You didn't have to carry it 7 miles uphill. Stop complaining.
What is it about holidays that make all the normally well-adjusted husbands I know get completely stubborn and totally useless? If you’re a husband, why are you being like this?
My husband likes to turn Christmas every year into a whine-fest about how he hates the holiday. I get it. He’s an atheist and doesn’t want any thing to do with crazy Christians and their crazy holiday. He isn’t a particularly celebratory person in general. He’d rather watch a movie and eat cheese than do just about anything else.
How I see it is that you can watch movies and eat cheese for Christmas, along with some other stuff. Like decorations, presents, and cookies. I’m not trying to create some “magical” experience. I am just giving my daughter a tradition. She can decide for herself when she’s older what she wants to believe about it. I just want her to have great holiday memories. With cookies.
Last year it was tree drama and present drama. This year I’m expecting 100% good behavior since I think I made my point perfectly clear last year about punching faces if I have to relive that. But I know many husbands out there who aren’t being so aptly threatened and even if they were, would still drag their heels and refuse to get with the program of festive cheer.
In defense of Christmas, all I can say is that it’s really nice to have this one point in the year where you can assemble sweets, cookies, twinkly lights, the smell of pine, the colors red and green, presents, and hopefully get them together with the family and friends you still like.
My Christmas traditions are not that high-maintenance: cookie-baking, tree-decorating, present-buying (and not even that many), stocking-hanging, food-eating, and the annual watching of Dr. Seuss’s “The Grinch.” I know people who enjoy going all-out and I admire their pluck but I’m fine with my list. My daughter won’t remember all of this specifically, but she’s learning and laying down a foundation of holiday-ness in her psyche. Just because she won’t remember this precise Christmas doesn’t mean we should skip it. She’ll still enjoy it and that enjoyment is what will stick with her. When the culture she is growing up in celebrates this time of year, I think it’s appropriate and necessary to give her some way to participate in that. I almost don’t care what the holiday is, just that she has one.
I like many aspects of Christmas just for myself, but more often than that, I’m usually working ahead of time to make it a nice time for the people I’m close to, ergo the presents, cookies, ambience. Isn’t that what it’s about? Making a nice day out of it? My husband would rather the whole holiday didn’t exist. Perhaps his heart is two sizes too small?
To all the husbands out there who are in his club, maybe you should just stop whining about it and accept and enjoy that the holiday is happening. Without packages, boxes, bags. It’s coming all the same.
