New Year's Eve

It’s New Year’s Eve and, with the exception of a wind storm raging outside, our house is very quiet. In the past it’s been kind of a happening place for the holiday. We’ve always had good food, lots of Martinellis to toast in the New Year, and while we waited for the hour to roll around, we would begin construction on one of our several “family” puzzles.

Those “family” presents actually had an inconspicuous beginning. Any parent knows that in order to have total harmony on Christmas morning, there needs to be an equal number of gifts under the tree for each child. Children always seem to be looking for solid evidence that you actually favor one or more of the siblings over another. There is, sometimes, even a child looking for confirmation that they are, in very fact, the favored one themselves. At any rate, if one has more gifts than any other, well, that’s just proof to all the rest that you are the horribly unfair parent who somehow loves them less.

Hard as you may try, however, sometimes the inevitable happens and for one reason or another, someone will end up with an extra gift. Hoping to avoid conflicts, I began buying “family presents”. If one person came up short, then we would pull from the family pile. Some of these presents amounted to puzzles, and so was born the tradition of putting together the New Year’s Eve puzzle.

We’ve tried hard over the years to think of family party ideas, but eventually we always end up gathering at some flat surface, putting puzzles together. Some of them have been rather monumental. For instance, there was the great John Deere puzzle of 2005, the year we all had a horrible 10 day flu! That one took a while, but even between barf sessions and while our heads were spinning with fever, we labored at it. When it was finished, we framed it and it still hangs on the kitchen wall. Good times!

Savannah is probably the grand puzzle master of the family. I’m not so great at it myself. I tend to take the pieces and, after half an hour of looking for something that fits, resort to forcing them together… figuring that if I mash them hard enough, they just might give up and conform to the right shape. At times I’m even tempted to pull out the scissors and snip the edges to make them work. Clearly, I lack a vision of the larger picture. Savannah and Kirk, however, aren’t half bad. They both possess a sort of supernatural patience for details that completely evades me.

Even given a full house, we rarely ever finish those huge 1,000 piece puzzles in one night, but eventually they always get done. Afterward, we leave them up, duly admiring our handiwork for several days before anyone will consider taking them down. Of course, after the first couple of days we also wished we’d purchased one of those roll up mats as well… but, that never happens.

This year, I bought the standard puzzles: a covered bridge and a snowy lake scene with a flock of geese. They were beautiful… only, Savannah isn’t here. Barry is on his mission, Clarke has been married and gone for years now, and Kamaron is on the stake youth committee, which means he’s in charge of the teen festivities and completely gone for the entire night.

Grrr… That leaves only the two of us to do the puzzle alone. What happened to our fun family night? Who gave my children the right to grow up!?! This whole empty nest thing officially stinks. Maybe I should wizen up and next year buy the 75 piece variety… they’re far more my speed. In the meantime, I’m hoping that the blue fairy will visit us in the night and figure out some way to make those impossible cardboard shapes fit together. Honestly, who thinks of these sadistic traditions?

Oh wait… o-O

It was me.