“Have I grown up?” my daughter asked me a couple of nights before Christmas … and her birthday. It was a serious question, asked in a serious voice. She sounded like she wanted to know if the end of the year was a good time to buy stocks, or if El Niño was going to make the oceans rise faster.
We had been watching old Christmas morning videos. How odd to say “old.” Because there should be nothing old about them — she’s still just a kid. Yet, they were labeled strange years, long in the past: 2009, 2010, 2012 …
And the kid in the video was nearly unrecognizable. In one, she was missing all of her front teeth. “Did you get in a bar fight?” I asked. “You look like a hockey player!”
And her voice in some didn’t sound like the little girl sitting in front of the computer.
“Yep, that was my little kid accent,” she said. “I’m not sure when that went away.”
I wasn’t sure, either.
Watching videos of Christmas morning past turned out to be a wonderful experience, and what I hope will be a new Thompson holiday tradition. It was fascinating to see how everything changed over the years. The child. The house. The dogs. (Who was this scrawny brown critter who showed up a couple years ago?) The ferocity of the wrapping paper being stripped from the presents. How some Christmases it was light outside, but others it looked like midnight. (“What time did you wake us up that year?!?”)
What an amazing Christmas tradition. But a tough one, too, especially when your child celebrates her birthday the day after, on Dec. 26. And this year she celebrated 10 years. A decade. A milestone. Ten of those Christmas mornings.
“Have I grown up?” my daughter asked me in her serious voice. It wasn’t meant to add salt to my already tender wounds, but it did.
“Yep,” I told her. “I think those videos show you are no little girl anymore.”
“Good,” she replied, relieved. Being that little kid — maybe the one with the cave where teeth should have been — didn’t appeal to her much. Not that night, on the verge of 10, when being a “big kid” was all the rage. All that she wanted for Christmas.
I wasn’t so sure. Where did the little one go? The one who struggled to put coherent sentences together? The one who gasped at each Christmas present? The one who rode a bike through the house until she bumped into a wall?
But she’s still so young. The teeth are missing in different spots now. The wrapping paper gets torn off just as fast. And next year I’ll watch a video and think about how little she was. How she hadn’t totally grown up, no matter how much she wants to.