My annual Christmas cold arrives about three days before the joyous day itself, when I wake up feeling like a sack of sawdust and lie in bed and time passes, night and day and night, and I awaken in a swamp of cracker crumbs and soggy Kleenex and the Sunday comics, and the guests have arrived, and I put on a bathrobe and go out to greet them looking like the Ghost of Christmas Future. Nobody asks, “How are you?” They can see for themselves.

This has been an annual event with me, and to complicate matters, we have some unusual guests at our house due to my wife’s belief that, in the true spirit of Christmas, we must invite those who have no other place to go because nobody else can stand to be around them. Our bachelor neighbor Earl, for example, who gets uneasy if the conversation should drift too far from the topic of his cars and lawn mowers, and a musician friend named Brad, who is always finding new support groups to join and new books to read that promise to help him build a new life. Last Christmas he had attended his first meeting of Victims of Ambivalence. He felt like a new person. He had learned so much about himself.
And, of course, he wanted to share. And there is a woman from church named Alison who wears black clothes covered with cat hair and for whom Christmas brings back memories of her years of personal sacrifice taking care of Mother. “Mother was dizzy and confused and everyone else was glad to wash their hands of the whole situation, so it fell to me. Thirty-five years I looked after her. I felt I owed it to her. After all, she was my mother,” says Alison. This is all in response to my asking her, “What have you been up to lately?” She has been caring for Mother’s cats, Pookie and Mr. Muffin.

Meanwhile Earl is informing me that he puts regular 84-octane gasoline in his van, not the premium that they recommend, and gets darned good gas mileage and plenty of acceleration. “You put your foot down, va-voom, you’re outta there,” he says. He puts premium in his car, but regular in the van. He repeats this so I will understand. And he goes on to discuss his four lawn mowers. Each has a separate and distinct function in the mowing process. Brad listens. He has some issues about lawn mowing, but mainly he feels ambivalent about it. These three have relatives, but the relatives often travel for the holidays, such as to Hawaii, for example.

Against Earl and Brad and Alison, a good cold is the best defense. It entitles you to go to bed immediately after the mince pie. And then last year, we told them not to come, and I didn’t get a cold at all. My wife and I spent a quiet day sitting and holding hands, watching her belly jump, and contemplating the arrival of our first child. Just like Joseph and Mary. Two persons waiting to be joined by a third. We did not exchange Christmas gifts. (Why bother with metaphors when the real thing is at hand?) We sat in the winter dusk, listening to choirs and thinking, “Nothing will be quite the same after this.”

And then, on Monday the 29th, after eight hours of labor, at 9:06 p.m., a little girl appeared, her crown, her face, her shoulders, and out she slid, took a breath, turned pink, was weighed at 6 lbs. 2.5 oz., was pronounced fit and swaddled in a receiving blanket and handed to her father, her arms and legs moving, her dark eyes roaming all around, her mouth prim, her long slender fingers curled into fists.

Amid all of the commotion of the next few days, it occurred to me for about ten seconds, I suppose,
that it wasn’t the best luck for the little sweetie to have her birthday fall in the wake of Christmas. A December 29 birthday is guaranteed anticlimax. I’ve heard of twenty-eighters and niners who get one present to cover both occasions. Or maybe someone gives them a tennis racquet for Christmas, and a can of balls for their birthday.

I’m thinking harder about this now as the holiday comes into view, and it occurred to me the other day — I was walking past Steve’s Pizza at the time — that it being the child’s first birthday coming up, and she being an only child, this is our once-in-a-lifetime chance to rewrite Christmas. The child is a blank slate. We could protect her from the onslaught of relentless festivity that wears a person out. We could bring her up not knowing about turkey and cranberry sauce. She could grow up looking forward to the traditional Christmas pizza (red and green peppers, bell-shaped mushrooms). Who needs sage dressing? Who needs “The Little Drummer Boy?”

The L.D.B. is a song used as a device of torture by the police to break down hardened criminals and get them to confess. Repeated exposure to L.D.B. is what produces an Earl, a Brad, an Alison, if you ask me.

We could keep all the good Christmas songs, but dance to them. Do a two-step to “Hark, The Herald
Angels Sing,” waltz to “It Came Upon A Midnight Clear.” On Christmas Eve, you go walking from house to house serenading your neighbors and you come home and dance around the Christmas chair where Old Father Christmas sits (that’s me) and you give the O.F.C. a big hug and promise to be good for another year and he presents you with a small gift. A small gift that, because it’s your only gift and because this is how Christmas has been ever since you can remember, you treasure deeply. Maybe it’s a seedless orange, or a heather oatmeal T-shirt, or a book of poems by Emily Dickinson. You open it and you smile through tears of happiness and you say, “Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you,” because it’s your annual Christmas gift, and you were brought up to be grateful for it. Afterward comes the pizza.

Then the beloved Christmas videos, the same ones every year. And after you go to bed, O.F.C. and O.M.C. sit down for their annual Christmas seared tuna and penne in pesto sauce and a bottle of Pinot Noir (Pinot Noir is French for “Please turn off those lights.”)

And then on the gala 29th, Our Girl’s Birthday, we pull out all the stops and put on the Carnivale de la Bebe Grande, clowns and elephants and ladies in spangly suits. Famous celebrities such as Marilyn Horne, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ozzy Osbourne, Rip Torn, Lorna Doone, Tommy Tune, Tina and Ted Turner. The Boston Pops plays “The Stars and Stripes” as the Blue Angels fly overhead in tight formation, and parachutists drop into our backyard, carrying rubies and diamonds, designer chocolates, a pony.

We will celebrate her birthday this way until she is twenty-four. That’s when we’ll let her start using lipstick and nail polish, and, if she wants, she can get her driver’s license. At thirty, she can start dating. Old Father Christmas will choose which men she may date.

“Ha,” you say. “Welcome to the real world. You can’t get away from having a Standard American Christmas anymore than you can bring up your child without Beanie Babies, and as for lipstick, it starts at the age of nine nowadays. Dating starts at eleven. Get real.”

Well, you’re wrong. We’re going to bring up this little girl the right way by keeping her away from you and your fast crowd. This is why we avoid malls and shop by catalog. In catalogs, you can buy a shirt without buying into the whole mall way of life. But, if you want to buy a way of life, there are catalogs that sell that, too.

In the Amish Country Catalog, for example, you can order a farm with no electricity, a matched team of Percherons named Patience and Prudence (available in black, beige, or honey mustard) and a simply furnished home (specify wood or coal heat) with or without spouse and children. (Not available in New Jersey.) Amish daughters do not use lipstick; at the age of nine, they are happily quilting and scrubbing floors and coring apples to make apple butter. They sing “The Gift To Be Simple” and enjoy riddles and dancing reels and schottisches. They begin dating at the age of thirty and marry the man that Papa chooses for them. And in the Lands’ Middle Catalog, you can order a new life for yourself in a small town in Kansas (specify size) where people don’t lock their doors at night and still get a big kick out of Jell-O salads and where every guy carries a jackknife and a little block of wood he is whittling on. He is carving a little figure of a daddy, and it’s his Christmas present for his daughter.