Aidan/Emilia: Christmas Shopping

So much of it!  And not just because of all the hours I'm working at the bookshop (lots of overtime - a couple folks quit and someone chose a lousy week to have Covid)!

This is not, by the way, a "Oh, now you know what ladies go through at the holidays" thing.  I've been a single dad for over a decade managing Christmas decorations and shopping on my own, and sometimes money has been tight.  It's just figuring out what would be appropriate 

For instance, we dug through the back of various closets and found that there was a small artificial tree and a string of LED lights that Emilia had apparently bought for her dorm room or college apartment.  It's small, maybe the and a half feet tall, but so is the apartment.  We pushed the coffee table into a corner and set it up in top of that.  Kutter and Rusty are going to have to improvise foot rests for when they're gaming on the couch, but they made that sacrifice willingly. 

Decorating ours, though, was surprisingly deflating.  There are years printed on most ornaments, whether store-bought or homemade, and every year I discover anew that they can be profoundly powerful reminders of how Kutter and Rusty have grown and what has persisted, what Christmas was like for me as a kid, and remember the ones we spent as a family before losing their mother.  The various ones Emilia, Katey, and Monica have left behind mean little to us.  Maybe even less, because they were willing to abandon them. We wound up putting them back in their boxes and buying some new ones.  I went for a couple specifically featuring New York while the girls went goofy - honestly, who even puts a loop of string on a miniature pair of heels and calls that festive? - so that they would mean something later. 

It's trickier to do the same sort of thing with the actual shopping - should I be shopping for teenage boys or young women?  It doesn't seem right to look for things that they will be leaving behind in a few months - although I suppose they may be mementos of their time here - nor to get them things that won't seem relevant until May.  After all, buying teenagers something that they'll still be interested in six months from now is difficult in the best cases, and who knows how this experience will leave them changed on the other side..

Yeah, I guess I'm shopping for Katey and Monica.  Of course, there's also the question of the family living our lives now, so maybe we should be getting "Aidan", "Kutter", and "Rusty" something.  The kids and I have talked it over a bit, but we're actually having a little trouble coming up with something appropriate that we wouldn't have mentioned three months ago.  Rusty as suggested just a card involving Santa dresses and the caption "Wish You Were Here!", at least until I pointed out that the girls living their lives were also underage and that would be inappropriate on so many levels.  She still wants the picture, though.

And then, there's the big one - these girls' families.

It's the twenty-first century, so there are social media posts hinting at interests and Amazon wishlists for when you don't want to leave anything to chance.  I've been texting with Emilia's (divorced) parents to get ideas about what to get her sister and vice versa, and also to let them know that their daughter won't be able to make it home because I'm working late Christmas Eve and early on the 26th, because rent in Brooklyn is expensive.  They're disappointed, but understand.  It's kind of a relief to me, since it means that there's a good chance I'll get through this whole thing and not have to lie about who I am to their faces and think about why Emilia left them behind.

The kids aren't so lucky.

Katey and Monica were both only children, and with neither Kutter nor Rusty having taken any time off, they've got a little PTO and floating holidays that they can't roll over into next year, so there's really no excuse, especially since Monica's father already bought her a round-trip ticket.  Katey's parents haven't been quite so insistent, but they too mentioned that they haven't seen her since graduation, so she's booked a ticket herself.

On the one hand, this is logical, they answer to "Monica" and "Katey" without ever missing a beat by now, never forget themselves and do things a woman wouldn't, and they've been less timid about responding to folks who knew the originals on Facebook or the like than I am.  On the other hand, despite them working full-time jobs and not sticking to soda when we do bar trivia every Monday and regularly getting into taxis driven by strangers on their own, they're kids.  This will be their first unsupervised travel, and as pretty young women besides.  On the one hand, it probably shouldn't scare me too much - they handle the New York subway system on a daily basis, which is probably more dangerous than suburbs and regional airports, on top of being more complex.

They're not that worried about shopping, saying that whatever they get, these other parents will appreciate the thought, and vice versa.  Which, I'll admit, is true.  It still seems overwhelming to me, though.

-Aidan/Emilia