Christmas With David

Our first Christmas with David was (like any new parent's) filled with joy. But we also had the added excitement and anxiety of the news that my early release from the Marine Corps to return to college had been approved. My desire to finish my education had kicked into high gear when Nancy and I found out she was expecting.

There was so much change to absorb; bottles, diapers, feeding schedules, the needs of an infant and a new life outside the Corps. We picked out a little Charlie Brown tree for the three of us with a few decorations for the apartment. I remember the joy of hanging his "Baby's First Christmas" ornament that year.

Nancy took to mothering like a duck to water and quickly mastered the basics. But, we were still young, inexperienced and far from family and home. My role was primarily relief duty, to catch the diaper changing and feeding when Nancy needed to sleep. If it was important she wasn’t going to leave it up to me. Then David started crying on Christmas Eve.

I looked intently at my infant son, marveling at the complex faces he made, without a clue what they meant. We changed him, burped him, walked him…nothing helped. I felt bad but even in his discomfort I smiled at the mad faces he made with his little balled up fists going outward. He cried into the night and now we began to worry. The strain of new parenthood met with exhaustion and we looked at each other with no answers. David eventually fell into a fitful sleep which would erupt into cries unexpectedly as we were startled from our own sleep.

On Christmas Day without any idea what we should do to do we made the long drive to Camp Pendleton’s Naval Hospital where David had been born. Eventually, we saw a pediatrician who after a peek in his ears announced with a look of mild annoyance “he has an ear infection”. Relieved and with our first lesson in parenting in hand, we were on our way home. This would be the last Christmas that David did not wear a smile all day.

David loved Christmas not for the presents but for the commotion. He loved it for the chaos of big family chatter, our big breakfast, piles of gift trash, Grandma’s food and rob-your-neighbor. He loved sitting with AJ going through his gifts and talking to him in that sing-song patter they shared together. Most of all, David enjoyed the happiness of others.

Of all our family traditions, the one that David cherished more than any other was “sibling presents”, a gift exchange for the brothers and sisters on Christmas Eve where every present has to come from the dollar store. I can still see David on his last Christmas Eve, sitting on the big family room couch with his bag of presents between his legs. One by one he flipped them across the room to each sibling. They were carefully selected, delivered with humor and a big David grin. He loved being from a big family, he loved being the oldest, he loved being a brother and he loved his family more than anything in his life. In that simple act of love, we see David at his truest.