Merry Christmas to all the Exes'

Christmas - The Joy of Exes'

December is here and with it comes my favorite time of the year.
I suppose Christmas is everyone's favorite, with all the gift giving,
yule time merriment, eggnog drinking, and generally just a good ole'
joy of Christmas feeling.

Not everyone enjoys Christmas as much as I do. Or, to put it more
succinctly, not everyone in my life tries to make Christmas the best that it can be. I have been married three times over the past years, and I can tell you now, every Christmas shares a life experience that most of you do not want to hear. Especially about the exes.

However, in the spirit of the season, I will share them with you anyway. Consider it my gift to you for reading the column.

One of my wives was very free with our money the first year we were married. We had no children. We bought a total of 150 Christmas presents. This equalled to about one present for every human being that we knew. Don't get me wrong. I went along with it and it was sort of fun delivering presents every day of the month.
Did I mention that we received, in return,two presents, and they both were from our parents? We did not give the presents just to receive presents, but I thought it was strange that we would give so much and receive so little in return...
Sort of like the marriage.

One of my wives was of another religion that did not support the theory of giving presents except for a certain eight day period,some time during the month, depending on whose calendar you were using that year. She didn't mind receiving presents. That part, of course, she celebrated. But it worked out fine and we worked through all the disparities of the holidays, as she liked to call it. I could not help that I was born into the religion that celebrated and gave presents, no more than she could help being born into the religion that only lit candles eight days a week.

One of my wives thought that Christmas was only for her. It was all about her needs, her tree, her decorations, her wants, her food, and how much I was going to spend on her each year. By now you realize that she was not the mother of my children. If we had had children, I am quite sure they would have had no presents.The word share was not in her vocabulary. Christmas was pretty much centered around her. Looking back now I realize that everyday of the marriage was centered around her.

Are you starting to get an idea of why my marriages did not work?
Could it have been that I am too judgemental and sort of outspoken? They understood that, which is why the exes and I never celebrate Christmas together. As a matter of fact, I am not sure that we celebrated anything together when we were married.

I still like Christmas; I still celebrate Christmas; I still write about Christmas. I only wish I could go back to the days when I would wake up to the excitement of a new bike, the fresh smell of muffins cooking in the oven, Christmas music playing in the background, and a wife who wanted to sit on my lap and tell me what she got me for Christmas.

A man can dream can't he?

Merry Christmas to you all, even the exes.