Scary Mommy's Guide to Surviving the Holidays (14 page)

44

CHRISTMAS IN THE AGE OF SOCIAL MEDIA: A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE

by Victoria Fedden

1.
 Early September, arrange photo shoot for family Christmas card. Coordinate matching outfits of khaki pants and white button-ups. Get teeth whitened and hair highlighted. Practice several poses with the family: jumping in the air, sitting in the grass, walking away from the camera while the little ones toddle adorably behind . . .

2.
 After your mid-September photo shoot, be sure to head over to the mall to admire the Christmas displays in the stores. Then go get a pumpkin spice latte to really get in the holiday spirit, even though it's eighty degrees out and technically still summer.

3.
 Go to Costco and purchase several inflatable Santas and snowmen and a herd of light-up wicker reindeer for your front yard. Buy so many lights that your home will look like the Las Vegas strip of Christmas come December.

4.
 Find out the “must-have” toys this year. Start researching.
Make a game plan for Black Friday in the Notes section of your iPhone.

5.
 The week before Thanksgiving, begin decorating your home for Christmas. Think elaborate. Each child needs a tree in his or her room. Don't forget that Isabella wants a PINK tree in her room. Ayden would prefer a
Jake and the Never Land Pirates
Christmas theme in
his
room.

6.
 Have an anxiety attack trying to decide between getting a Douglas fir and a Fraser fir. Look for organic, locally sourced Christmas trees from sustainable farms only. Ask the Internet for help.

7.
 Hire a professional tree decorator to come and string the LED lights on the Fraser fir, which you chose because the Internet said it was the number one pick for Christmas trees seven years running. Worry that the warm white lights you chose are too '90s and maybe you should have gone retro-chic with the rainbow lights, which might actually be too '70s, and then wish you'd have gone super-retro and asked if real beeswax candles were available, because how totally Martha would that be? Except fires. No, scrap the candle idea. Go with the warm white.

8.
 Stage a complicated tree-lighting ceremony for Thanksgiving evening, but make sure you hurry up with the whole Thanksgiving dinner thing because you need to hit the stores. Black Friday actually starts Thursday night now and you want to be first in line to get the five-dollar robotic Olaf doll and, well, every single other piece of Disney's
Frozen
merchandise, because you can SO sell the extras on eBay.

9.
 Admire your holiday photo cards when they arrive via FedEx. The sepia tone looks fantastic. Praise your own good taste. Your family definitely looks like something out of the Pottery Barn catalog. Actually, no. The Restoration Hardware catalog. Sigh with relief that you chose “Happy Holidays” over “Season's Greetings.” You'd agonized over that for days. Now drop the already addressed, preprinted cards off at the post office and pay $437.29 in postage.

10.
 Host a holiday cookie exchange. Be sure to remind guests that it is a GRAIN-FREE cookie exchange because you and several other guests are suffering from wheat belly, leaky gut, and possibly Lyme disease (at least according to your acupuncturist, even though you have seriously NEVER gone anywhere near the woods, where deer ticks live).

11.
 Take the children to gingerbread house–making class, Seasonal Craft Explosion, Reindeer Fest, Santa Days Blitzkrieg, and the Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/Christmas/Pagan Winter Solstice Hot Yoga Celebration of Light. You do not want the kids to miss a single event this December. They will not. And every second of it will be digitally documented.

12.
 Become deeply concerned when you read on Facebook that eggnog lattes contain carcinogens. Virtually sign some sort of online petition about Starbucks and chemicals. Order an eggnog latte anyway, skinny with four Splendas.

13.
 Plan Christmas dinner. Purchase a set of Spode dinnerware. Order an organic, humanely raised, pastured turkey who was treated so well that he was named Ethan and kept as a pet before
being slaughtered (yes, humanely). Then go to Whole Foods and buy a Field Roast because you can't bear to actually eat Ethan.

14.
 Plan alternative Christmas dinners for vegan, gluten-free, Paleo guests.

15.
 Make a hip Christmas playlist on Spotify that combines remixed classics from the '40s and '50s with indie covers. Think Dubstep “Rudolph” followed by The Mountain Goats' version of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”

16.
 Burn your arm making homemade cranberry sauce. Jeez, that stuff is like molten lava. Toss the whole pot and use the Trader Joe's jarred version. Much safer.

17.
 Take some probiotics. Because stress.

18.
 Attend the children's December pageant at their Waldorf/Montessori hybrid charter preschool. Post several photos of your daughter dressed as a Kwanzaa candle on Instagram along with a video of your son singing a Hanukkah song in Hebrew even though you are not Jewish and Hanukkah actually ended three weeks earlier. Wish everyone a good month. That can't offend anyone, right? Enjoy a nice kombucha on tap with the other parents after the show ends.

19.
 Make homemade, wheat-free, peppermint-scented, red and green play-dough to entertain the children during their school break. Great topic for a blog post.

20.
 Blind panic when you realize that OH MY GOD, you completely forgot to do Elf on the motherfreaking Shelf. Immedi
ately locate said Elf and pose him on the edge of your toilet with a fishing pole and several marshmallows floating in the toilet bowl. Take a bunch of pictures of him for social media.

21.
 Check and see how many “likes” and “shares” your Elf pics got.

22.
 Let the kids watch the classic Christmas specials whenever they want. You have downloaded them all onto their iPads for everyone's convenience. Isabella and Baylee have seen
Charlie Brown
seventy-five times. Today. Ayden is singing the Heat Miser song. Totes cute. Make a Vine of it.

23.
 Explain sadly to the children that no, Heat Miser isn't real, but global warming is, and no, there will not be a white Christmas this year because it's seventy degrees out in late December again.

24.
 On Christmas Eve, arrange professionally wrapped gifts under the upside-down Christmas tree. Set out a plate of date-and-coconut raw energy bars and a glass of cashew milk for Santa. After the kids go to bed stay up until 4:00 a.m. putting all the toys together. Drink wine out of a quart-sized Mason jar. It's okay, no one can see you. I mean, unless you take a selfie, which maybe might be kind of, like, ironic funny.

25.
 Do some breathing exercises. It will all be over soon, and the kids love the holidays so much. It's totally worth it. Think of the memories.

45

GET-YOUR-BUZZ-ON KAHLUA DIP

by Jill Smokler

O
ne of the best things my husband ever gave me was this recipe for Kahlua dip. (Yeah, yeah, after the kids. I guess.) It's simple and horribly unhealthy and you can grab everything you need at your local gas station market. But? It's amazing . . .

4 giant Hershey's milk chocolate bars

2 tubs Cool Whip

Kahlua

Put four giant Hershey's milk chocolate bars into food processor (or hand-grate if you have two hours and knuckles to spare).

Combine 2 tubs of Cool Whip into serving bowl and mix in the chocolate.

Add ¾ cup of Kahlua, adding more to taste.

His family served it with Pirouette cookies, and that's all well and good, but I prefer it straight-up, mousse style.

It's best refrigerated overnight before serving. Plus, if you eat enough of it, you can get a nice little buzz and forget how exactly
much saturated fat you just consumed.

Perfect.

46

THE MOST WONDERFUL TIME OF THE YEAR . . . NOT

by Allison Slater Tate

I
t's December 22, and I am over it. All of it.

I know how I am
supposed
to be feeling: jingle bells, peace love joy, white lights, and warm fuzzies. I'm
supposed
to be counting my blessings instead of sheep and humming tunes about roasted chestnuts and getting excited about my annual chance to play Santa. I'm
supposed
to be cuddling on the couch with my kids, watching Christmas movies and eating candy canes and whatnot.

But I'm not.

It's Sunday night, and my kids have been out of school since Thursday. I'm having a panic attack because it's just about the end of the road for Amazon orders that can arrive before Christmas.

A strand of lights already burned out on my tree, and I am negotiating with myself over whether or not to replace them. I'm
sick to my stomach from Christmas treats. I'm haunted by the nagging feeling that I have forgotten something or someone, and I am 110 percent certain that I will not remember where all the gifts left to wrap are hidden on Christmas Eve.

Most of all, though, I am
over
my children. They have trampled my Christmas spirit like reindeer on a grandma. Between surly tweens and stubborn little people, I am all tapped out of ho-ho-hos.

“Do we have to listen to Christmas music, really?”

“Can we go home now? I don't want to look at Christmas lights.”

“A cookie exchange?! Mom, I'm
eleven
. I don't go to cookie exchanges.”

“Are you seriously going to make me wear a shirt with a collar on it?!”

Something about working 24/7 to engineer a magical holiday for them makes their obvious lack of appropriate gratitude and cooperation glaringly more obnoxious than usual.

Here's the truth: by Tuesday night, we'll be on track. The Christmas Train will have left the station, and everyone will cooperate: my kids won't call each other losers and fight over every ridiculous thing. They'll wear what I ask them to for dinner. They'll be so excited, I won't be able to help being excited too. We'll leave out cookies for Santa and carrots for his reindeer, and they'll go to bed on time and stay there. I'll wrap presents with my husband while watching
Love Actually
and
It's a Wonderful Life,
and I'll cry because love
is
actually all around (also, Colin Firth) and because George Bailey really
is
the richest man in town. I'll go to bed exhausted and be awakened before dawn
by giddy children, and I'll watch them tear into brightly colored tissue paper and hug baby dolls and new laptops, and it won't matter at all if I replaced that strand of lights or not. My kids
will
be grateful and they will hug me and then I will collapse in front of the
A Christmas Story
marathon on TBS like I do every year and hope the kids don't tear the house down while I am in my post–Christmas-morning coma. It will be wonderful, messy, and perfect in its own way.

But tonight? Tonight, I mentally returned every present I bought my children. I threatened to call Santa and cancel Christmas (for the third time this week). I used my foot to push the writhing, whining six-year-old back into the bedroom he shares with his older brother, and I closed the door, telling him I was done and he was to go to bed already. I ignored the tweens' protests when I sent them to bed early, hoping they might sleep and be nicer tomorrow.
Merry effing Christmas
, I thought. And then I cried actual tears, wondering how I will get up in the morning and do it all again tomorrow. I really do love Christmas and I really do love my children, but sometimes I don't know if I will survive until December 25.

So just in case the holidays aren't going so magically at your house tonight, either, I want you to know you are not alone. And as always, now I feel guilty, and I am swearing I will try to do better tomorrow and keep my patience more—to, you know, enjoy the magic and the wonder of the season. Or something like that.

Merry effing Christmas, fellow moms. Hang in there.