When I was a child, everything about the holidays felt glittery and magical. This was undoubtedly due in large part to the tireless efforts of my mother, who was possibly a Claus in some former life. Each year in the weeks leading up to Christmas, she energetically directed us kids through various festive rituals: baking sugar cookies for teachers; decorating gingerbread houses with Necco wafer shingles and gumdrop landscaping; stringing cranberries and popcorn to festoon upon the tree.
While my father played a relatively negligible role in the buildup to the main event, his star turn came on Christmas Eve, just before bedtime. After hanging our stockings with care, my siblings and I would clamber into my parents’ bed for Dad’s annual reading of the Clement Clarke Moore classic, Twas the Night Before Christmas. Even the family dog, who was not allowed on the furniture the other 364 days of the year, would be invited up for the sacred recitation.
Always one to savor the spotlight, Dad barely needed to glance at the pages to boom out the familiar words with great bravado. Any inquisitive interruptions about, say, what sugar plums might taste like, or why the reindeer role call snubs Rudolph, would be ignored. Like the big man in the red suit, he had a job to do, and the clock was ticking.
By the time he’d bellow out the final line, “HAPPY CHRISTMAS TO ALL, AND TO ALL A GOOD NIGHT!,” we were creatures all astir in anticipation of the hoofbeats we expected to rattle across our roof at any moment. We knew better than to beg to stay up any longer–Santa sees you when you’re sleeping, and knows when you’re awake, after all!– but as we set out the traditional offering of milk and cookies, plus carrots for the reindeer, we’d beg our parents to at least try to catch a glimpse on our behalf. Much to our dismay, they seemed far less savvy than the dad in the book when it came to scoring an encounter.
As an adult, the holidays have a different feel. Nowadays, it falls to me to be the ringleader of all things festive, and regrettably, I did not inherit my mother’s Claus-ian tendencies. I tend to shy away from activities that will result in messes I’ll have to clean up, and while I like the idea of stringing popcorn and cranberries for the tree, I’ve never actually gotten around to doing it with my kids. My to-do list only gets longer as Christmas approaches, and there never seems to be enough time to cross everything off.
However, a tradition that endures is the ritual of reading together on Christmas Eve. After hanging up our stockings, we all gather around a glowing fire with the same battered copy of Twas the Night Before Christmas from my own childhood.
Now that three generations share in the annual reading, my father has mostly ceded his starring role to the grandchildren, who take turns intoning each verse. To this day, nobody knows what a sugar plum actually tastes like, but if the reader wants to insert Rudolph into the reindeer role call, they are welcome to do so.
Because no one can match the original timbre of my father’s bellow from back in the day, we now shout the final line out in unison. “HAPPY CHRISTMAS TO ALL, AND TO ALL A GOOD NIGHT!” Whoever holds the book claps its cover closed, and we all take a moment to listen for hoofbeats on the roof, while savoring the glittery holiday magic.
