Screw Christmas!

So another Christmas is in the bag, and I am grateful that it passed by with minimal amount of agitation and upset. I’m sure there are other spouses out there whose combat vet was deployed over at least one Christmas, if not more, and finds the holiday just too much to bear. As December 25th approaches I become more and more apprehensive as I know I will be playing dual roles of sympathetic wife and placating mother as I try to keep both sides of the camp happy at home.

Bill hates Christmas, and all the trappings that go along with it, and is at great pains to remind me that he is only allowing a tree in the house “for the kids sake” permitting it to stand for the shortest amount of time that doesn’t constitute cruel and unusual punishment in the minds of a 7 and 14 year old! The tree literally goes up the day before Christmas, and is located in a room where Bill does not have to look at it except when passing through. The lonely Noble is the sole decoration in the house; there is no bunting or wreaths on the door, just the tree, nothing else, zero, zilch, nada.

Christmas day passes in a blur, with the kids opening their presents before Bill even gets out of bed, and I make sure to bag up the paper and bows they have left strewn across the living room floor before he gets up. No special meal is on the menu and I leave for work with a thermos of soup (I always work Christmas day at the jail) and my family is left to fend for themselves with microwavable ready meals.

The tree comes down literally on the 26th, and is removed from the house along with the wrapping paper and Christmas cards and taken to the burn barrel for incineration, symbolically purging the day away as if it never happened….and I can again breath a sigh of relief, it is all over for another year.