Marotta:
Deliver Me, I Pray, from Over-functioning

"Have you even STARTED your Christmas shopping?" I overheard one young mother wryly ask another.

"I have," said her friend, "and I MIGHT be almost finished; but you know how it is. You keep thinking ‘Is it enough?’"

That’s your first principle of holiday shopping right there: Beware doing it too early lest you waffle, panic, then rush out and start doing it all again.

This happened to me the year we took the train from our home up north here clear down to Tampa, Florida at the invitation of my sister’s family, who’d been hinting that it was time for us to come to them for once.

The train part was my idea and I talked it up big to the kids. "What fun we’ll have!" I enthused, describing us all sprawled on our plushy train seats, humming little tunes and coloring in our coloring books while outside our windows the world whizzed past. And it was fun too, aside from how our tiny third grader was almost pressed to death by a surging Down-Escalator-crowd at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia; and how the toilets all froze just north of Baltimore, not to thaw and become usable again until we hit the sunny Southland.

We’d brought the whole Santa miracle with us of course. And probably it was the unfamiliar setting more than the particular gifts, but there were some quiet little tears late that Christmas Day, tears that I for some reason took responsibility for. So that we weren’t back from Florida for three hours before I had dashed out to the closest discount drugstore to haul home what I was somehow prevented from seeing as a pile of lame junk—which I wrapped, stashed behind a door, then pretended to come upon, crying "Whoops, what’s THIS, kids?! More gifts, that Santa must have set down and forgotten about!"

Deliver me, I pray, from such over-functioning again.

We all over-function though, especially we women. For us, snowdays like last week’s never mean lying around in front of the sports channels. For us they mean another chance to clean more; to get a little more done.

I have one friend who, for this Thanksgiving just past, made lasagna and tortellinis; curried chicken and sausages; scallops and bacon; and crab cakes and fudge—and all this in addition to the traditional turkey dinner with all the trimmings, pies included.

I had another friend who couldn’t stop decorating her house come the holidays. Even her bathrooms twinkled with lights and candles, and toilet tissue imprinted with little reindeer. She actually began weaving her own Persian rug, of all things, in suitable seasonal colors. (This was the same woman who, when she learned that her husband’s new job would mean the family’s moving to another state, heaved a great and unexpected expected sigh of relief. She’d been thinking only Death would get her out of all the volunteer activities she had by then committed to.)

We need to simplify. We all know it. We all say it. But boy is it hard to do it.

My husband eased himself off the old sports couch last weekend to join a conversation about holiday shopping that the rest of us were having in the kitchen.

"I don’t want gifts anymore," he said. "I’d like you guys to give me… experiences."

The kids’ eyes grew shiny, already picturing concerts and baseball games.

Me I just thought "Train trip to Tampa!" After all, that tiny third-grader is five-foot-nine now and far less easily crushed; and even if the train-toilets do freeze, I’m strangely drawn these days anyway to the whole concept of adult diapers.

Write terry at tmarotta@comcast.net