Thank you all for indulging me over the year and here is to a wonderful and productive 2008.

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My daughter and my son, now nine and six, have lived with me since my ex-wife left five years ago, but every Christmas since, except the one when I was briefly engaged and forbidden to, we have all spent together with her family in Social Circle, Georgia.

My ex-wife reminded me soon after we separated that Christmases for her as a young girl, after her parents had split up, were forever ruined. No matter how many Growing-Up Skipper dolls she unwrapped she could never forget that her dad's only appearance that day would be by phone.

I spent my first Christmas with my now ex-in-laws when we first started dating, seventeen years ago. My parents had both passed away years before so I had no real family obligations of my own.

My ex in-laws live in a vast log cabin on its own tiny lake and that first year they put me in the room next to their daughter's, far from their own, so they had plausible deniability about my true whereabouts. Christmas Eve four years later I slipped a ring into the bottom of a champagne flute and she very nearly swallowed it till I pointed it out and she shrieked.

We were married for eight years and when we divorced we did our best to separate without rancor, each committed to shielding our children from the worst of the trauma. When she first brought up the idea of me still coming to Christmas I had no idea how I would handle it.
As I did every year I flew out a few days after them, this time cutting it close and arriving on Christmas Eve. My ex and I slipped out to the Mall of Georgia to load up on presents and the drive there was the longest we'd been alone together since she'd moved out.

When we returned home Carmen and I kissed the kids to bed and then wrapped all the presents in front of the television. She hadn't had a TV since she moved out so was wide-eyed at the new reality shows. Finally, we were done and she disappeared up the stairs to her room. I ate most of Santa's cookies and drank almost all of his milk.

I won't say it was easy, that first Christmas Eve apart, sleeping in the guest room again, surrounded by more ghosts of Christmas past than ever haunted Ebenezer Scrooge.
And yet the morning after made it all worthwhile. I immediately recognized in the eyes of my kids the purity of the joy that I knew on that day when I was their age, still untainted by the disappointments that, with time, will meet us all.

Five years later I love my Christmases with my adopted family.

Rabid, runaway reindeer couldn't keep me away.

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Typical Friday night for me. I'm working feverishly in my office while Ava and Chet and Ava's friend Livia try to decide on what movie to get from pay-per-view. I made the mistake of telling Ava that her old best friend Maude, Judd Apatow's daughter, is in Knocked Up so she was begging me to watch it.

"I wanna see Knocked Up! I wanna see Knocked Up!" she howled.

"Ava," I said. "You're nine. There is no way I will let you watch that film." By the way, the version she had highlighted on the screen was not even the unrated Knocked Up. "You wouldn't like it, it's all about sex."

"But I love sex!" said Chet, who is six. "I was born from it!"

When he figured that out and exactly what he figured out is anybody's guess.

I had them watch License to Wed instead. I usually have a no Barney and no Robin Williams policy in my house that is strictly enforced, but this time I caved.

Posted by Trey Ellis at 05:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

It is aways such a great feeling to hold that advance copy in your sweaty mitts. It all suddenly feels so much more real.

The rest of my life is actually pretty wonderful right now now that I think about it. I feel so damn creative in this city, even with the freezing cold invading my bones. The semester at Columbia went well and it's almost over so between now and late in January I am free to write, write, write. It's such a treat for me. The kids leave for Georgia before I do, however, as I do every year I will be down there for Christmas fighting off the drowsy mud dauber wasps who like to crawl around on my little bed before they die. Any time Ava and Chet get to spend time with their parents together it's Christmas and when it's actually Christmas it's paradise for them. It's good for me too. I get to feel a little mopey and sentimental for all that has changed, all that was lost and also to think about the New Year and and the adventures to come.

Still, we have another two weeks here so we're buying a tabletop tree. Ava is beside herself, got up at six just to unpack the decorations (one bags worth from the Duane Reade pharmacy). When I was a kid we had one main cardboard footlocker sized box with cardboard compartments for the menagerie of exotic ornaments my mom would collect throughout the year. We would string popcorn some years and I would bring in the tree myself from the Boy Scouts where I was selling them.

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