COMMENTARY : All I Want for Christmas Is a Minute’s Peace

One woman remembers a Christmas Eve when she sat down at the kitchen table and inexplicably burst into tears, bewildering her two small children, who were just starting to think Christmas was fun.

Another woman, who had spent the weeks before Christmas decorating and baking to a fare-thee-well, saw her husband sit down at the beautiful dinner table in his long underwear. She promptly left the house and drove around for an hour while the rest of the family ate.

It’s that time again. It feels like a hot cat sitting on your chest, threatening to suck the breath out of you like a vacuum cleaner.

Christmas stress.

It’s become a tradition to publish articles telling you how to cope with the pressure of trying to get everything done, but they never tell you anything really useful, like “Drink more gin” or “Break your leg.” (There was a report recently that blood banks run low at this time of year. The reason: More people are having elective surgery. On reflection, this did not surprise me.)

At this time of year, the world seems to be divided between those who “do” Christmas and those who don’t. This has nothing to do with religion. It often has a lot to do with the differences between men and women, with those who are wondering how much pine roping to buy tending to be women and those who are walking around thinking Christmas is sometime in the distant future tending to be men.

Generally, men prepare for Christmas by spending a few hours in a department store, during which time they buy sexy nightgowns for their wives that can’t be worn until June and a box of overpriced candy. Sometimes they will go all out and make up a batch of eggnog according to their own secret recipe that they got from a friend in the office.

A lot of women, on the other hand, are starting to go quietly and politely insane right about now. You can see them in the malls and stores, their shoulders starting to hunch, a bolus of panic starting to form in that space behind their eyes.

Soon there will be no space behind their eyes; it will be crammed with phantom lists and memos, pine cones, hot-glue guns and seasonal tablecloths. In a few weeks, you will see them shopping at midnight, pausing between the Teen-Age Mutant Ninja Turtles and the Food Fighters and trying to decide which one is more educational.

There was a Christmas advertisement for a shopping center recently that featured a fully grown woman in a long dress, wearing a lace apron and clutching a teddy bear. This woman is clearly already way out into the ozone. Can you imagine an advertisement showing a grown man holding a teddy bear? Can you imagine a man making “snowflakes” on the windows with lace doilies and spray snow?

The modern woman has been trapped by Christmas. This is her chance to beat her mother at her own game. This is when, in a few short weeks, she tries to make up to her children for all the songs not sung, books not read, outings not taken and construction paper not glued during the preceding 11 months while she was out holding down some ridiculous job instead.

The code is clear: If you can’t do your own Thanksgiving and Christmas, if you can’t cook the meals--and we mean Christmas Eve dinner, Christmas breakfast and Christmas dinner--clean the house, make sure the kids home from college have clean sheets, and love it, you are a Wimp.

Can’t take the heat? Can’t take the kitchen? Thinking about “going home” for the holidays? Thinking about buying a pie? About canned cranberry sauce? About hiring one of those people who will wrap your presents and trim your tree?

There’s a word for you, and Heroic Superwoman is not it.

You should be making ornaments out of dried pomegranates and pressed tin, earrings out of cinnamon sticks and centerpieces out of old reindeer horns and dried grasses.

You should be reading Consumer Reports to find out which toys will not turn your children into vulgar, valueless, slime-bag creeps or poke out their eyes or end up under the couch.

You should be going ice skating and visiting the National Christmas Tree and a few puppet shows, and possibly having a dozen people in for punch and cookies after the school holiday program and getting some wood for the fires.

You should get 50 or 200 copies of that snapshot you should have taken two weeks ago to put in the Christmas cards, the Christmas cards you should be writing this very minute.

You should be talking about The Real Meaning of Christmas, and taking the kids to work in a soup kitchen, and researching the charities to find out which one will spend more of your money helping people than on office coffee.

You should be making place mats out of red and green Popsicle sticks and crocheting coffee cups and putting red light bulbs in the flashlights. And then your husband (not mine) will say: “Why are you going to so much trouble? We don’t need all of this.”

Last Sunday, I spent two hours rolling melted chocolate chips into little balls. These are “truffles” and will become a thoughtful gift for some thin friends. Now I have to find little papers to put them in, tins to put the little papers and the chocolate balls in, and paper to wrap the tins with. What a great idea that was!

The cat is starting to breathe very hard.

My mother has a wreath made out of nuts and pine cones that she takes out of a box every year and sticks on the front door. I make my own wreaths. My mother waits until the last possible minute and buys the smallest, cheapest leftover tree and turns the squashed half toward the wall and then lets my kids decorate it. We go out and cut our own tree and then carefully place on it our painstakingly exquisite ornaments that we have assembled over the years.

My mother is totally mellow at Christmas. I’m like Holly Hunter in “Broadcast News,” taking regular anxiety-attack crying breaks.

I knew I was over the edge this year when I noticed the decorations and advertisements going up right after Halloween and thought: “Oh great, they’re starting earlier this year, so we’ll all have time to get everything done.” I was finally brought back to earth the other day by something I saw in a bookstore.

Two years ago, one of the best gifts we got was a copy of “The Polar Express,” a wonderful children’s book about a little boy who gets to go to the North Pole and is the one child selected for a ride on Santa’s sleigh. He chooses, for his gift, one of the silver sleigh bells, but after he gets home he finds it has fallen out of a hole in his bathrobe pocket. Miraculously, it is under the tree Christmas morning. Only the boy and his sister can hear the bell. Grown-ups can’t hear it. Only those who “believe” can hear it.

Well, now somebody has packaged a little kit: the book, a tape of William Hurt reading it and a silver bell. The person who designed this little gift evidently forgot to read the book.

When will I find the time to make that authentic Christmas pudding that nobody likes? When will I polish the silver? Varnish the pine cones? Buy those perfect presents for the 700 people on my list? Figure out why my cookie batter always sticks to the table? Figure out why I’m making cookies?

Another year has gone by, and I haven’t learned to play Christmas carols on the piano. I haven’t even gotten a piano.

I haven’t made homemade gifts for everyone so that I can avoid the commercialization of Christmas, and I haven’t thought of a way to get my children to think more about others than about themselves.

I haven’t learned how to mull wine or shell nuts or make a festive garland out of dried herbs and old panty hose. I haven’t learned how to make plane reservations for Morocco.

I haven’t learned anything.

And it doesn’t look like I’m going to.