Christmas
Unless you're one of those hugely pro-Christmas nutters with brandy sauce for blood and a "comical" santa hat that is pretty much surgically attached to your head for the entirety of December your relationship with Christmas probably passed through the following phases.
Phase 1: Childhood
You can wet yourself with excitement anywhere from about August onwards at the mere thought of Christmas morning. It doesn't matter what you receive on the day, it will still be enough to have you screaming with joy from approximately 4am til whenever the first toy breaks or runs out of batteries. Your first thought after Christmas will be how soon next Christmas is.
Phase 2: Later childhood
You start to be able to differentiate between good and crap presents. They're still generally OK but it becomes possibly for Santa to bring the wrong thing (No, a Machine Man is not "just the same" as a Transformer. It's just not. Not that I'm scarred. Not at all...). Even with this it's still fairly impossible to have a bad day because of added family, over-eating and the extra shit you can get away with because mum and dad have had a few beers at lunch. Your first thought after Christmas is over is whether you can swap your loot for something better once school goes back.
Phase 3: Teenage years
Christmas becomes a bit of a minefield. Presents become a bit more crap ("A young man such as yourself doesn't want toys anymore! So we bought you underpants!") just as your demands start to get a bit more...demanding ("It's just a car! One car! What's so greedy about wanting one car?!"). Hanging around with family seems pretty lame and you'd rather be doing practically anything else. First thought once Christmas is over is how you're going to spin it to your friends when school goes back so that it sounds even lamer than it was.
Phase 4: Young adult years
You spend each year extricating yourself a little further from your family Christmas until your mum no longer cries when you say you won't be home at all. Your reward for this is sitting around with your friends drinking and bored and making ludicrously complicated plans for New Years Eve. Christmas ceases to have any real importance to you and you get to be all snide and hip as shit about it, which frankly is pretty much what your 20s is all about.
Kids bring back some of the Christmas magic. Sure, you have to explain it to them. I tried the "If you be good Santa might bring you..." emotional bullying technique on my son only to be informed that the thing he wanted was readily available from any good toy store, the proprietor of which wouldn't care whether he'd been good or not. But their general level of excitement about practically every aspect of the day is infectious. Yes, presents are great. No, it doesn't matter that we don't have a chimney. No, you don't get to decide what your sister gets for Christmas. Why is Christmas all about snow when it's actually quite hot? Well, you see the earth tilts...
Anyway. It feels oddly as though your children have given you something back, something you didn't really realize that you missed. And this gift, this giving from child to parent, makes it even worse that I was given a Machine Man when I very specifically asked for a Transformer.
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