Kenosha Christmas

Karen and I were married two Decembers ago.

Her son Bill, and his wife Erika and children Andrew, 10, and Caitlin, six, live in Kenosha, Wisconsin, an hour north of Chicago. My daughter Jessica, with her husband Kevin and kids Mason, Davis and Evie June, live in Blue Lake, CA, just inland from Arcata, which is just north of Eureka. My son Tyler lives in Nashville. My stepdaughter Branan lives in San Diego but her brother Parrish, with his family, lives in Salt Lake City.

Please tell me how are we going to get all these kids around the same Christmas table? And of course other sets of parents and grandparents wonder the same thing, about these same kids.

This year, special reasons guided the gatherings. Jessie and her crew traditionally came to San Diego for Christmas. Then they realized, during the last year, that Mason, who is 12, has never had a Christmas at home. So they visited here for Thanksgiving and stayed home for Christmas. Bill and Erika, meanwhile, bought their first home and moved in last summer. Obviously that's where they wanted to be, this Christmas. We thought it would be fun to watch this passage and promised not to be too much trouble if they said we could come. And so we spent Christmas in Kenosha.

It was 26 degrees and cloudy when we arrived on Christmas Eve afternoon. Snow on the ground. Strange. Christmas Day is supposed to be a time for brunch on the patio. Their house was impossibly cozy. Kenosha at Christmastime is a collection of impossibly cozy dwellings organized in streets and grids across a frigid tundra bumped up against Lake Michigan. From their windows, the homes let glowing light out into the gray chill, as attractive and emotionally connective as a Disney Christmas movie, or a model train village. The prevailing wind is from the west, and on any given December day, the wind prevails. Kids go outside and play in these conditions; I watched them do that very thing, from the warm glow of the kitchen window. There is a new Labrador puppy, Rocky, at Bill's house, and parents and children willingly escorted Rocky outside on frequent back yard training missions, and then at least twice a day took him on long walks along streets lined with piled snow.

Gifts were piled high as a 10-year-old's eye under the tree at Erika's parents, where we went for Christmas Eve as Rockwell might have seen it. We ate plates of Christmas specialties (lefse!) flowing from Erika's mom's kitchen while kids made pretty toys and huge mounds of wrapping paper appear. To see Andrew, imagine Brett Favre at age 10 with an Opie grin and the energy and attention span of a Labrador puppy. Caitlin is blonde, favors pink, knows what she wants when she wants it, and showed her California grandma what she had learned in ballet. They were the stars of the show.

Note to AARP members: do not rent a Pontiac Grand Prix unless you are short, very flexible, and don't stuff yourself on Christmas Eves. I am none of these, but we made it back home anyway, shooed the kids to bed, and wrapped presents until 1 a.m. Coolest gift (I thought): Erika gave her son her old microscope set, which she had kept amazingly intact. Grandma and I collapsed upstairs in Andrew's bedroom, that he let us use, and which was fun and nice except for all the Green Bay Packer stuff. Cold! But cuddly, with I in my cap and she in her kerchief, cap, pajamas, socks, four sweatshirts, scarf and robe, when the children found us at first light and escorted us downstairs to the tree.

Andrew and Caitlin played Santa Claus until every gift was opened. We restored our strength with homemade muffins and Butter Braid (a local delicacy), followed by French toast and sausage, which may well have been invented in a Wisconsin kitchen on Christmas Day. Bill, who loves to cook, fed us all pretty well during the week. Chicken Parmigiana, paninis, apple pancakes, barbecued ribs, hominy casserole, Tex-Mex enchiladas and German Chocolate Cake. We watched movies, played Uno and Trivial Pursuit (Andrew wanted to play Monopoly, but we said no way), had several furious gunfights with quickly broken-in Nerf Bullet weaponry, dodged, or collided with, Rocky, watched Caitlin's impromptu dance recital and took a million pictures. If the walls could talk, the house would tell you that the new family in residence had a pretty good first Christmas there. Grandma and I would second that.