Christmas Spirit

It is week before Christmas when I return to Beijing from my father’s 90th birthday party and a subsequent business trip. I make it through customs and immigration and then walk through the arrivals areas looking to see if someone is there to pick me up. I do this even though I know those days have long ago passed. Down to the airport basement to take the express into town. A young woman greets me, her job is supposedly to help newbie foreigners. I brush past her, bo humbug.
I find my way home. Sabrina has put up the christmas tree while I was gone and had done quite a stunning job with it. At first I thought it was a new tree. The kids arrive the next day and would stay through Christmas. I don’t know why, but I just wasn’t very excited about Christmas. Not anti Christmas, just not into it. Maybe because of the jet lag, which takes me a week to get over, or because of my dad’s poor health effect on me (he would pass the day after Christmas). I wasn’t even going through the motions of wrapping gifts and putting them under the tree. Worse yet, I was in a “mood”, both at home and at work.
Two days before Christmas, it felt like a normal saturday and then I noticed Elisa, who is nine. She was sitting at the dinner table drawing and cutting. She was making presents and cards, keeping her work a secret. She then made her own wrapping and put them under the tree. That is what did it - I was in. I went to the store and bought wrapping paper proper - not always easy to find in Beijing - and wrapped the simple gifts I had bought in the US. Elisa really wanted to know what I had bought for Aidan and Lydia. We then went Christmas shopping, I provided the kids with some money to get some small things . Wrapping ensued that evening, with Sabrina helping Elisa.
The next day I made the christmas meal shopping list and had to visit five stores before finding ricotta. We watched “die hard” as our Christmas Eve movie night.
Morning came. We had dunkin donuts and then opened gifts, most of them, since Sabrina had to go to work (Christmas is a normal working day here). Kids were grateful and excited even though the gifts were really basic this year - basically I had no idea for what big ticket items to get. In the afternoon Yang, her mom, and a friend came over and we had an early Christmas dinner. I made my mom’s lasagna and devil eggs but the big hit was the chips and dip (sour cream plus onion soup mix).  
The kids left with Yang around 6pm and would spend the next few days at a ski resort. I cleaned the stray wrappings from under the tree and had a glass of wine or two.