The Christmas Dance

My Mother and I have begun our yuletide tango.

Every year, we put each other through 6 weeks of teasing, badgering, silent treatments, and deception--all over Christmas gifts. It's Advent, Williams-family style! No candles required.

My mother, if she were here in Basel as I type this, would take offense that I am calling this a partner dance and not a solo routine. To hear her tell the story, it's all my crazy, and none of hers. I believe an objective eye would call it a 60/40 split. Okay, maybe 70/30.

Ever since I was a young child, I have been bad about respecting the tradition of gift-giving around Christmas. I do not wait gracefully; even when I was 6 and should have been wide-eyed and apple-cheeked with the mystery of the season, I was impatient and well...goal-oriented. My goal was the opening of my presents. AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

I am not especially proud to admit it, but I was the type of child who would sneak into the living room when her parents were otherwise engaged, hide under the tree, pick a present, and gently pull out the folded corners of the wrapping so that I could see the edge of the box. I would do this to each corner, slowly so as to protect the paper, in the hopes of devining from any visible labels or markings if it was the gift I had asked for. I was methodical, I was determined, and I was sneaky.

One of the few times I ever got into trouble as a child (because I was a pretty good kid, except from about Black Friday until December 24th) was when I threw a temper tantrum over the brand new box of Crayola crayons under the tree. I remember that box of crayons vividly. It was the 84-color box! You can, perhaps, understand my impatience. I knew about the crayons, of course, because I had used my aforementioned technique of gift-wrap circumnavigation. School was out, I was bored, and I wanted to color! BUT, I wanted to color with my NEW crayons. The ones I wasn't supposed to know about. I stomped up and down the stairs. I cried. I yelled. I'm sure I made the Christ child proud that day.

The following year, Mom decided to take the lead in our little dance. She stopped putting my Christams presents out under the tree at all! She waited to arrange them under the Christmas tree until I was asleep on Christmas Eve. Sneaky, right? I guess I get it honest!

I was convinced that I wasn't going to get any Christmas presents at all that year. I spent all of December rummaging though the boxes under the tree in disbelief. I would even check the branches because Dad, for some unknown reason, liked to hide the gifts IN the tree. No box had the label I was looking for: "M.E." (Mary Elizabeth was too long to fit on the sticky Christmas labels.) Not one M.E., anywhere. It was a dark time, my friends.

I have to admit that waking up the next morning and being genuinely surprised by all my presents was quite a novel treat for me; but once I knew her new choreography, I was sure to change mine, too. The following Christmas, I learned to hunt.

She didn't expect such tenacity from an 8-year-old, no doubt. Mom's hiding place that first year was really beneath my talents as a detective: the top of my father's closet. Please. What Mom didn't realize was that she was doing me a favor! Now that the gifts were in a secluded place, I could open them completely, and with finesse! I became a whiz at re-wrapping. I even learned to pack a roll of scotch tape when I would go out on a gift-finding mission.

Year after year, her hiding places became increasingly complex: in the garage. In the trunk of the car. In a locked suitcase (which, by the way, I still consider unsportsmanlike conduct). I think she slowly started to like the challenge of finding hiding places that would confound me. She also learned to tape down the ends of the wrapping paper to the box, which drove me crazy. Dad never understood why we went through so much scotch tape at Christmas. He would mutter under his breath about needing to buy stock in 3-M. What can I say? Our little dance required props.

Long after it was age-appropriate, I was hunting for my Christmas presents. I was hunting, though, because SHE was hiding. It takes two to tango, Mom.

Sadly, I found in my late teens that opening the wrapping at the ends of boxes doesn't work nearly as well when most of your gifts are in department store boxes and don't rattle, so my main method of snooping lost its effectiveness about 1997. It was a rough year.

Mom and I still do our routine. Just yesterday, she and I exchanged a little SMS pas-de-deux:

Mom: Am getting ready to go into Nordstrom's.
Me: What are you doing at Nordstrom's??? :)
Mom: ...maybe some Christmas shopping.
Me: I bought you something today. Oooooh, can you stand it??
Mom: I may buy you something too!
Me: You just CANNOT resist teasing me, can you??
Mom: Nope!

As you can read, it's all a little less frenzied now. There are no temper tantrums, or tears--just civilized text messages and cheshire-cat smiles. Since we've had 33 years to hone our responses to each other, we make perfect dance partners. There's no longer a need to work up a sweat.

We may do only the tried and true footwork these days. We may be years past adding any new and creative steps. But, the dance still goes on.