We will all eat peppermint ice cream because that is what we do.
The drama begins before I even get off the Interstate on Christmas Eve. Peppermint ice cream is the flashpoint. There may have been a time where the conflict was genuine, but it has, like most of the events that follow, reached a point where it is mostly just an endearing tradition.
I call home while I am still in the car and ask if anybody picked up peppermint ice cream in the course of the holiday preparations. Nobody has, because “nobody in this house would eat that garbage” (which, we will soon learn, is as much a lie as it has always been).
Television advertisements would have us believe that the holidays start with somebody being dropped off in a taxi and embracing their family amid twinkling lights. This is not my style.
I prefer to walk inside with three cartons of peppermint ice cream and start right in complaining about what a miserable supply chain it must be that I had to visit three stores to find the product when the factory is not even five miles away and what an outrage it is that the clerk would dare to suggest mint chocolate chip as a substitute and how the lines are too long at the checkout and how Meijer claims to be Dutch with their fancy silent J but would be put shame if one of their executives were ever to visit a proper Albert Heijn in the Netherlands where people know how to check out efficiently. This puts me in a warm holiday mood.
Tradition is tradition, and complaining is as much of a tradition as anything else.
The last-minute gift shopping is next, and this marks the beginning of a rare afternoon of sibling unity. This annual exercise takes place at a local department store called Teerman’s and a store whose name includes something about seasoning but which I know only by my father’s name for it: “Spicy’s Spicy Spice Hut.” The fact that we begin this process only in the final hour before the stores close adds motivation for us to work efficiently in our search for kitchen gadgets.
After dinner, we watch National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. This is not a leisure exercise. The entire family — grandparents included — is forced into what my parents still call the “playroom” after what it was called when we were young children, but which my sister and I call the “TV room” to give it some shred of dignity. There are a loveseat and a chair. Most people must sit on dining chairs or a footstool. This is not about comfort. This is about tradition.
Every year, my mother attempts to escape the movie by claiming that she has “already seen it” as if this is some kind of language class she could test out of if given the chance instead of a time-honored tradition. The movie cannot start until my mother is in the room, and nobody can leave for church until the movie is finished, so there is a hard deadline that usually brings the situation under control.
Church begins at 11 p.m. and is the one exception to my father’s rule that the fine line between a church and a cult is weekday attendance.
My sister and I spent much of our early lives figuring out how to silently torment one another and my parents in church without disturbing those in the adjacent pews. This is the annual showcase of our craft. This used to be an exercise primarily in physical comedy, which included sliding objects onto my parents’ seats just before they sat down after a hymn and very quietly pinching one another’s arms or stepping on feet during a period of silent meditation.
Today, our tactics are more cerebral. One of us will leaf carefully through the hymnal to find an amusing title, like “Fret Not For Those Who Do Wrong Things (For They Shall Wither Like The Grass)” and show it to the other at the exact moment when laughter would be inappropriate. The other will write down homophonous hymn lyrics (“O come, lettuce a door hymn” for the chorus in “O Come, All Ye Faithful” was last year’s winner) and reveal them in writing just as we reach that point in the song. While juvenile, these methods always elicit the desired reaction of a tortured laugh disguised as a cough from the other sibling and the horror of our parents.
After church, we enter a series of negotiations to determine what time the grandparents will be summoned from the hotel to begin the opening of gifts. As a child, I was a staunch advocate for the 6 a.m. time slot. Now, as a person who values sleep, I find myself lobbying for noon.
Christmas Day is a sort of haze, and the McKnight family Christmas ends with the Christmas tree on the curb. My mother is the point person for the removal of the tree and executes her duties with great enthusiasm each year — often before the rest of the family is even awake on the 26th to protest. Nobody has tested the theory, but if we let our guard down on Christmas Day, she might take the tree out to the street before the last present was even unwrapped. We all do better in the realm of routine than that of tradition, and nobody can have routine when the couch is on the wrong side of the living room.
For my part, I spend the post-Christmas getting peppermint ice cream stains out of the white napkins from Christmas dinner. And there are, for the record, peppermint ice cream stains on all of the napkins.
Distractions
Things I have been reading, watching, and listening to this week.
“The Polar Express, As Run By the Metropolitan Transportation Authority” by Will Quinn in McSweeney’s.
This is the piece that introduced me to McSweeney’s in the first place. It remains essential Christmas reading.
“This is a North Pole-bound, Polar Express train. Please stand clear of the closing doors.”
“You’re not very Christmas-y,” I said.
“Yeah, well we’re public transit now, kid. They make the rules. Get on.”
“Facebook is a Doomsday Machine” by Adrienne LaFrance in The Atlantic.
This one is less Christmas-y. Sorry. I’ve known for a long time that Facebook upset me. As it becomes increasingly clear that Facebook is a terrible threat to our democracy, this is the best articulation of the case against Facebook that I have read.
“Facebook cannot in an instant reduce a city to ruins the way a nuclear bomb can… But the stakes are still life-and-death. No single machine should be able to control the fate of the world’s population—and that’s what both the Doomsday Machine and Facebook are built to do.”