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and I thought I might as well humor him. So we spent the morning getting ready for Christmas. I called the girls—we have three grown daughters—and they came over for lunch and helped untangle the lights and wrap some packages. We sang carols and made cookies and had a wonderful time.
    “When the girls left, he asked me to tell him about Christmas when he was a boy—because he was having a hard time remembering. Now I’ve known this man all my life. He had a terrible childhood, father was a drunk—beat him and his mother all the time. His father ran off with a woman from the drugstore, and his mother took sick and stayed home in bed most of the time. Ed never had a Christmas when he was a child. Well, how could I bring all that up again? I just didn’t have the heart.
    “We’ve been married sixty years. And I’ve never lied to him, ever. But I decided I’d just make up some good memories for him. What harm would it do? So I told him about the year he got a tricycle, and the year there was a wind-up train under the tree, and the year he saw Santa Claus, and the year he got to be in the Christmas pageant at church. It made him veryhappy—me remembering the Christmases he never had but always wanted.
    “You know, we never did get around to Christmas that March. Just Christmas Eve. Because by evening his mind was back in the present. Christmas Eve and good memories seemed to be enough.
    “But four months later it happened all over again. I heard him singing carols upstairs one morning, and here came Christmas down the stairs. MERRY CHRISTMAS! Again in July. Also in October—instead of Halloween. Twice in December. And now in February.
    “Every time, he wants me to tell him about his childhood again, and I do. I’m getting so good at lying about how wonderful his Christmas used to be that I half believe it myself. I call the girls each time, and they come over to help out. They’re really into it now. They bring him presents and sing carols and bake cookies. And twice we’ve even got as far as putting up a tree. They love to do it. See, they don’t think of it as Christmas anymore. They think of it as Father’s Day.”
    Just then the old man comes shuffling back up the hall. He and the nurse are finishing off a last chorus of “Jingle Bells.” They both shout “Merry Christmas!” at me, and I shout “Merry Christmas!” right back at them.
    The old lady patted my knee again, smiled, and rose to leave with her husband. He gallantly held the door open for her, and they went off into another day, hand in hand.
    I didn’t have time to ask her what they did when other holidays came up.
    But I guess every day is Valentine’s Day for them.

T hat old lady in the Valentine story planted a seed in my head that didn’t sprout until the following November. She had said, “It’s kind of refreshing to have Christmas come as a surprise.”
    The early warning signs of the inevitable coming of the holiday juggernaut had appeared in the form of gift catalogs in late September. A fog of anxious dread began rising out of my spiritual swamp. By November I was in a serious Christmas-phobia funk. I wanted out. I lay awake half a night with a full committee meeting going on in my head. In the morning, I wrote a letter.
    Dear Family and Friends:
    I saw the cover of the December issue of
Esquire
magazine this week and bought it to take home to mywife. Because the headline on the cover fitted my mood exactly:
    “O H M Y G O D (It’s Christmas)”
    Maybe “Jeezus Christ, here comes Christmas again” would be more ironically accurate. Neither exclamation reflects much joy.
    Nevertheless, Lynn and I couldn’t seem to help falling into the inevitable what-are-we-going-to-do-about-Christmas discussion—the exasperating one that leads to deep sighs and the making of long lists of people and long lists of things to buy and long lists of things to do as soon as possible even though soon is not so possible. Christmas as a