Well, I hope everyone had themselves a nice Xmas holiday. Margaret and I got up around 10, fed the cats, opened our prezzies and went off to her parents’ place in Bellevue to stuff our phizzes in the company of her family. Not bad, all around. I really wish we could have made it to my folks’ house in Hawaii this year because it was the first time in a while that my brother and sister-in-law were able to visit from Southern California. That would have been fun.

I’m still trying to figure out what Christmas means to me in my long, protracted post-adolescence. Probably like many of you without children, there doesn’t seem to be much magic in the season any more. It’s a time for relaxation (if you can get away with it), for visiting with friends and family, and for joyful gluttony with no thought to the enduring consequences, and that’s all great stuff. But the last time I can remember being really excited about Christmas was probably the second one I spent with Margaret, where the anticipation of giving was still very fresh. Obviously, I still enjoy getting presents for her (and others), and I enjoy receiving gifts as well, but the breathless anticipation, the lying awake at night, the power of it all, seems to be gone.

I’m not complaining, really I’m not. Plenty of things change as you get older, and this would seem to be one of them. I just think it’s interesting.

The missing ingredient is, of course, the children. I don’t have the sense of wonder of a child any more, and since we neither have children nor spend the holiday with poeple who do, we don’t get to experience the side-effects of breathing in some other child’s second-hand excitement. This, to me, is something of a mixed bag. While I love my own nieces and nephews and cherish many of our friends’ children as well (I’ve mentioned this before), tragically I was born with the “paternal instinct” switch in my brain turned off, possibly even turned off and glued shut. To me, kids are like any other form of motion-oriented entertainment such as television; as soon as they stop being entertaining, I want to change the channel or leave the room…at least hit the “Mute” button. There’s really no place in my life or my worldview for children of my own.

It’s kind of ironic that the thing I think is most missing from my Christmas holiday would be a byproduct of something I feel the rest of my life in no way requires. Oh, well; I suppose I’ll have to try to fill the gap with social interaction, crass materialism and decadent overconsumption. Poor ol’ me. 😉