Indoor Camping: Fixing Up the Fixer-Upper

Friday, December 17, 2004

A Very Cal and Mary Christmas

When I can’t think of something to talk about, I’ll ask about your childhood. How many sisters and brothers do you have? Did your Mom work? What kind of house and in what kind of place did you live?

Watch out. From then on, I’ve boxed you up. I forever after remember you as the one whose parents divorced when you were twelve, and you lived with your Dad in California while your sisters stayed with your Mom in Iowa. I think about this every time I listen to you, assuming there’s some deep connection between what you are now and who you were then.

The only conclusion I’ve made from all this nosy research is that everyone’s family screwed up. Some families screw up so much it’s obvious to anyone they’re screwed up. Sometimes this is almost easier to deal with: there’s a problem and everyone can see it. Other times families screw up and hide it well.

This is worse. If you don’t see a problem, you don’t have anything to fix.

Charlie and I went out with some friends who we thought we’d really like. We didn’t know them well but we had a good superficial relationship. They seemed so nice and funny and just plain charming for the whole five minutes we’d cross paths.

After way too short a period of time, and after more beer than necessary for the task, we couldn’t think of anything to say. This isn’t usually my problem. I figure if I open up, others will follow. I often start conversations with, “My step-daughter, the ex-meth-addict with twenty tattoos, is making us grandparents next month. Do you have kids?”

“We just met them,” Charlie will often whisper to me. “Do they need to know this?”

I decided to fill the awkward silence with stories of my own family. Maybe they’d open up and we could get through the evening without it taking a week. Maybe we could connect.

Charlie had already shared plenty of Cop stories, so I decided to share from the other side of the authority. I used to sneak in at 4 or 5 in the morning, so far past curfew even my parents believed I was already home, I said. I’d crawl through the doggie door in the bathroom and told them, if caught, I’d been home for hours – I was just using the bathroom. The only negative was tiptoeing barefoot in the backyard by my parents’ bedroom windows, where the snails hung out. I got good at screaming without making noise.

Our friends smiled but didn’t bite. Evidently they didn’t have authority problems. I kept talking. I shared stories about my tightwad Dad who carries tubes of epoxy around with him anywhere. He visited my house in Montana on vacation once. When he left dry-rot was a curse of the past. So was our potential equity. Everything with drip potential was now coated with a big, lumpy ring of white. We called a plumber, which we should have done before he visited. His vacation cost us plenty.

I was ready with stories about my Mom, the Registered Dietician who gets together with her friends and oil paints big pictures of naked ladies, but the wife spoke up. “My father died before I was old enough to know him.”

“That must have been difficult,” I said. Now I felt bad. You can’t complain about your Dad if you never knew him.

“He was retired long before I was born. It’s just the way it was.”

“I don’t know anyone who grew up in a typical family,” Charlie said.

“I did,” the husband said. “My family was totally normal. We didn’t have any problems.”

“That’s nice,” I said, thinking about how boring that sounded.

Nobody said anything for a little bit. I noticed the wife looking increasingly uncomfortable. She looked over at her husband and after another moment of silence, said, “Your Dad was an alcoholic.”

“Yeah, but he just went to bed,” the husband said. “We knew, but it wasn’t a big deal.”

We never did connect. It’s the first time I realized what a gift it is to have a semi-dysfunctional family. It gives you instant conversation. It gives you something to laugh about. There’s nothing funny about problem-free families, especially if it’s not true. Is it ever true?

Holidays and families go together whether you like it or not. When Charlie worked as a Deputy in Florida, he went to one call where a Dad picked up the whole Christmas tree and threw it at his wife. Another time, he had to deal with a wife who wouldn’t stop throwing unwrapped presents at her husband. He responded to one Christmas call where the turkey was lying on the floor and gravy and mashed potatoes dripped from the walls. Apparently the conversation around the table wasn’t going so well there, either.

Christmas magnifies everything: what we have and what we don’t. Alcohol magnifies things, too, such as the irritating qualities of people might not chose to spend time with if you didn’t feel obligated and weren’t genetically linked. Awkward silences might be favorable over some families’ ways of getting together for the holidays.

There are all the expectations, as well. My ex loved Christmas even though he’s an atheist. He worked for weeks to make it perfect. He had such high expectations so no matter what we did, it was never good enough.

There couldn’t be enough presents, so he’d use my social security number and open accounts at Spiegel and Sears and buy all the kids new bedroom furniture. Then he’d go to a dog breeder and buy an expensive puppy to have delivered Christmas morning. He got so angry when the kids ended up creating cities out of empty boxes and opened wrapping paper to play with their non-gift, pre-Christmas action figures.

My relatives, all of them, have lots more money for gifts than us. They’re not living in a fixer which, if we had money, we’d get someone else to fix up and get the hell out of here. No matter what we buy, we feel bad. It’s so much easier to buy the right gift when you have a bigger credit limit.

We get around this by making gifts for the relatives for Christmas. Last year we bought Crate and Barrel glass bowls, beautiful nice ones which I would have liked to receive myself. The Vegan and his brother drew designs on clear contact paper, cut them out, and applied etching solution to create expensive-looking one-of-a-kind art. It was a good idea but I couldn’t do the exact same thing again this year. We didn’t have the time or the money, not even for little, cheap glass bowls. I’m buying carpet instead.

You can’t tell your relatives you don’t have money for gifts. They will only believe you have plenty of money but you don’t want to spend it on them. “Sure you do,” they think. “You’re just too cheap to spend it on me.”

My Dad and his wife, Mary, have a different solution. They travel all year, going on cruises and bike trips through Europe. Instead of spending big money on unique clothing or jewelry from faraway places and giving these out for Christmas gifts, they do one better: they combine creativity with cheapness. They do it better than anyone. It’s one of my favorite conversation starters. Even my kids could get their whole classrooms quiet when they told about their “Cal and Mary Christmas.”

My grown-up kids call every year to ask if the Cal and Mary package arrived yet. Cal and Mary send a big box full of little things wrapped up in recycled paper from the sixties and seventies. I’ve never seen them buy new paper so I wonder where they keep finding this old, often metallic, often water-stained, retro paper. The kids look forward to opening up this box more than anything else.

We open this package last and we open the individual gifts one by one, so we can all see what each other got. One time my son got a thin, flat gift. He unwrapped the recycled paper carefully to find a piece of recycled paper. The card attached said, “We know how much you like to read,” so he used it as a bookmark until someone threw it away, thinking it was used wrapping paper.

My kids once went on a cruise with my Dad and Mary. That Christmas they got, all individually wrapped, several soap samples and tiny tubes of shampoo they saved from their shared cruise. “We thought this would remind you of your trip,” the note read. The Vegan said, “Next time we go out to dinner, I’m saving the mints by the cash register and giving those out for Christmas.” This is why we don’t take him out anywhere.

Every year we do a little math and figure out they spend more on the postage to mail the Christmas package than on what they’ve wrapped up inside. This simply proves it is the thought that counts. You can’t wrap a piece of wrapping paper without a lot of thought.

Cheyenneh has inherited the Cal and Mary Christmas spirit. One year she saved baby food jars, found the food coloring, and went outside and collected tiny landscaping rocks near the front door. She hid in her room and came out hours later with little wet gifts wrapped in the Sunday comics. She was so proud and so were we when we opened them. Now we had something to tease her about for years to come: Cheyenneh Snow Globes consisting of baby food jars full of colored water and landscaping rocks. This is better than anything money can buy when it comes time to make conversation with her boyfriends.

We told everyone we can’t afford to do Christmas this year. No one believed us even though they know where we live. It’s too late to read up on crafty Christmas gift ideas, so we have no choice. We’re forced to do our own Cal and Mary Christmas.

We don’t have a sustainable supply of recycled wrapping paper, but we do know websites where we can get fart noise makers, soap which makes things dirtier, and coal gum, and we can get it delivered for free. There are so many messy, sticky, annoying things you can get cheap online to help screw up other peoples’ families just enough. My little nephews are going to have a lot more fun than my sister this Christmas. Getting messy is a lot more fun than cleaning up. That’s what Christmas is all about.

I hope my sister appreciates the gift of future conversation starters I’m giving her for Christmas this year.

A little help? [] 4:52:41 PM