In 43 years, I was with my dad for all but four Christmases. That might not sound impressive to those who spend every Christmas with their families, but it is considering how many years I worked in newspapers and lived hundreds of miles from home.
The first time I wasn’t home for the big day was the most difficult. It was 2002, and my first wife and I lived in McAllen, Texas, a city just a few miles north of the Mexico border. I was 26 years old and living away from family for the first time.
It’d been a rough six months in deep south Texas. Even though I’d just been promoted to deputy sports editor, I wasn’t fitting in at work, and The Monitor was the reason my wife and I moved more than 1,000 miles from Emporia, Kansas.
To make matters worse, three big life changes (the job, the wedding on May 28, 2002, and moving a long way from our comfort zone) was just too much to overcome. We argued constantly, and I put on quite a bit of weight, pushing the 300-pound barrier.
By the time Christmas rolled around, the marriage was on the ropes. Nonetheless, she went all-out, buying several awesome presents. Unfortunately, my Christmas spirit took the year off. I could see the disappointment on her face as she opened a handful of mediocre gifts.
It wouldn’t be fair to say she had a sense of entitlement. I’d made a big deal of the holiday in our time together, so to be underwhelmed had to be a shock. Not surprisingly, and for plenty of other reasons, our marriage, which included a miscarriage a few months later, didn’t last through 2003.
Somehow, though, we both ended up back in Kansas before the end of 2003. She went back home to Wichita, and I moved in with my dad in August to the small town of Cottonwood Falls, Kansas, where I lived for about six months.
From time to time in the next year, I thought about that sad Christmas in 2002 and the miscarriage not long after. I’d always wondered what it be like to have kids at that time of year.
As fate would have it, I moved in with my brother and sister-in-law in tiny Harveyville, Kansas, early in 2004. Dan and Tricia had two babies, Draven and Ashlyn, and I fell in love with both of them quickly.
By the time Christmas rolled around that year, I was lonely. Despite living with a loving family, I’d been about as single as single gets for going on two years, and I often wondered what it would have been like without the miscarriage.
I’m sure my brother and his wife realized this, and it might have been why they asked me to help with Christmas. That meant staying up until 4 a.m. with both of them and my father, trying to make sense of overly complicated instructions to build dozens of toys.
After two hours of labor, we finally finished the toy race track many of us grew up with. Of course, Dan and I spent the next hour racing one another and got an hour of sleep before the kids got up to see what Santa had brought them.
After two hours of opening presents, I remember standing in the middle of the living room with my hands on my head looking around the carnage of the floor, thinking, “Somebody has to clean this shit up.”
For most of the next six years, I remained about as single as single gets. Finally, in 2011, my true love came along. As luck would have it, she had three kids. Within a few years, we were married and I was shoulder-deep in Christmas spirit with three step-kids.
As Shana meticulously calculated how much we should spend on each child, I was running way over budget every year, much like my parents did when we were kids. To her, I was going overboard. To me, it’s just what I learned though the years from my old man, and I take pride in carrying on that tradition.