Christmas, Olympic Style: a New Twist on 5 Golden Rings

Twelve days before Christmas. I don’t have time to be writing this. Here’s my to-do list. Maybe you can relate:

1--Prepare my one-bedroom apartment for my parents’ five-day stay--clean out closets, buy a shower curtain that stays closed, put away all the bills, throw away several years of old magazines, and find a way to make apartment walls that haven’t been painted in

eight years look relatively clean.

(If you ask why my parents can’t stay elsewhere, they are staying elsewhere--they’re spending the first five days of their visit with my brother and sister-in-law.)

2--Get a Smog Check certificate and rush it to the Auto Club with, essentially, a large sack of doubloons, to register my car so my parents won’t notice my preposterously out-of-date registration sticker or--worse--be driving around in my car with me when the LAPD notices and pulls us over, impounds the car and leaves us on the side of the road. (Fortunately, my cell phone bill is paid.)

3--Find a place to eat festive dinner on Christmas Day. (Me to my sister-in-law: “We’re not eating at your house?” My sister-in-law to me: “Are you cooking?”)

Conceive of and buy a dozen Christmas gifts. (Gee, that’s one a day--if I start now.) Plus wrapping paper, ribbons, those little cards to put on the gifts that designate what goes to whom.

5--Lose 10 pounds. (Kind of a constant goal.)

6--Get a root canal. (Actually, I just postponed this until January.)

OK, so you’ve got it worse. You’ve got parents and in-laws staying at your house; you have to cook Christmas dinner; you have to buy three dozen gifts.

You’re only underscoring the need for the proposal I make:

Why can’t we have Christmas just every four years? Like the Olympics.

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Now, I’m not suggesting sacrilege. We can still have varied Christian services and a holy day of obligation for Catholics and four Sundays of Advent. I’m not suggesting we forget or ignore the religious roots of the holiday.

But let’s face it--in the secular world, we don’t observe Christmas, we hold Christmas.

It’s an event. A multimedia, interactive, intra-family, intramural extravaganza. And I’m simply not prepared to deal with it every 12 months.

First of all, I don’t have enough money. (And this year, I mean it.)

“I’m still paying off last Christmas,” lamented Daphne, the dental assistant in my dentist’s office, as she made the costly crown to install in my mouth, a procedure that has swallowed several hundred dollars that could have gone to the needy recipients on my Christmas gift list.

“Let’s not give each other gifts; let’s just get things for Dillon,” my mother said, referring to her infant grandson and my nephew.

But that idea has already been supplanted by a flurry of cross-country phone calls in which everyone asks everyone else what they want and the replies are always politely vague. No one sets out to demand expensive gifts. (“Let’s see, I’d like that baby-blue convertible Audi I saw on that car showroom floor in Redondo Beach.”) Christmas shopping just turns into a compulsive buying orgy.

Second, I just don’t have enough time--for anything.

But consider a quadrennial Christmas: There would be time to fund-raise for Christmas. You could invest in mutual funds or buy the stock of a new high-tech company that in three years time would be worth three times what you spent on it. There would be time to shop for what your family and closest friends really want. No more running into Long’s for Chia Pets because they’re a campy last-minute gift and that’s all you have time for--campiness. You could have jewelry handcrafted to your specifications; you could have clothes designed for people; you could give people skis and lessons and, heck, you could probably arrange for snow, you’d have so much time to plan it. You could scour obscure music catalogs until you found the backup guitar Elvis kept for his Las Vegas concerts and buy it for a loved one who’s a guitar nut.

I could actually fulfill my sister-in-law’s fondest Christmas gift wish--”a week off.” I could find a brilliant baby sitter who knows how to amuse babies and simultaneously teach them foreign languages so my sister-in-law could join me on the spa vacation I would be able to finance.

And, like elite athletes training for a race, we would finally have time to get into fabulous shape. We would be energetic enough for marathon mall shopping and svelte enough to fit into stretch velvet sheaths to wear to Christmas parties where we could eat hors d’oeuvres without pooching out our stomachs.

And finally, a once-every- four-years Christmas splurge would leave us mellow enough to be willing to put up with driving around the Century City Mall garage for half an hour waiting for a parking space. We might even be amused to walk into our favorite after-work watering hole and find a gaggle of Gas Co. employees holding their Christmas party and singing off-key to a karaoke machine playing “Jingle Bell Rock.”

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Listen, I’m not Scrooge. I like Christmas. I like the creamy white lights nestled in the coral trees on San Vicente Boulevard. I like the whiff of pine wafting from the Christmas tree in my employer’s lobby. But precisely because I like it, I want time to do it right. I want time to enjoy it; I’m tired of feeling like I’m in one of those old black-and-white movies where the hands of the clock are spinning round and round and round.

And be honest. If you lay down for a nap after Thanksgiving dinner and woke up to find it was Jan. 1 (and I don’t think I need to add I could completely skip the grisly exercise known as New Year’s Eve), would you really, really be that upset?