Christmas vacation redux

Throughout my career, usually because of convenience but more likely out of desperation, I always managed to take off the week between Christmas and New Year’s, and every year when I returned to East Elm Street on Jan. 2, my administrative assistant would ask, “How was your vacation?”

Don’t you hate that question? Vacations, at least to me, have a distressing tendency never to live up to my expectations, even the minimal expectations.

Anyway, I’d usually curse under my breath and say, “Terrific.” And then move on to the first or second or 20^th crisis of the new year. 

And every year I’d vow I’d never take that week off again because having our four children at home – who were generally suffering cabin fever by midweek and disconsolate because their Christmas toys only provided about 48 hours of pleasure – was a perfect formula for domestic disaster. They would be hanging from the chandeliers while my long-suffering wife would be threatening to abandon all of us. The same thing happened for about 20 years in a row.

Four daughters in one house with one bathroom just doesn’t work for an extended period of time. One year, however, I got the ingenious idea of traveling to Vermont for a few days of vacation because my daughter was doing a report on Robert Frost, and a visit to his grave in Bennington seemed like an ingenious idea. 

But there was so much hysteria in the car, we didn’t make it to the Vermont state line. I turned the car around and headed back to Connecticut, muttering words I can’t repeat on a community website. Then, my wife intervened and got me to point the car north again. This time, I made it over the state line and into downtown Bennington, but they were driving me so crazy that I turned the car around again and started to head back.

I hate to admit this, but I even put one daughter out of the car on the side of the road and started to drive away I was so furious with her behavior. And she was only a toddler. (Sorry bad joke. She might have been 9.) 

Family vacations and fatherhood are such an insidious combination. But times change and circumstances change with them. This year, for the first time in decades, my wife and I are home alone between Christmas and New Year’s. The daughter who lives with us is headed to California, so we’ll be alone on New Year’s. How depressing is that? What to do? I suppose we could rent a DVD and just relax, or if I’m looking for a little excitement, we could head north and pay a visit to Robert Frost.