Saturday, December 05, 2009

The Month of Christmas

String Bean is all about Christmas this year. Before Thanksgiving was even over, when those first Christmas catalogs started arriving in the mail, she started hoarding them in her room, gazing wistfully at them by day, requesting to “read” them together as her bedtime story at night. She wants, in short, one of everything. Sure, there are things that are higher on the list, like the Princess bike (in purple) and Tinkerbell roller skates (ditto) and a doll-house style princess castle, complete with mini princesses and a horse-drawn carriage for them to share. Lower on the list (but still on the list) are a baby doll that crawls, a little robot dog, a dinosaur that walks, and a remote-controlled helicopter.

The other day I was telling her to be patient, because Christmas isn’t until the end of the month, and she gave me one of her impatient looks and said, “Christmas isn’t a day, it’s a month.” I tried explaining that, like Halloween and Thanksgiving and Easter, Christmas is just one day per year, and that the month is December, but she wasn’t having any of it. I guess it’s hard to believe all of the ads, TV shows, movies, decorations, music and festive clothes are about a single day rather than an entire month, so I let it go.

Also adding to the confusion is the fact that between her three sets of grandparents she’ll have three separate Christmas celebrations, plus a gathering with my step-siblings and their children. So maybe having four family-gathering-plus-Christmas-present-opening sessions in a span of eleven days renders the whole concept of Christmas Day irrelevant. Let the month of Christmas begin…

No comments:

Post a Comment