Sufjan Stevens Christmas album is the only one you’ll ever need.   I found this essay about Christmas in the sleevenotes.  It makes me laugh.  A lot.  And it makes me realise that all families argue at Christmas.  I won’t regurgitate it ALL here in case I get sued for breach of copyright, but I will direct you to a You Tube video of him singing a song about 25th.  http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=RGVZwi4VbvY&feature=related Happy Christmas! 

“Christmas Tube Socks by Santa Sufjan.”

“Christmas was a time of terrible expectation, during which, for one week prior to the fateful day, our family was confined to the claustrophobia of our winterized home, forced to “spend time together”.  For a family who mixed like vinegar and baking soda, this was a cosmic blooper.  My siblings and I were out of school for two weeks, but unlike summer vacation (with the various distractions of summer camp and summer jobs), during Christmas break, we were snowed in on all sides, cooped up in small, poorly insulated rooms, and forced, by our father, into the manual labor of household chores; hauling wood, sweeping the stairs, picking fleas from our dog Sarah.  This was his version of Family Time. 

My father survived the holidays through work, taking on multiple jobs, double shifts, or implementing odd, complicated, time-consuming chores around the house, such as shoveling two-lane walkways in the snow in the yard, and an escape route to the creek out back, in case of an emergency.  He joined civic clubs, became a volunteer fireman, attended multiple self-help groups, anything to keep his mind away from the notion that his family was, in fact, a messy, fussy, dysfunctional menagerie of misfits. 

As for his children, confined inside, breathing recycled air - we fought all day.  My sisters, having more prep time in the bathroom in the mornings, hissed and yelled over hair gels and curling irons.  ”Did you eat my lipstick?”  ”Did you break my nail file?”  My older brother and I would find ourselves writhing, biting, and wrestling under the Christmas tree, overturning bookcases, TV stands and sofa chairs.  My father would jump in, separate us, give us a slap on the face and ask: “What are you fighting about?”  We could never remember. 

Each year, our mother carried the impossible burden of making Christmas “spectactular” and this often threw her into a psychological state of mind one could describe in medical terms, as a temporary insanity.  She spent money she didn’t have, lots of money, imaginary money, money based on speculation, future jobs, hopes and dreams, the kind of money promised by lottery tickets and Amway.  Her motives, perhaps were good:  who could blame a mother’s desire to make Christmas perfect for an otherwise imperfect family.  But the results, over time, were incriminating.  Credit cards engorged and then ignored, bounced cheques , money borrowed from distant relatives, great grandfathers, next door neighbors , train sets and suit coats and wool vests from J.C.Penney put on lay-away, sometimes for years.  She brought home elaborate Christmas wreaths, scented candle sets, music boxes, decorative Christmas plates with Elvis, Gene Kelly and Winona Ryder, designer snow suits, a family toboggan, a Saint Bernard, a Jeep Cherokee.  Each item brought home, whether big or small, ignited, between our parents, complicated, colossal disputes as epic as the battles of the Odyssey or the Iliad, often resulting in egg salad smeared all over the bay window or pots and pans thrown about the kitchen with the pageantry of a Texas high school marching band.  In the most heated of arguments, our mother would run to the tree, grab an inconsequential gift (breath mints, a paper kite, a gift crertificate) and throw it in the wood stove - an impulsive, spiteful and most likely cathartic gesture.  She would stand over the flames like a high priest making a sacrifice, counting down backwards, from ten to one, breathing deeply between each number, ruminating on the incineration of an unopened present.  It must have been a metaphor for something deeper.  But what? 

And this is where I began to really hate Christmas.  One year, when it snowed 72 inches in two days, and my sister started her period, and my mother brought home sixteeen pounds of discount jumbo shrimp from Wal-Mart, and my father reminded her that he was allergic to shellfish and his face would swell up, and our dog chewed up the Encylopedia Britannica, and our cousin called and said that Aunt Josie had died in her sleep and my mother started to cry and declared Christmas was cancelled.  Then she stomped over to the tree, grabbed the first gift she could find and threw it in the wood stove, with a quick flick of her wrist, like swatting a fly. 

“There, it’s done,” she said. “I feel much better.”   But the gift she chose happened to be a six-pack of ordinary tube socks, wrapped in plastic.  Which I had bought as a peace offering for my brother.  (The week before, I’d cut the toes to all of his socks - using my mother’s good sewing scissors - after he’d told all my friends at school that I still sucked my thumb and slept with a Care Bear.)

“I paid good money for those!” I told her. 

“Oh dear,” my mother said, stepping back from the stove.  But it was too late.  They were cheap, acrylic, dollar-store tube socks, manufactured in China, spun out of pliable man-made materials, synthetic fibres, which, when burned, began to melt, ooze, liquefy, and bubble over, triggered, perhaps by some extraordinary and complicated chemical reaction.  The smell was harrowing - a dense, bold toxic aroma the Smell of Death (as we later called it) which when metaboloized in the gloomy atmosphere of our home, spread from room to room in a noxious smoky haze, lilting under doorways and air vents with the speed and agility of hot lava.  We were being suffocated in our own house.  My mother ran out the front door; I found the nearest window. 

“What is that smell?” My sister screamed from her bedroom.  ”The Smell of Death!”

It forced everyone else in the house to immediately abandon his or her particular private tasks (for my sister, it was nail polish remover, for my brother, a home-made fire bomb he’d been building under his bed) and seek immediate egress outdoors.  We met in the winter maze of the driveway, feet stamping, shoulders shuddering, tsk tsking each other, inhaling the icy air of a blizzard, watching our father leap around inside, leveraging windows, propping doors fanning the smoke and fumes with a folded newspaper. 

“Good going!” my sister rolled her eyes. 

“Next time, buy cotton, ” my mother suggested.

“Why is this my fault?” I wondered.

“Because you’re a cheap-o,” my brother said, jabbing my collarbone.  I kicked snow in his face and he punched my ear and my sister screamed because she lost an earring and my mother started counting backwards from ten to one, mumbling prayers under her breath. 

It took forty-five minutes for the air to clear, and even then, after we’d returned to the chilly reaches of our rooms, there was the faint smell of burnt tube socks lurking between the walls, behind doors, nestled in the window curtains and in the bath towels and in the hair on our heads.  It stuck around for weeks, months, years; perhaps it never left us.  Even today, whether I’m at home in Brooklyn or in some distant East Asian country, Christmas still leaves a plastic taste in my mouth, a toxic residue that reminds me of tube socks….”