Let Me Tell You Something by Caroline Manzo Read Free Book Online Page B

crazy). My love for that one holiday blinds me to the stress of it. I think of Christmas the way I think of childbirth—it’s insanely stressful and painful, but the minute the hard part is over, you forget it immediately and it was all worth it.
    I fall for the Christmas stress trap every year in a big, bad way. It’s stress piled on top of anxiety and pressure, and I’m just as guilty as the next person of leaving things to the last minute and rushing back and forth to the mall, supermarket, and Internet. The work is always the same and it’s always a lot, but it’s my frame of mind that gets me through it. I know the happiness this will bring to my children and that Christmas only happens one day a year. For me it’s worth it. It’s chaos and it drives me absolutely crazy, but through it all, I know one thing: my table will be set beautifully, there’ll be a gorgeous centerpiece on it, and at the end of it all, there’ll be a wonderful gathering of my family and friends.
    BEHIND THE SCENES
    When we agreed to let the cameras film our Christmas for season three, it just didn’t occur to me that we’d be forcing our crews to miss their own Christmas as a result. I felt horrible when I realized the crew would be spending Christmas at my house, not with their own families. So what you didn’t see is that we set a complete second table in the dining room for the crew so they got to sit and have Christmas dinner with us. Lauren and I also went and got every crew person a personalized gift, and we gave each of them a gift bag with my homemade hot chocolate mix, a mug, and some hats, socks, and gloves, because they freeze when we film in the winter.
    Sure, there’ll be drama, there’ll be stuff going wrong, but let me tell you this: Christmas is still my favorite holiday. Hands down.
    We have a pregame on Christmas eve. If there’s fifty people coming here on Christmas Day, we do everything the night before Christmas eve. So on the night of the twenty-third, we drop everything and get into the kitchen and do all the baking. It’s one of my favorite nights of the year. I don’t want to bake a week before and freeze it; I like to do it on the twenty-third. And every year, all my sisters, all my sisters-in-law and nieces, they all come here and we cook. My mom comes too.
    The guys hang out, playing video games and shooting the shit, and all the girls are in the kitchen, baking. Every now and then a guy will wander in and help chop and they’ll stay and laugh. We’re up until three o’clock in the morning, and it doesn’t feel like a chore at all. It feels like family.
    On the twenty-fourth I’m tired and there’s so much to do. I have to set the entire table and get the whole house ready. The phone never stops ringing, this person isn’t coming, that person is having some other drama, this other person is on a diet and wants diet food. I just listen, make mental notes, and keep on getting the house ready.
    There’s no such thing as a perfect Christmas. Someone’s late, someone’s not gonna come, someone’s drunk. Something always happens, and that’s just part of it. No point in getting cranky about it or letting it get to me. On Christmas Day, if someone wants to be an asshole, they can be an asshole. If people want to fight, that’s fine, they can fight as long as they let me eat. You need to accept that a perfect Christmas will most likely involve some sort of drama. Instead of letting it “spoil the day,” just roll with it.
    We had a Christmas a few years ago that was definitely one of the worst. My mother decided she was going to leave my father, right before Christmas. Did I mention that she was seventy-one years of age? She decided she wanted to change her life up a bit. She came to stay at my house, so my father didn’t come to Christmas that year. That was not a good year. And thankfully she