Ok...let's try this again (a few days later).
Up until last year, the concept of Christmas break was something I hadn't experienced for a while. I'd finally weaned myself from the educational lifestyle after a year of teaching after I graduated, and had grown accustomed to the two or three days off I'd gotten around holiday time. Now instead of being on the other side of the desk (as a teacher) I'm on the other side of the book (as an editor). Since the educational publishing schedule is largely based on the school schedule, winter is traditionally a slow time for work so I've had the luxury of a holiday vacation for two years straight now. For some reason it's just not like what it was back when I was in school...after a few hours of puttering around without work, I really don't know what to do with myself.
Christmas to me used to mean making the yearly pilgrimage down to my grandparents' house on Long Island (my mother's parents. My father's family is Jewish and he's pretty much a non-practicing Jew so Chanukah wasn't a big celebration in our family...of course it's not really a big huge wonderful commercializable holiday like Christmas is anyway (not to imply that Hallmark isn't trying!)). The big activity while we were there was playing Nintendo. My brothers and I were always big Nintendo devotees - from the original machine that my mother said we'd never get (my brother got it for his tenth birthday) to the Super Nintendo (one of the best gifts we ever got - my parents wrapped up the words "look", "under", "the", "window" and "seat", whereupon we assembled the sentence, dashed over to my grandparents' window seat, and fished out the box amid much pandemonium) to the N64 and the GameCube. I hardly play at all now - as the controllers sprouted more buttons, I lost interest - but for years we were Nintendo addicts. We would pack up whichever machine was in vogue at the time, along with a little TV we kept in my brother's room (it probably wasn't in mine because I would have secretly squeezed in a few games at night after lights out) and set it up in my grandparents' guest bedroom. We'd take a half-dozen games with us and squabble over playing time, but only until we would invariably unwrap the latest and greatest game that my parents had somehow managed to a) find out about, b) obtain and c) wrap in a box-inside-a-box-inside-a-box to throw us off the scent. These days my video game-playing is limited to occasional sessions with my middle brother when I go home and a sporadic playing or two on an emulator I managed to find on the Internet. It's not quite the same, but firing up Ninja Gaiden III does bring back the memories...
This year Christmas consisted of heading down to New Jersey to stay at my mother-in-law's and attending my new nephew's christening in Philadelphia. We celebrated Christmas Eve at my nephew's parents' new town house with a marathon mah jongg session. Mah jongg is a relatively new pursuit for me but I guess it's in my blood since my mother used to play it with all of our neighbors when I was a kid. Of course, my new extended Filipino family plays it much differently than my mother did with all of our Jewish neighbors, but I'm proud to say that I can hold my own. Being a man of the Caucasian persuasion, I was welcomed skeptically at first, but maybe that's just selective memory, since I should have been an easy mark for money at first (we play fifty cents a game with various bonuses and multipliers). Lately I've been playing pretty strongly; this time around I managed to swindle my dear relatives for $32.50 (though the family net was $21; the wife had a bit of a rough go of it). Mah jongg - it's not just for Jewish housewives anymore.
The christening was a very nice ceremony - the first Catholic one I've been to. We had a bit of a laugh before even getting into the church when the baby's father got a little overenthusiastic and greeted a black-robed man in the parking lot with a cheery "Good morning, father!" Turns out he was a member of the choir...oops. The baby was extremely well-behaved and the ceremony went off without a hitch. It was actually my second Catholic mass in two weeks and I'm getting used to it. Though my sister-in-law told me I looked like a deer caught in the headlights when it came to giving the sign of peace - she turned to give me a kiss and I guess I froze. I felt like I was in the old Ray Romano stand-up routine where he goes to a church for the first time in ages and ends up watching a little old lady in the last row to find out what he should be doing: "Okay, stand...now sit...now stand-no, kneel! Granny's faking me out here..." The Lord's Prayer always throws me off too - what the heck are "those who trespass against us"? In my church we ask for forgiveness for our debts as we forgive our debtors. I wasn't aware that we had to apologize for cutting across someone's yard in days of yore, but there you have it.
As for presents, I got my share, but the best one was my wife deciding to surprise my mother by driving up from New Jersey to Maine on Christmas day. We're experienced road-trippers so the drive wasn't all that bad. It was the twelve inches of snow we were driving into that complicated matters a bit. Getting back home was fine - we actually managed it in record time thanks to zero traffic at the Tappan Zee bridge tolls (a little eerie just being able to go through and get right on 287...I felt like I was driving through a ghost town). The snow started coming down during the second leg of the journey, and by the time we hit New Hampshire, it was an honest-to-God snow storm. We were down to one lane, people were spinning out in front of us, there was a bozo in a Ford Focus passing us at 50 while we were doing 35 in our quasi-SUV, the whole nine yards. An hour-and-a-half trip turned into 2:45 but we got there just as my mother was putting dinner on the table (with two extra mouths to feed, the poor bird never stood a chance...). If my brother hadn't spotted us through the window, we would have made it all the way into the house before being noticed, but my mother was so surprised anyway that it made the whole trip worth it. And isn't that what Christmas should be about - being with family?
Maybe when we go back up for New Years (as was the original plan) we'll squeeze in a few games of Nintendo.
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