Our time with Benjamin finished in a three-way tie for my favorite memory of Christmas 2025.
A snowman of many faces
A second involved our two grandsons, the younger of whom was exasperated with grandma and grandpa for the tardiness we showed in decking our halls with boughs of jolly – or anything else.
By the time we started, he had been counting the days to Christmas on his Advent calendar; scouring their house with his brother for an elf on a shelf; and carrying around and his favorite stuffed animal of toddlerhood, Puppy, who, like our son, comes home annually for the holidays.
His first question for us was whether the traditional life-size Frosty would reappear on our refrigerator.
All this was transformed into a memory a week or so before Christmas when both boys were over and had already completed their ritual goading of grandma over her insistence that the noon meal we had just eaten is called dinner and the evening meal supper – notions the boys think are out to lunch.
Satisfied he had eaten grandma’ lunch, the younger grandson stepped over to the refrigerator to change Santa’s magnetic personality by rearranging his face.
The result so struck me when I looked up from cleaning food off my shirt that I asked him to show us an irate Frosty.
After that, grandma and I were asking both boys to mimic every emotion covered in the “Inside Out” movie. The results left the two left us astonished, contemplative, outraged and, mostly joyous at their tsunami of creativity.
In the giddiness that followed, a request surfaced for a Frosty version of the expression worn by the woman who appears in commercials during Cleveland Cavaliers games as she says: “I wanna see ya in a Ken Ganley Kia!”
While that produced a great moment in art history, I’d like to have had one other holiday season look preserved: The dead-serious one our younger grandson’s had as the two of us were deep in the weeds of a discussion about the profound logistical challenges Santa must overcome every single year to deliver presents all over the world on Christmas Eve.
Indeed, how does he do it?
Duck on the pond
Ralphie from the movie “A Christmas Story” played a crucial role in my third memorable Christmas moment by providing the pre-meal soundtrack for our Christmas Eve dinner – a dinner that nearly didn’t happen because my wife and our daughter, the two executive producers of our Christmases, were sidelined.
Like most American women, they were already exhausted not only by making multiple lists of presents, checking them twice and searching the stores and online for them, but having to deal with husbands who had returned from stores with the wrong gifts and apparently had eaten the receipts, because they couldn’t find them.
Then on Christmas Eve our daughter was in the choir for three Christmas Eve services and my wife (our Grandmother-in-Chief) was on injured reserve a after a bruising fall in a shopping run.
When I was selected to fill the breach, even the children knew the Fan Duel odds that disaster was likely to strike.
It was averted only because Grandma came off the bench to make a follow-up call to confirm who was ordering and picking up the food. Had she not, I would have been sitting there at 7 p.m. with egg fu young on my face and two grandchildren enraged about one more tone more intolerable delay in opening their presents.
In my own defense (which is a week one), there were last minute changes to an earlier plan in which our daughter was supposed to order the food, and I had received no written instructions to the contrary. (My union steward has details.)
Still, I must have seemed like a grandpa trampled by team of a reindeer to think that our daughter might be able to take care of all this. As she put it afterwards: “Did you think I was going to call the order in between songs?”
But, once grandma told me which side was up, a Christmas miracle unfolded. Not only did I correctly predict a 75-minute wait time after the to-go order to the restaurant, but I phoned it in at the time that fit the family schedule picked it up 79 minutes later. (It was four minutes before) someone finally pulled out of a space in otherwise full parking lot.
The sense that I had been Batman instead of Bateman filled egg-fu-old grandpa with enough Christmas spirit cast the rest of the family to play the roles of the waiters in the Chinese restaurant scene of “A Christmas Story” while he led them through two choruses of “Fa-ra-ra-ra-ras,” scolding them between attempts, as the script demands.
Clearly, this year will be hard to top, which is why I’m thinking that next year, I may have to add a duck to the restaurant cast.
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