My father would be celebrating his 76th birthday on Monday (Nov. 2, 2020). It’s hard to believe it’s been 15 months since he died and that this is the second straight year he won’t be here for his annual family dinner.
I never got the impression that his birthday meant much to Dad. He was far more moved by a nice card than any gift, and he often shook his head when somebody asked him what age he was. Even if he didn’t expect to grow old after a rough beginning, he didn’t like the idea of aging.
As the years passed, his birthdays were a big deal for the rest of us. We almost always got together on Nov. 2 for a home-cooked meal by my sister-in-law, and the menu typically had three variations for the last decade of his life: Deer steak, chicken and noodles or chuck wagon casserole. But the featured food was always a cheesecake. Before he got sick and couldn’t eat much, he’d devour half the dessert in one sitting.
I considered the old man’s birthday the kickoff for the holidays. This really was his time of year. He loved Thanksgiving and having everybody together. He went overboard on Christmas, especially when my brother and I were young.
In addition to far too many gifts for a family of our means, we could count on several other traditions, from our trips to Battlefield Mall to spend two hours in the arcade, to hanging out with him on the weekends as he worked monthlong craft shows all over the region in Columbia, Topeka, Emporia, Joplin and Springfield.
Some of my fondest memories are going to bed with virtually nothing under our Christmas tree and waking up to a ridiculous number of presents, always wrapped in newspapers he’d bought and read during his shows.
Another tradition was putting up the tree and lights early, as in before Thanksgiving. Sometimes, we had decorations up a few days after Halloween. That more or less stopped when I left for college and started my own family. My wife firmly believes that celebrating Christmas, a holiday she doesn’t embrace like I do for various reasons, shouldn’t begin until after Thanksgiving.
I, of course, start before Thanksgiving. It’s a running family joke that I’ll hit any closing-out sale I can (especially Kmart) to supplement the bigger presents with trinkets and small gifts piled around our Christmas tree, which usually doesn’t go up until the second week of December.
It’s an understatement to say I inherited the old man’s Christmas spirit. That was until last year, our first without him. Try as I might, I just never got into the holidays in 2019. I went shopping, I dug through our decorations, I wrote a Twelve Days of Christmas blog series … I tried.
I even talked about hanging Christmas lights on our house, something Shana and I have never done. It didn’t happen. I just wasn’t into it.
This year, though, I made a bet with Shana several months ago that I’d start putting up lights on Nov. 1. She wasn’t thrilled about the idea, but I could tell what she was thinking: “He’s never going to do it anyway.”
I remembered that bet today as I thought about Dad’s birthday kicking off the holiday season. I dug through our boxes in the basement searching for lights. I climbed over a slew of boxes and tables in our garage and finally found a few yard decorations.
By the end of the day, our front yard featured a glowing sleigh and three reindeer, the beginning of what I hope is a display that honors the old man properly on what would have been his 76th birthday and holiday season.
