things everyone wants. I got a Coleman’s lantern fifteen years ago that we still use. I also got a set of drill bits that I love. Every year there’s something up for grabs that everyone wants; one year it was a baseball signed by Joe Mauer, another year a 24 pack of toilet paper. No one fought over the tp during the game but everyone wanted to bring it home at the end of the night.
This Thanksgiving was brisk and the snow we got on Tuesday hung around so it felt very Holiday-ish.
Josie arrived home around 1 on Wednesday afternoon. She had no immediate plans, so we hauled up the Christmas tree and decorated the house. It’s the first time I’ve ever put up Christmas decorations before Thanksgiving. I don’t approve of leapfrogging like that but I had to take advantage of the help while it was available: it’s too big a job for me to do alone. Last year I didn’t get the tree up till mid-December because I just couldn’t face it.
Josie lit the tree. I taught her to do it properly when she was about ten. A gorgeous tree is all about the lights. You can’t just toss strings on it; you have to depth into consideration. We start at the bottom and wrap each branch from the trunk out, one layer at a time. It takes forever and is backbreaking but it’s worth it. The tree looks like something on a showroom floor.
This year, I got two strings of twinkle lights. They’ve finally made lights that blink independently affordable! When I was growing up, my Mom had one string of twinkle lights. They were white, she put them on the living room mantle with a garland of greens and flocked fruit. They lasted for forty years. No one makes lights like that anymore. But at least someone finally got to the twinkling part. Josie put them on the tree in such a way that the whole thing seems to be twinkling, not just one chunk of it.
I started collecting glass ornaments when Josie was old enough to be trusted around the tree. It was one of the compensations for not having toddlers anymore. Well, now I’ve got grand kids but one of the differences between kids and grand kids is I don’t mind if the grand kids wreck the Christmas tree.
But a broken glass ornament is dangerous so we made sure to put most of the glass up high on the tree and cover the bottom with needlepoint ornaments. Over the years, I’ve stitched several dozen stockings, bears and assorted commemorative ornaments. They’re beautiful, personal and unbreakable. Many years ago, when she was about three, my niece Sophie collected all the bears I had done to that point and played with them throughout the Christmas Eve party. There are now so many bears on the tree I don’t think she could carry them all at once, even at her advanced age of over 10.
Last year, Tyler and Megan took all the ornaments I’d done for them home to hang on their own tree. Katie took some of hers but left me others. This year, I got tendonitis before I could stitch ornaments for everyone so I won’t be adding much to the stash this year. It sucks because I had some really good ideas. 2016 was a hellova year!
After we finished getting all the rooms in the house decorated, Josie and I relaxed on the porch eating devil cookies and watching Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol while Jay made us dinner. Josie had no idea who Mr. Magoo is.
That cartoon was one of my favorite Christmas specials growing up. It was right up there with It’s Christmas Charlie Brown, Rudolph and the Grinch. I told her it was the scariest thing I ever saw as a kid, next to the Wizard of Oz. It stopped running on TV back in the ‘80s, I think, when Mr. Magoo was deemed politically incorrect for mocking the myopic. Seriously. No wonder kids these days can’t handle disappointment of any kind.
Scott Farkus would not have lasted a day at my house growing up. We’d have hog tied him and dragged him over the bee hive we found in our front hill.
Mr. Magoo gets at least partial credit for our insensitive treatment of bullies.
A Christmas Carol is a great, classic tale and I approve of it, any way that it’s told, from the classic stage production to Scrooged.
Josie enjoyed Mr. M’s Xmas carol. In the beginning, when the Ghost of Marley appears, she exclaimed “Woah, I can see what you meant by scary!”
I’m such an old fart I actually say ‘In my day, the cartoons were better; scary, insensitive and mean…and we liked it that way!”
We really did.
Jay got up in the wee hours Thursday morning to get our turkey roasted. He bought a 14 pounder and it was done by 8:00 am. I awoke to the most delicious smell in the world. Katie came over and she and Josie made pies for the parties we were going to. I’d already made the cookies I was bringing. I got the cranberry sauce made while they played with pie crusts.
We all headed off to Pam and Steve’s early in the afternoon. I have no idea how many Pivecs were crammed into the house over the course of the day but it was a lot. Most of the in town family was there. There were two brand new baby boys to be passed around: CC is 6wks and L is 3wks.
By Easter there will be three new baby girls. I can’t wait!
As usual, the food, beverages and company were the finest imaginable. Jay and I have congratulated each other many times over the decades that we genuinely like our families.
Just after pie and before the coma set in, we packed up our cars and headed back toward our neighborhood for the Hubbell side of the family gathering at Andy and Vi’s house. They eat later there so we arrived in time for a glass of wine before diving into another giant dinner. The key to our Thanksgiving is pacing one’s self.
The two eggnog pies that Josie and Katie had made in the morning were not the best in their attempts at Holiday desserts. Half the fun for them is the suspense of whether or not the pie turns out. Sometimes they do but the disasters are so much more memorable. It’s not like either girl chooses a recipe they know, or practices beforehand. No, they just dive in, whip something up and attempt to feed it to their family. Maybe the suspense is the whole point.
This year was an unmitigated disaster. They were supposed to refrigerate the pie for five hours before serving. They left one pie in the fridge while we went to Pam’s, carefully transporting the Pivec Pie, planning to keep it in the fridge until after dinner.
Rounding the corner to get onto the highway, a crockpot in the back of Katie’s car fell on the first pie, smushing it to bits. It’s a good thing Josie wrapped it in plastic or Katie would have eggnog pie all over the back of her car.
Later in the day, they swung by our house and picked up the Hubbell pie for Andy’s. It had been in the fridge for the proscribed amount of time and they were very careful on the 1 mile drive between our house and my brother’s.
By the time dinner was over, the pie had completely melted. It was a soggy crust full of completely re-liquefied eggnog. It was, in a word; gross.
Fortunately, there were plenty of dessert options at both houses. I’d brought my world famous ginger snaps to Pivecs and my equally world famous devil cookies to Hubbell’s. Others had brought every pie option imaginable and my niece Meg, who is baker Mensa, made a pumpkin pie that was worth going to war over.
What was not worth going to war over was the recent election. Both families had participants supporting either side. Some were crushed, some elated, some fearful (very young ones) …My Christmas wish is that they all come to realize that just as a politician’s promises are written in dust, so is their fear mongering and demonization. We’re all Americans, and our lives are our own responsibilities. Yes, politics does matter but it’s the push and pull, the yin and yang that keeps us from going over the cliff.
Jay and I were some of the first to bail at the end of the night. We headed home around 8, having been partying like Americans since lunch time. Full of turkey, stuffing and cranberry sauce, we threw in the napkin and were in bed by ten.
Josie and Zack were up again before the crack of dawn to go see Santa with a huge crowd of relatives. If a Black Friday ever dawns that doesn’t see a crowd of Pivecs in line to see Santa downtown, I guess we’ll all know the end of the world has come.
But here in the waning hours of the Best Year Ever, the biggest crowd of Pivvies in decades jammed in next to Santa for a family Holiday photo.
Happy Holidays!