Christmas Traditions

I yawned and stretched, my back sore from the position I was in on the floor, wrapped around the baby protectively while Rebecca was starfished out on the pallet Chris had created. He wandered in from the kitchen and paused.

“Oh, wow, now that is a beautiful sight. I have to take a picture.” He looked around for his phone.

“Please, stop, no more pictures,” I groaned. “You have been taking pictures all day.”

“Because I have such beautiful subjects. I’m not using the camera, just my phone.” He held it up and I heard the shutter click. “It’s not a great picture. Look. It’s really dark. The lights from the tree make your face look shadowy.” He carefully lowered himself onto his knees on the pallet beside Rebecca and showed me the screen.

I took it and squinted at it, tilting the screen to see. It was a terrible picture. You could see Rebecca in her red fleecy pajamas in the foreground, the baby, a soft white blur beside her, and I was a larger, dark smudge behind them, like a looming dark shadow coming to steal their souls. “Well, if you’re going to insist on photographing us, you might as well take a decent one. Go get the camera.”

He laughed and rocked back on his heels, a grin on his face. “As you wish.” He padded off on bare feet over the plush carpet to the dining room, where he’d put the expensive camera I’d given him for his birthday in June to keep it out of reach of little fingers and returned a few moments later. I closed my eyes while he squatted down, checking his settings and making sure his light was just perfect. He’d be a while doing this. I hadn’t realized the monster I was creating by giving him a camera.

When I opened my eyes a little bit later, the Christmas tree was behind him, the red and green lights giving the corner of the room a homey glow. He was quietly snapping photos, moving around the three of us.

“Did I doze off?” I asked, my voice gravelly.

“You did,” he confirmed, his voice soft, so as not to wake the children.

“And you just kept taking pictures?” I asked with amusement.

“Of course. You’re beautiful when you sleep.” He lowered the camera. “For clarification: I do not normally take photos of you when you’re sleeping. This is the first time.” He grinned at me.

“Will you just put the camera away and come lay down with us please?” I teased. “It’s time to sleep.”

“Are we seriously sleeping in here? On the living room floor?” He looked at me in surprise. “I thought that was a joke.”

“I’m too tired to get up and go to bed.” I yawned again. “And Rebecca is already asleep.”

He looked at her. “She’s eighteen months old. I can pick her up and move her and she won’t even notice. And I can probably pick you up, too.”

I snorted. “I seriously doubt that. Let’s just sleep here. It’s fine.”

He sighed and lowered himself to the pallet again. “I mean, sure. We have a perfectly great bed right there but yeah, let’s sleep on the floor. Sounds reasonable.”

I grinned at him. “It’s one night. And Rebecca will love it.”

He looked down at the tiny girl who’d rolled into his chest once he’d stretched out on his side to face me. “Well, when you put it that way…” He smoothed back the unruly dark hair. “Was this another of the weird Gilbert family traditions you keep pulling out?”

I chuckled and shifted the baby a little. The fleecy outfit was making me sweat. “Not exactly. We would stay up late watching movies and drinking hot cocoa and enjoying a fire, but we always had a sofa bed. We never slept on the floor.”

Chris craned his neck and studied the couch. “I barely fit on our couch. I don’t think a fold out would work for me.”

“Probably not.” I reached over and smoothed his hair. “Do you wish we’d gone with your family for the annual Christmas getaway?”

“Not at all. I’m happy to be here. We’ll go next year. We have a good reason to be here this year.” He caught my fingers in his hand and kissed them, then dropped his hand down to trace the curve of the baby’s cheek. “Newborns aren’t exactly the best of traveling companions.”

I smiled and looked at the Christmas tree again. The lights were dancing to unheard music. I’d insisted on the singing lights when I’d seen them advertised on TV, but when they’d arrived the previous year, they’d been so annoying after twenty minutes, we’d immediately, and permanently, turned them to mute. I did like the way they dance, though. I definitely appreciated the fact that they had a volume control. It was pretty the way the yellow, red, blue, green, and white lights blinked in time to the unheard songs. We tried to guess which songs they were, and we were always wrong.

“Did I ever tell you about the year we didn’t have a Christmas tree?” I asked suddenly.

Chris raised his eyebrows at me. “Uh, no. why didn’t you have a Christmas tree? They sell them on literally every corner.”

“Well, my parents had several years when they were newlyweds of no money, so they’d wait until they university students left for home and go around and find discarded trees in the dumpsters and drag one home and set it up for free.”

“Emma. No.”

I grinned. “Sometimes, even fully decorated. We have family heirloom ornaments from those years.”

He ran a hand down his face to smother his laughter. “Why does this not surprise me?”

“We’re economical people,” I protested with a laugh. “But one year, when I was around 8, we waited too long, and all the students left, and there were no trees. And we had to decorate this old floor to ceiling lamp. It was awful.”

He stared at me, horrified. “A lamp?”

I nodded, shaking with silent laughter, tears leaking from the corners of my eyes. “We put tinsel on it, hung ornaments, everything. It had three bulbs, so we didn’t need any lights, obviously.”

“Oh, obviously.” He nodded as though this was perfectly normal.

“We put our presents around it and acted as though this was perfectly normal. We had a family from our church who were less well-off come and spend Christmas with us that year, because their house had burned down, and their children actually felt bad for us. Because the place they had been staying before at least had a tree.” I rolled onto my back so as not to disturb the baby, I was laughing so hard now. I put my hand over my mouth. “The little girl asked me if I’d like to have her doll.”

“You didn’t take her doll, did you?” he asked in a horrified gasp.

“Of course not,” I answered. “I had one. I’m not a monster.” I composed myself and rolled back onto my side. “Anyway, the next year, we were all separately determined that we were going to have a tree. So, my brother went out with his friends and found a dumpster tree and dragged it home and set it up.”

“Good for him. I mean, not the dumpster part, I’m not convinced that’s not a good way to bring vermin into the house.” He made a face.

I laughed. “I’m honestly not surprised we never did. Mom came home that same day with a tree she’d gotten somewhere. I’m not sure if it was a dumpster or a corner tree lot.”

Chris’s eyes widened. “Whoa. Two trees?”

I grinned. “And Dad came home a few minutes later, while Mom and Edward were arguing with each other about which tree to get rid of…with ANOTHER TREE.”

Chris’s mouth fell open. “So, you went from no tree and decorating a sad lamp to three trees?”

“Yes. And we kept all three. In that tiny living room.” I frowned. “Or maybe one went into the home office? I can’t actually remember. I just remember it was the year the house smelled so strongly of pine, that we were all sneezing a lot and we realized we had mild pine allergies.”

Chris started to laugh. “So, the moral of the story is, buy a tree when you can?”

“I think the moral of the story is, getting a fake tree is actually ok. That’s what they did for the next year. Dad went out and bought one of those space saver trees as soon as the trees went on sale after the holidays and that’s what they’re still using now. It’s pretty bedraggled looking, but it works for them. It was pre-lit, but most of the bulbs have burned out so they have to use strings of lights. But they have plenty from our dumpster trees.”

“And don’t forget those heirloom ornaments from other people’s families,” Chris reminded me.

I nodded. “Oh, they’re the best. We made up plenty of stories. ‘Oh, Bertie. He was my favorite cousin who went to the Canary Islands and brought me back this flipflop ornament. I hope he’s doing well on his submarine tour of the Antarctic.’ Stuff like that.”

“Should we start buying your parents tchotchke Christmas ornaments when we travel? Would they enjoy that?”

“They would love it.” I yawned again, and the baby shifted, moving against me and rooting, looking for milk. I opened my shirt and offered my breast, which was met with enthusiasm. “It’s weird not being with any of our family for the holiday. We have a baby, and they all left town.”

He nodded. “It’s like we’re actual grownups now.”

I snorted. “Says who?”

“Well, probably these two.” He motioned to the sleeping children between us.

“In all fairness, my parents planned their cruise months ago, and the baby was late. They thought they’d be here for a while after the birth. And we chose to stay home from your family’s trip,” I conceded. “It’s not like everyone just abandoned us out of spite.”

“It just feels that way,” he said.

I nodded.

“What other bizarre Gilbert Christmas traditions do I need to know about? Do you dress up a random person as Santa? Steal something? Dine and Dash your Christmas dinner?”

I laughed softly. “No. We get up on Christmas morning, have a great, big breakfast, and open our presents. Not always in that order, now that there’s grandbabies, and the twins are impatient, and then in the afternoon, go to a movie, whatever is showing. Then the rest of the day we read. It’s very lazy and quiet and just…together.” I shrugged one shoulder. “It’s nice. But we should start our own traditions. As well as we can. We’ve only had a few together. We have time to figure them out.”

“I like the breakfast and reading and quiet ideas,” he said thoughtfully. “Though I’m not sure how quiet these two will be for a few years.”

I shook my head. “No, maybe not just yet.”

“But the breakfast. We could do that.”

“We could.” I closed my eyes again. The gentle tug of the nursing baby, the warmth of the blankets and the soreness of my body was all pulling me into sleep again.

When I opened my eyes again, it was morning, and I could smell coffee. Chris was sitting with his back against the couch with Rebecca in his lap, reading a picture book. He looked over at me and smiled.

“Good morning. Coffee and eclairs on the end table.”

I smiled. “Really?”

“I’ll make omelets when you’re ready.”

“God, I love you. Wanna get married and have babies?”

“Are you proposing to me? Again?”

“I absolutely am.”

“Then absolutely I do.”

I pushed up and gave him a kiss. “Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas.”