Twenty Years of Christmas

We celebrated our 20th anniversary last week. Twenty years is a whole lot of years. A milestone of sorts. So I looked it up and found that 20 years is China. Now we really didn’t need any dishes. We still had our good China from our wedding, and flowery China my grandmother left me, and a few pieces left of the everyday China that had survived the early years of our marriage when I liked to throw them at him. And then we had the Corell wear that we always use because the others are too heavy and we prefer the Corell.

That left us to improvisation. We would go eat Chinese. That was the next best thing and included the word China. It also included tall drinks with umbrellas and fruit sticking out of them. After 20 years all the well orchestrated anniversaries with Champagne bottles and fancy restaurants were a thing of the past. And also the need for a babysitter. We left two teens at home alone and went out for our Chinese anniversary.

I dressed for the occasion in my sweater with the cheetah fur collar and Santa Clauses all over the front. One must look their best on a 20th Chinese anniversary. I hoped nobody would throw paint on me for my faux fur implying I would really like to wear real Cheetahs around my neck. And we started the evening with a Flaming Volcano to toast our 20th while we were waiting for our dinner.

Having had an earlier dental visit, I found early on that Flaming Volcano felt really good when swished around my really sore tooth. So I ended out drinking most of the anniversary toast. And after the meal, we headed out for our post anniversary shopping. The only problem was now we didn’t know what to buy.

In previous years, my mom would watch the kids while we left to celebrate our anniversary, and after dinner we would head to Toys R’ Us, open late for the holidays, where in about an hour and a half we had our entire Santa’s haul for three little ones stuffed in the back of our car. We would return home to a wrecked house, a frazzled Mimi, and three overstimulated little ones jumping off furniture and the boys torturing little sister’s Barbies. I would put the kids to bed, while my mother limped to her car, and my husband clandestinely hid our haul in the darkest corners of the garage.

Now those days are over. Christmas is a long process of specific items from Best Buy, Circuit City, Wal Mart, and hard to get things from Amazon. It’s trolling the malls for that particular thing from Hollister, Abercrombie’s, or Limited Too. And the last minute trip to the Dollar Store where $50.00 could buy a truckload of breakable items that brought screams of joy on Christmas morning is now no more because a plastic horse for Ken is no longer needed or a rubber Pokemon ripoff that squeaked and was great to throw at the cat.

It was a bit sad as we stood on the steps of the Chinese restaurant. We looked at each other wondering where to go now. And although my tooth was feeling better, my husband did look a bit fuzzy. Maybe 20 years brought the need for glasses. We opted for the next best thing. We went to the Kroger across the street. We did need oatmeal and milk for breakfast, and had to do something that remotely resembled our traditional post meal shopping.

Wandering around Kroger, I quickly misplaced my husband and began looking for not only Maple and Brown Sugar, but also someone named Jeff. It didn’t concern me much because I was marveling at how much better my toothache had gotten and how interesting that this Kroger seemed to be built in a circle. I kept looking for Quaker and kept ending up in the cheese display. But my tooth sure felt better.

Finally after hours of searching, I was grabbed by the husband named Jeff who was standing with grocery bags in hand and muttering something about too many Flaming Volcanoes. We went home to a house minus a frazzled Mimi, and two teenagers in front of televisions. But even through my tooth numbing haze, I knew they really were happy to see me, twenty years had been good ones, and echoes of those three little people would live on in my heart forever.