My New Christmas Hack

It totally worked

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Happy day after Christmas and second day of Hanukkah everyone. Also happy all the other things. We’re heading up to the Catskills to hopefully romp around in some snow, do some book writing and have lots of low-key hangs.

Speaking of low-key hangs. We had friends over for Christmas Eve Day fondue and told everyone at the last minute to dress as their favorite holiday movie character. This was the best thing I have done all month. I was Emma Thompson from Love Actually (did anyone realize her name is Karen?). And I got to shit all over Alan Rickman’s character for doing her so dirty for most of lunch. Nick was Todd from Christmas Vacation. Charlie was Kevin McAllister, Tara was the Ghost of Christmas Present from the Muppets and Bryan was John McClane. Pro-tip if you watch Die Hard after Love Actually Alan Rickman is punished for what he did to sweet Emma.

But now onto my new holiday hack that I will be doing every year from now on.

To explain it I want to talk about the YouTube videos and family influencers that I despise the most—the unboxers. I can’t help it. Watching a bunch of kids tear into a package (that they’ve gotten free from a company for promotional reasons) and then toss the contents aside in favor of the next unboxing is the epitome of shitty consumerism for me.

For me, Christmas morning can feel like a real life version of the unboxing videos. My kids are still pretty little which means they have the attention span of coked up hamsters. After one or two presents everything starts to look the same, the adrenaline rush of the opening gets higher and higher and the amount of attention paid to each gift gets smaller and smaller.

The gratitude also falls off a goddamn cliff. I think this will evolve as the kids get a little older, but for now I wanted to try something different and it really, really worked.