I come from a family institution in which birthdays were celebrated on a single day, with a cake and surprise presents and guests. Enter my husband, whose sense of the world when it comes to special occasions (despite a voracious desire and impressive skill for throwing several-course dinner parties) is so fluid it has the capacity to flood and drown the small, brittle town of my gray matter.
First there’s his airline pilot schedule, which… #godhelpusall. We’ve come to the place in our lives where all holidays have at some point been displaced by anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. [This year I ran into some rather sticky moments when my four-year-old daughter suddenly taught herself to read the calendar, using very pointed questions and two magic markers, a few weeks before I anticipated having to move Christmas at the last minute on account of Captain Dad’s still-unknown training schedule. That one was a nail-biter.]
Then we have Captain Dad’s model for gift-giving, which is as likely to be an interactive process involving a co-created shopping spree as it is to be a conventional “surprise,” and tends to harness an extremely odd and satisfying combination of practicality, thoughtfulness, and improvisation. Once, back when we still had the will and energy to fill each others’ Christmas stockings the night before (rather than putting some unwrapped things in a pile and hoping for the best) I found him standing in front of our pantry cupboard,