Christmas Eve Eve?
American families seem to have two different ways of celebrating Christmas, one in which Christmas Eve matters most and the other in which the focus is on Christmas morning.
Kevin Costner even alluded to it as Crash Davis in the famous “I believe” speech from the 1988 movie “Bull Durham.”
” … I believe in the sweet spot, soft-core pornography, opening your presents Christmas morning rather than Christmas Eve …”
Of course families that have small children can’t opt for the earlier opening. How can you open your presents on Christmas Eve when Santa hasn’t even arrived yet?
Anyway, the older you get, the less you enjoy the magic of Christmas, eve or morning. I can only think of two Christmases in my 30s when I even celebrated with my family. I was home in Virginia in 1985 because my employer had gone bankrupt, and I flew home from California in 1989 because my mother paid for me to come for what turned out to be my grandmother’s last Christmas.
Things got special again in 1992 when I remarried and found myself with a wife and two wonderful children. Every year from then until they were grown, there was Christmas shopping, lovely decorations and a Christmas Eve feast that was my wife’s favorite meal to fix all year.
Once the kids were grown, though, there was a gap of a few years when things were less thrilling.
Then our daughter started giving us grandchildren.
Six of them at this point, and they’re continents away in Tunisia this year.
We’ll see them on Facetime on Christmas Day, and God willing and the creek don’t rise, someday we’ll have another Christmas with them.
Maybe even a Christmas Eve eve.