I decided a while ago that I wasn’t going to sit around and ruminate about 2005 on New Year’s Eve, because in a way it felt as though I’d spent most of 2005 doing exactly that. It wasn’t necessary this year to try and reflect on everything that happened, because everything happened and it happened big, demanding the neurological spotlight and microphone. There’s no going, “Married? Holy shit, was that this year? Honestly, I don’t know where the time goes. The move was last year, though, right?” No, we had a handle on ‘05, and I think it’s safe to say no one I know will look back in ten years and think, “I wish I had taken time to appreciate that more.” Even friends who had awful years got new jobs and homes.

Well, I guess Trevis did lose his parents in Hurricane Katrina. But he found them eventually! And he found them a house here in town, and they had a big Christmas dinner together there, with scrumptious pie! See? It’s easy if you know how.

2006, though… I don’t like the look of this 2006. Nine days in, and it’s all surgeries and rushing to the ER and painful breakups and dentists who must have been drunk and Tivos that shoot sparks at the most expensive possible moment. I mean, three of the top stories on my headline tracker are reports on various people’s comas and/or lung fluid. It wears on a person this early in the year. One coma per week limit for the rest of January.

We had a nice and restful break (my company closes its doors for a week every year, waving a white flag in the face of midwestern Christianity) but Christmas never really took off for me this year, despite my best efforts to wish my state of mind back to 1983. It’s true that Christmas inevitably loses some of its magic when you no longer believe a terrifying bearded giant is breaking into your house using witchcraft while you sleep and none of the adults seem to care. When Christmas is 50% of your annual income and the only time you can see your favorite cousins, it has a way of focusing the attention that Mastercards and job deadlines take away. They say Christmas regains its magic once your generation has kids of its own, though, and that really is a pernicious goddamn lie. Our family Christmas is stuffed to the rafters with little children, and those f***ers ruin everything. They need driver’s licenses and out-of-town girlfriends as soon as the law allows.

I used to crab about this every year. Three of my cousins began simultaneously cranking out wee babes in the nineties, all roughly the same age, all being raised on a steady diet of neglect and pure, uncut Colombian cocaine. This year, the upstairs landing was employed in a game called Drop It Onto The Ground Floor for what must have been two consecutive hours; it looked like the kids were trying to move out. People say of children, “They grow up so fast,” and that is also a lie. I swear to golly gosh these grotty bastards have been little for-friggin’-ever. They never seem to get older, to outgrow anything. Why aren’t they aging? What about the years when they become sullen and hormonal and sit sulking, miserable and quiet, in the living room waiting to go home? Where the holy hell are those years?

The Christmas Eve party when I was a kid and the family was manageably sized was something I looked forward to all year; now, with every Christmas Eve looking like a cross between a playground and a playground shooting, I look forward to it every year until I get there. Then I realize, “Oh. Right. Shrieking indoor baseball.” At this early stage in our marriage, the eroded, grimly self-parodying traditions are the only ones we have so far. This was a year of finding our way. There are still the newlywed obstacles to overcome regarding whose house we visit when, the questions about why we visit any of them at all, and the silent treatments following those questions. I think Christmas will only be properly restored when Christmas morning once again means going downstairs, sitting on the floor, and opening gifts in our jammies while the bacon cooks instead of getting up way too early, getting dressed like it’s our anniversary, and rushing out to the car so we can Be There In Time to sit and do nothing for hoooooours in someone else’s house.

That, I realized this year, is how little children put the magic back in Christmas: they give you that precious, precious excuse to stay home and make everyone come to you. My sister worked it with her newborn boy: “We would love to go to midnight mass, but wouldn’t you know it, he’s all tuckered out.” This maneuver cracked me up, since my sister started the tradition of the family going to midnight mass by insisting on it a few years ago (”like we always used to,” she said; with the exception of maybe 1982, my family had never, ever gone to midnight mass) and has successfully weaseled out of it every single year since, leaving me and my Lutheran wife alone with my parents in the church, praying that it’s not too late to ask Santa for some Jolt Cola before our long-distance drive the next morning.

Though it didn’t have much of the usual fairy dust sprinkled on it, the holiday was generally pleasant and relaxing. My immediate family’s Christmas dinner was of the “traditional” turkey and stuffing variety for the first time I can remember. (I’ve noticed that according to my upbringing, the definition of “traditional” is “something we have heard other people do.”) Considering the Letter Incident was still fresh in everyone’s mind, the genial nature of everyone present was nothing short of a Charlie Brown tree-prettying miracle. I would have to be a churl to say anything too critical about it, like I just did for pages. It was a quiet end to a good year, and hopefully the beginning of another one despite all evidence to the contrary.