It's Andy Fish!

Above- anxiety is often our co-pilot during the holidays.

You’d think growing up in a single mom household would make for some pretty sparse Christmas’ but that was never the case. As a kid I thought we were millionaires because I always got everything I asked for and more.

I have a favorite aunt who really got me– and the families all got together on Christmas Eve (which is typical in Irish Households) to exchange gifts while our immediate family would exchange gifts on Christmas morning.

This aunt would always come up with a home run. Some years she’d get me art supplies, other years she got me a bootleg Darth Vader figure before there were official Darth Vader figures (I still have it), and then one year after I obsessively became a classic film fan (thanks in no small part to a Great Aunt who always pushed me to watch BW movies) she gave me a pile of VHS Tapes from a CLASSIC FILMS line which included great movies like THE RED HOUSE, THE STRANGER, HIS GIRL FRIDAY, MY MAN GODFREY and the big winner in the bunch Bob Hope’s MY FAVORITE BRUNETTE.

I loved all of the films but the Bob Hope film became a Christmas classic even though it had nothing to do with Christmas. Hope plays a baby photography who wanted to be a hard boiled private eye and steps in thanks to mistaken identity and its one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen.

As the years went by and I became an adult with my own family the Christmas Eve tradition continued, but the introduction of Yankee Swap really soured me on the whole thing. For those of you who don’t know what it is I’d more accurately call it “Bad Christmas” because you choose a gift from a pile and open it and if you like it you keep it and if you don’t you swap it with someone else’s gift whether they want to swap or not.

It’s supposed to be funny– and maybe it is the first time you play with a bunch of people who get how it should work. But I had enough deadbeat relatives participating who wouldn’t bother to bring gifts that my Mom and Aunt would each bring extra, causing the rounds to continue for what felt like eternity.

I don’t see how this is anything even close to the Christmas Spirit or Fun and after my Grandmother passed away my promise of attending these family events ended and I broke off into my own family Christmas– which also coincided with my immediate family’s expansion with spouses.

I still fondly remember that Christmas Eve night back when I was probably 14 and I had retired to my room, popped in those VHS tapes and likely read a Mickey Spillane novel.

Probably the best method I’ve used to keep the Christmas Spirit is the years I volunteered to drive a van to pickup up donation boxes for Toys for Tots– inevitably the night I was assigned was always frigid with drizzle and a “wintry mix”, my helper was a good friend with a big personality who would always show up in a Santa hat– and we’d make plenty of stops for Hot Chocolate to make up for the lousy heat and lousy defrosters of the rental van.

Today things have evolved Christmas wise, and I’m as close to Jimmy Stewart in IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE as I’ll probably ever get to.

Happy Christmas!