Christmas Past and Present (2025)

This morning as I arose from bed I felt a moment of nostalgia. "It's Christmas morning," I remembered. "What presents have magically appeared under the tree?"

Of course it's been decades since I believed in Santa Claus or presents magically appearing beneath a Christmas tree. It's also been almost as many decades since I actually believed in Christmas. ....Oh, I don't deny that Christmas exists. It's a religious holiday that's important to one of the world's large religions. I'm just not a religious person.

Bah, Humbug?

I've written about Christmas with the tag Bah Humbug on LiveJournal for years. Partly that's a personal inside joke, dating back years now to when I was in graduate school. The preeminent technical conference in my field had its annual submissions deadline in early January. Late December was crunch time to finish up our research and writing. That year I was working on not one, nor two, but three papers for the conference. It was mega crunch time. I recall I went to the lab sometime around 1pm on December 24th and left to go home at 7am, having pulled an all-nighter (one of many). "I'm part of the Bah-Humbug Brigade!" I chuckled to myself as I settled down to sleep around 8 on Christmas morning.

Over the years since then I've kept Bah, Humbug as a meme to encapsulate my feeling of alienation at this time of year. Christmas is familiar to me because I grew up in a religious family celebrating it, and simultaneously foreign because I'm not longer religious and haven't celebrated it for years. At Christmastime I feel like I'm on the outside looking in through the glass with a tinge of longing— as well as a tinge of disgust at what it's become.

Of course I didn't invent the phrase Bah, Humbug. It entered our cultural lexicon with Charles Dickens's classic 1843 novel, A Christmas Carol. "Bah, humbug!" was the memorable refrain of the main character, Ebenezer Scrooge, a greedy man who scoffed at the religious significance of Christmas to anyone. He thought it was theft that his employees wanted even one day off to celebrate at home with their families.

I chuckle at saying "Bah, humbug!" but I'm not Scrooge. I don't deny the importance of Christmas to the 2-billion-plus Christians in the world... or the people who've embraced the American cultural version of Christmas as a month-long celebration of consumerism (oops, there's my tinge of disgust coming trough). I'm just not one of them. But if you are, I'm happy for you.

Most Years I Travel. This Year We're Home-bound.

Another way I'm not like Scrooge is that I don't intend to work on Christmas. ...Not since that one time years ago in grad school, anyway! 🙃

Most years I take advantage of the time off my employer provides, and the generally slow place of business at this time of year, to travel. For example, last year Hawk and I were hiking in Panama on Christmas. The year before we were touring Sydney, Australia on foot. In 2022 we visited the California desert and spent Christmas day climbing huge sand dunes, visiting an abandoned train station, driving a 4x4 trail, and exploring lava tube caves. In 2021 we were on the beach in Waikiki, Hawaii at Christmas.

In fact the last time we didn't go anywhere over Christmas was 5 years ago. That was back in the depths of the Coronavirus pandemic, before the vaccines were available to more than a handful of lucky recipients.

Indeed, what December 2020 and now have in common is that Being Sick Sucks. Oh, fortunately it's not another raging pandemic that's keeping us home this year. It's just the uncertainty around Hawk's recovery from foot surgery a few months ago. And it's just as well we didn't try to plan anything around that as she suffered a major setback a few days ago that left her unable even to walk inside the house for a few days.

Another Surgery Followup. Chinese Food on Christmas Eve.

Yesterday, Christmas Eve, Hawk had another followup with her podiatrist. It's been now 10 weeks since her surgery and three weeks since her last followup. Christmas Eve may seem like a strange time to see the doctor for a followup. Indeed, the schedule on the wall showed half the doctors in the department out on leave. But we don't celebrate Christmas (we're not religious) and after her week 7 followup showed things progressing but not as fast as expected (stuff went sideways in weeks 2-4 due to a bad substitute doctor) Hawk was keen to get her next checkup on schedule and not let it slip out as much as two weeks due to holidays. Oh, and things went sideways again last weekend, so Hawk was eager to see a trusted specialist to get her diagnosis of the situation.

Long story short, it was good news yesterday. Call it the Christmas present we were hoping for on the 24th. 🤣 The bones in the toe are fusing correctly, and Hawk can now walk in a regular shoe. She's on track for being able to get the next operation in a month. The sideways stuff that happened over the weekend is still sideways, but the doc says it will resolve itself within 2 weeks with educated self care.

One way we celebrated good news after past checkups is by going out to eat. Even if only to Denny's. With the 24th being Christmas Eve there was an additional tradition to follow....



Chinese food!

Hawk grew up in a Jewish family, and at least among American Jews, going out to eat for Chinese food on Christmas Eve is a tradition.

We tried a new-to-us Chinese restaurant in Sunnyvale, Epic Dumpling. The menu is huge, and despite the restaurant's humble appearance the food arrives with beautiful visual presentation. But some of the flavors were not to my taste. For example, the filling in the steamed pork buns was candy-sweet. And a beef dish I ordered came full of cucumbers, which weren't listed as an ingredient in the description. I hate cucumbers. Given how hard it was dealing with language barriers just to order our food I decided it wasn't worth the effort trying to send the food back to have it remade.