If you and I are close, or if you have eyes, then you know that I’m a Christmas lunatic. A cuckoo banana Christmas freak. A disciple of all things Christmas. I’ve been obsessed with this holiday for as long as I have had breath in my body. My earliest Christmas memories involve me sitting on my bedroom floor at 5:30 in the morning vibrating with anticipation. I was instructed to wait there until my little digital red clock said 7:00. It was an excruciating 90 minutes as I tried to distract myself with trucks, action figures, and video games. Nothing really worked. It was Christmas morning and there were presents downstairs that I needed to attend to immediately. They quite literally had my name on them. It was a brutal practice in patience. By 6:58 I was standing outside my parents’ door ready to make my move. By 7:01 everyone was awake and slightly annoyed. Mission accomplished.

In my early days, I’m sure I appeared a tad materialistic. Things on things on things. That was certainly part of the draw. Really, though, the main event was the magic. Even if I couldn’t articulate it, that’s where the joy came from: magic. Think about it. A strange man came into my house while I was dead asleep. Instead of murdering me, he brings me a boatload of gifts. He even took the time to wrap them! How magical is that?! Sure it’s a little creepy if you think too hard about it. And yes it was a little transactional because I had to not be “naughty” and I had to leave his jolly ass some cookies. Nevertheless the whole thing was pure magic.

It still is magical for me. I’m equally obsessed with Christmas now as when I was a child. It’s a little insane actually. There’s a winter wonderland in my head all year round. Burl Ives pops into my head in the middle of July. On Easter Sunday I start making my Christmas wish list. Basically I start to visualize Christmas on the 26^th of December. Maybe I need medication.

In my defense, I’m pretty sure the Donohue family does not do Christmas like most normal human families. Therefore I won’t take complete ownership of my pathological holiday responses for this is a case of both nature and nurture. Case and point, this is the first year (seriously the first year EVER) that Santa is not coming to my mom’s house. Keep in mind I’m the youngest child and I’m 28 years old. That means for over three decades, Santa has made his merry way over to my parents’ house to leave gifts for us, even after we graduated high school, even after we graduated college, even after we moved out, even after some of us got married, even after some of us had kids. Santa always came through and whenever you got a gift from Santa you were to look to the sky and scream, “Thank you Santa!” But not this year. Apparently Santa is done with my generation and is focusing on those little ones coming up. Fear not, there will still be gifts. They will just (presumably) say “From Mom.” How pedestrian.

Over the years I’ve shared Donohue Christmas traditions with various friends and acquaintances. They’ve almost unanimously been shocked, bewildered, horrified, and impressed. Like I said, we don’t do Christmas like how I think most people do Christmas. Seeing as how it’s December 25^th today, I’d like to walk you through our Christmas. So grab a hot cup of cocoa and snuggle up.

It all starts with the mouse. Everything that is related to Christmas in my family starts with the mouse. We have an ancient cloth advent/Christmas calendar that’s been in my family for at least 40 years. It’s green and has an image of Santa and Mrs. Claus enjoying some hot toddies near a fire. Below that are 24 squares where a little mouse makes his journey everyday toward Christmas. When that calendar comes out on December 1^st, that’s the first indication that life is worth living and Santa is on his way. Since I’m the youngest and most annoying, I was usually the one to move the mouse. Maybe no one else cared. Shame on them.

So on December 24^th the mouse is moved one last time. It’s Christmas Eve day, which packs as much anticipation as any day of the year. We spend the whole day getting ready for the next day. Back when our family was much more broke, this involved going to get our Christmas tree. The tree lot near our house in south city St. Louis would give away their unwanted trees the day before Christmas. Free tree? Sign me up. The rest of the day is spent cooking. We prepare a veritable feast of hors d’oeuvres. Christmas Eve is the only reason I’ve known that weirdo French word since infancy.

Every year we’d have friends, family, neighbors, and strangers come to our house Christmas Eve. They’d be fed Swedish meatballs, bacon-wrapped water chestnuts, deviled eggs, and these little crab puffs that have no name but will make you believe in god. We’d round out the feast with a meat and cheese tray, crackers, mixed nuts, and cookies galore. My mom’s hors d’oeuvres recipes have become canon. The entire feast is topped off with pickled herring. Let me explain.

Herring, which is a fish, is sometimes pickled and eaten by people who have no taste buds. To say that it’s nauseatingly gross is an understatement. The only reason people pickle fish in the first place is out of dire necessity. No sane person would look at a piece of fish and say, “you know what would make this better? If we put it in a jar with a salty sugar solution and eat it in a few months.” You only pickle fish if winter starvation is the alternative. So why do we include this in our Christmas Eve feast? I have no earthly idea but I love the stuff. It’s unnatural and there’s no excuse. I’m sorry.

Once our friends have left, stuffed and happy, then we get down to the annual Donohue Time Argument. This is the point where we fight over what time to wake up the next morning. When I was little, earlier was better. I pushed for 6 a.m. Even my sisters wanted an early start. My poor Aunt J would nearly be in tears at the idea of waking that early. We usually settled on 7 a.m. As my sisters grew into teenagers, they wanted to sleep in. These were rough years. The Time Argument would get pretty heated. Pretty soon we were looking at 8 a.m. Fast forward into my teen years and beyond, and the kids are begging to sleep until 11 a.m. while my parents push for no later than 9. It’s called the circle of life.

The next morning at the previously agreed upon time, my sisters and I would rush into mom and dad’s bed. There was jumping and tickling and singing. It was Christmas freakin’ morning! We even dragged my Aunt J into the chaos where she’d sit on the corner of the bed wondering why her life choices brought her to that moment.

We walked downstairs as a family unit, everyone in pajamas, to see if Santa had actually made the trip to our house. I usually led the pack as I have always been the most eager. We’d make our way to the living room where, lo and behold, there were neatly organized piles of bright, shiny, glittery, dreamlike presents of every conceivable shape and size just waiting to be opened. Santa surely did not mess around.

Every year my mom yells at us that we were supposed to cut back on the presents. We never do but it’s a fun rhetorical game we feel we must play. Otherwise, the whole thing seems a little materialistic and greedy. But seriously when 8 people are buying gifts for each other PLUS Santa’s presents, it’s easy for those numbers to creep up.

Just as everyone gets comfortable near his or her pile of treasures, Mom announces that it’s time to put Jesus in the manger. My mother is obsessed with nativities, to a near-unhealthy degree. I would say there are no fewer than a dozen in her house at Christmastime. So it would be easy to get confused about which Jesus and which manger she’s talking about. However there is one primary nativity (PN) on the table near the door. It’s rustic and ceramic and quite beautiful. So, yes, there is a nativity hierarchy.

We all get up and stand in front of the primary nativity (PN) and sing Happy Birthday. I kid you not. As grown adults, we stand in front of a nativity scene and sing Happy Birthday to a ceramic baby Jesus that has been hiding on top of the fridge during the month of December. I guess this makes sense seeing as it’s the dude’s birthday but it still feels like something that should be in a movie and not real life.

Once that momentary awkwardness is complete, we get down to unwrapping those presents that await us. This is where things get extreme in the Donohue house. We savor and relish every single moment of unwrapping like it were a fine wine or a beachside vacation. Nothing is rushed. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. We take an unfathomably long time.

First we have to take inventory and count our presents. It’s on the honor system to be honest about your number. This number will then dictate how the rest of the day unfolds. We do “rounds” meaning that we sit in a circle and each open a present one. at. a. time. If you miscount your rounds (mom), then you have a whole lot of presents left at the end. That can lead to resentment and mistrust and no one wants that on Christmas day. It’s best to get an accurate number the first time.

From there we go around in a circle, either clockwise or counterclockwise, and open presents. This takes an outlandishly long time. The reason for this is that my family is composed of talkers. Every one of us knows how to tell a tale. We’re funny and loud and like to talk. Like a lot. Did I mention that we we’re talkers? So here’s how a typical unwrapping might look:

Shannon opens a gift from Aunt J. She loves it. They then stand up and hug each other. Then Aunt J tells the story of finding gift. It probably involved some kind of trial or tribulation. Shannon then talks about how much she wanted that gift in the first place and what she’s going to use it for. Mom then says she’d like to borrow that gift. Actually, Mom was going to put that same thing on her list but she forgot. Pat chimes in about a gift he wanted to put on his list but then he forgot and he regrets it. When Dad was alive, he would pipe up with a story about how he and his best friend Duncan forgot to put something on a list one time and it almost led to their death. It was probably sailing related. Erin can’t sail because she gets seasick. Shannon and Pat accuse her of making that up just so she wouldn’t have to sail. Mom comes in with a story of Erin getting sick on a boat one time. Then Mom, Shannon, and Erin all tell the story of being on the boat in Brazil where they almost died. Shannon travels a ton. How was her trip to Ireland? Wait I need more coffee…

So you see how things can quickly spiral out of control. This is why opening presents takes an ungodly amount of time. Each gift takes about 45 seconds to open but is then followed up with an average of 11.2 minutes of conversation. It’s must be in our genes.

After a few rounds we take an official bagel break. I say “official” because by this point most everyone will have snuck away into the kitchen to fix a bagel. My Aunt J brings them every year along with lox and capers, the whole 9 yards. She brings enough to feed a large corporation. She basically clears out every Panera between South Carolina and Atlanta.

A note about breaks: there are two official ones in the day. The bagel break and the lunch break. Everything else (bathroom, coffee, water, costume change) is non-sanctioned but usually allowed. Group permission is not necessary but strongly encouraged. It’s important to stay hydrated and move your legs. No one wants to throw a blood clot.

After our bagel break, we dive right back into presents. The morning becomes the afternoon, which then becomes early evening. Due to the nature of our unwrapping, it’s an all day affair. The longest we’ve ever gone is 8 hours. I wish I were making that up. We opened presents for a total of 8 hours one Christmas. In our defense, that was the year Aunt J went crazy at a thrift shop and got my sisters each a storage box filled with clothes. They then proceeded to try on every single solitary piece of clothing. That’s how it goes sometimes. I would say that, on average, we open presents for about 5 hours.

We strategically break for lunch with one round left. This is why our early-day inventory must be accurate. For insurance purposes, we do random counts throughout the day. By the time lunch rolls around no one is hungry but we feel obligated to eat. It’s usually a smorgasbord of left over hors d’oeuvres. Everyone fixes a plate and microwaves it. Some people start drinking at this point because it’ll be 5 o’clock soon enough and it’s Christmas.

Then the Final Round. The big “FR.” Everyone is in a food coma by this point and fairly exhausted but it’s still bittersweet. We rally because this is usually when we get our big gift. It’s probably from Santa (although this year who knows what’ll happen) and it’s the big-ticket item you had on your list. If for some reason you produced a crappy list that year, then your big-ticket item is probably a gift card. It’s been known to happen. But if you were thoughtful and creative enough to make a solid wish list, then that last round is probably going to be your biggest item. Unless that item is a monkey, which is something I asked for every year and never got. We savor this final round more than we savored any of the previous rounds.

As the last gift is opened and the glitter settles into the carpet, we collectively agree that it’s time for a nap. Apparently sitting on our asses for 8 hours and opening presents is a cause of exhaustion. After the nap comes another giant meal that we all helped to prepare. Everyone is usually asleep by 10 p.m.

So there’s a Donohue Christmas for you. Now, there are some details and stories I left out. Like how if a gift is really good, we’ll applaud. Or the year when mom played a song for each person and we all ended up sobbing multiple times that day. Or how we figured out long ago that my brother-in-law needs a daylong meat grilling project in order to keep his sanity during this madness. But that’s us. That is how we do Christmas. We’re a little different, a little eccentric maybe. But maybe everyone is. Maybe every family has their own quirky way of doing the holidays. So whatever your traditions are around this season, I hope you lean in. The most important thing is to find a little joy because we could all use more of that. Merry Christmas.