Daddy Humbug!

Call me Grinch.

I’m not a holiday guy. Never have been.

If not for my wife, my kids would have a far different holiday experience, one that resembled Whoville before the Grinch grew his heart.

As they get older, Sydney and Tyson will no doubt add to their nightly prayers, “Thank you God for sending us a mommy who gets excited about holidays.”

I don’t know when or where my ambivalence for holidays started. Sometime after I graduated college, I decided wrapping gifts was a waste of both time and money. Why spend so much effort for something that will be torn away in seconds?

So every year, I showed up at mom’s house with a garbage bag filled with toys and just handed them one by one to my mom, siblings and nephews.

“Merry Christmas! God bless us every one!”

It is not that I hate holidays. Well, maybe Halloween. Who likes dressing up in a costume and spending all night barely able to move?

As I grew older, I found ways to be comfortable during Halloween. Throw on a University of Cincinnati sweatshirt and a pair of shorts and carry around a basketball and pair of handcuffs – these were the Huggins years – and you are a UC Bearcats basketball player.

So I now have a rule on Halloween. If I am going to wear a costume, it actually has to be more comfortable than if I were not wearing a costume. It is a hard goal to meet, but as long as there are shorts and sweatpants, it is a possibility.

I do like Thanksgiving. You get to eat a lot and watch football. That is like any fall Saturday or Sunday for me.

But the rest – ambivalence. New Year’s Eve hasn’t been fun since I was 30 and Dick Clark rocked like a 65-year-old. Now, I rarely make it to the ball drop.

Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day – nice to have a day off work.

Christmas? Seems like a lot of work.

But now I have kids. And they want – no, they deserve – a nice Christmas.

That’s where mom comes in.

Since dad can’t seem to get his act together, she goes into high gear. First, there is the Elf on the Shelf. I never heard of this until a couple of years ago. It is a jolly way of scaring your kids into behaving.

When we were young, mom or dad used to say, “You better behave. Santa is watching.” Now, Santa has his own little spy who lives in your house the whole month of December and flies back to the north pole each night to report on the behavior of the household children.

Has anyone over 40 ever heard of this? I swear there was no Elf on the Shelf when we were kids. I think it has to do with the never-ending commercialization of Christmas. Sell an elf and the book about the elf.  Pretty soon, there will be reason for him to make his arrival around Labor Day as the never-ending Christmas season continues to bleed earlier and earlier on the calendar.

My dental hygienist said to me the other day, while not-so-carefully rooting through my mouth with a very sharp tool, “I’m thinking about doing the Elf on the Shelf this year. But it seems like a lot of work.” I almost choked to death on my own gum blood trying to gag out an emphatic “It is!”

Every night, my wife has to move that elf to a new place so the kids can find it again the next morning. Not a real difficult task, but try to remember to do anything every night. More than once, she has nervously spelled a “H-I-D-E E-L-F” to me as we are getting the children ready for pre-school in the morning, sending me scrambling down the stairs.

But the kids love it. They are like their mother.  They love everything about Christmas.

She has already hosted a Christmas cookie trading party. She has the house decorated in red and green. Every bedtime story in December must be a Christmas book.

Stockings are hung by the chimney with care, in hopes that lazy hubby will get off his derriere.

And the centerpiece of our holiday? The family Christmas tree.

I have managed to cut corners on the tree. We decided to start out with a fake one right from the get-go, so they would never know the difference.

All their life, they are going to have an artificial tree. Yes, this means they will never know the joy of trampling through the snow, searching the woods for the perfect evergreen, methodically checking for a bird’s nest – they’re good luck! – and measuring for a height that will fill the room without hitting the ceiling. (Or going to Home Depot, paying $20 and dragging a bundled, bedraggled tree to the back of the SUV).

I can live with that.

Our artificial tree is beautiful, a 7 ½ foot Martha Stewart given to me by a friend that would retail for about $300 at a store. The kids love it. The wife loves decorating it. I love not having to do anything. A win, win, win.

They also love Christmas lights. The chirping at dad has begun. “The neighbors have pretty lights, why can’t we?” Or the wife: “I don’t like colored lights, but it would be nice to have white ones.”

I try to drown it out. While they merrily think of the joy Christmas lights would bring, I picture myself falling off a ladder, ala Chevy Chase.

My wife finally conceded the other day, telling the children “the only way we are going to have lights is if mommy hangs them.”

Sydney and Tyson both turned to stare at me like I was the Grinch.