Christmas…lol.

We approach the time of year when we have all been tricked into linking together the buying of things with the genuine expression of love and there seems to be no way out of it. I (barely) survived a giant family fight with one of my teenagers this week — set in motion by me announcing that due to various logistical factors like global pandemic and a vast unnameable existential fatigue, her mother and I have decided not to do a huge many-gifts-per-child Christmas this year. We would instead spend the day together making food, watching movies, playing video games as a family, drinking eggnog, enjoying each other’s company. Gifts would be limited to cash with which they could do what they please.

My daughter heard this only as “we’re not doing gifts” and did not take kindly. I, of course, did not take kindly to her not taking kindly. She felt that we were depriving her of a “real Christmas experience” now that her older brother had graduated, which to her felt like a personal diss. I, a Black father, felt that the “real Christmas experience” was that she had a roof over her damn head and food to eat and a healthy (relatively) sane family that loved her and supported her.

I’m angry that our daughter is not grasping the TRUE MEANING OF CHRISTMAS!!!” I yelled jokingly to her mother during one of the regular phone calls during which we process the unmitigated horror of having teenaged people in our lives, after which two of us laughed the laugh of people in their late 40’s who have spent the last nearly five decades living and parenting through late capitalism. It was a long laugh and a slightly hysterical one.

Of course, our sixteen-year-old went to her mother to referee and her mother relented, agreeing to do little gifts even though it was she who originally set the no gifts this year policy in motion. I ended up looking like the bad guy but maybe that’s because I was the bad guy. When my daughter complained to me about “no gifts,” I lectured her about gratitude. When she complained to her mother, her mother listened and agreed that if it’s important to her, then we should probably do a little something.

Whoops.

I get triggered by Christmas because I’m triggered by poverty and by my own history of trauma and by the mere fact that every time I lie down in a bed to go to sleep, I remember what it was…