I’m glad I read the box before throwing it out. It came with an important warning:

In case you can’t read it: “WARNING: This product contains (a) small magnet(s). Swallowed magnets can stick together across intestines causing serious infections and death. Seek immediate medical attention if magnet(s) are swallowed or inhaled.”

Now I’m honestly kind of tempted to have Rex swallow these darts to see if they stick together through his intestines.

Awesomest warning ever.

This will mark only the third time in my life I haven’t spent Christmas in Utah with my family, the first two being those I spent in Argentina as a missionary.  I arrived in Argentina in October 1996, fresh-faced and full of zeal. I was assigned to be trained by a missionary I will call Elder Vasquez, of Uruguay. In the unlikely event that I am ever elected President of the United States, my first official act will be to launch a full-scale nuclear attack on Uruguay. After a few years, when the radiation clouds have subsided, I will send the Marines to kill any survivors and then sew their fields with salt. Other nations of the world will no doubt characterize these actions as “unprovoked.” But other nations of the world didn’t spend 5 months living and working with Elder Vasquez.

It’s hard to know how to describe Elder Vasquez. Actually, it’s easy. The hard part is trying to do it in language appropriate for a family blog. If I were to write a memoir of my mission but present it as a novel, any astute reader would view the “character” of Elder Vasquez as a mash-up of every “bad missionary companion” cliché: lazy, trunky, covetous of leadership positions, overly familiar with the members, and highly interested in spending as much time as possible around women. And that’s just describing him as a missionary. In order to describe him as a person, I wrote down every adjective that I believe characterizes him, put them in a hat, and randomly drew out the following five:

1. Sadistic
2. Irrational
3. (Is probably a) murderer
4. Self-pitying
5. Terrible person

“This isn’t going to make much sense now, but in about 15 years, you’re not going to want to live downwind of Uruguay.”

Within a week of my arrival Elder Vasquez told me, in the spirit of full disclosure, that the only American he didn’t hate was Gordon B. Hinckley. Either Presidents Monson and Faust weren’t highly-placed enough to escape his ire, or he just really hated their faces. I don’t know. Regardless, if those two weren’t qualifying for an exemption, I certainly wasn’t going to, either. It was all downhill from there.  In one corner we had the eager, young American who actually wanted to, you know, do missionary work, and in the other we had the lazy, homesick Uruguyan who wanted to spend all day licking ice cream cones while watching girls in the plaza. By the time Christmas rolled around we’d spent two utterly miserable months together consisting of me dragging him out the door to do missionary work, which in turn consisted of me trying to stop people on the street in broken Spanish while he stood 10 feet away with his arms crossed, smirking whenever people refused to stop or when I made a mistake in Spanish.

I should mention here that the way Christmas is celebrated in Latin America is much closer to the way we celebrate New Year’s Eve here, with people getting dressed up, going out dancing and to parties, and lots of noise and fireworks at midnight. And by fireworks I mean fireworks, but also guns and probably some grenades and mortars. It’s incredibly loud and a little dangerous in that fun “It’s not a certainty that someone is going to lose an eye, but there’s a decent chance” Third World kind of way. For this reason our mission president gave us strict orders in no uncertain terms: Be inside your apartment by 6 PM, and don’t leave until the next morning. No exceptions. This rule was mentioned every time we saw the president or a mission leader for about a month in advance, and as Christmas grew closer, it was reiterated more and more frequently and with greater and greater force.

Well, I’m sure you can see where this is going. A little before 6 PM we picked up some food to eat in miserable silence and headed back to our apartment. Thankfully, we received a visit from a member friend, Fabian, who agreed to eat with us and hang out for a bit. At some point around 8 or 9 PM Elder Vasquez declared that we needed some soda to celebrate. I told him we weren’t going to get soda, and we argued for a few minutes about the rule, at which point he seemed to back down. A little bit later I stepped into the bathroom, and when I came out neither Elder Vasquez nor Fabian were anywhere to be found. I went to open our front door, which required a key to open from the inside or the outside, and found I’d been locked inside the apartment.

“No, I’m serious.  The shelter needs to be resistant to radiation.”

Worn out and depleted from this confrontation and the last couple months of near-constant strife, as well as the difficulties of being away from home and trying to learn a new language, I crumpled onto my bed. Before closing my eyes, I looked at my watch and realized that at that moment my family was gathered around the dining room table in my parents’ house, eating turkey, drinking wassail, warmed by the glow of love and tradition. The contrast between the beauty and peace associated with that setting and the misery and conflict of my current one was so great that I briefly wondered whether my former life was simply a figment of my imagination. And then I started to cry.

I don’t mean that I got some tears in my eyes. I mean that I cried really, really hard. To the point that I was doing the fast suck-in thing that people do when they cry really, really hard. I cried like this for a few minutes, and then went to the bathroom to try to get rid of my “cry face.” After being gone who knows where for an hour or so, Elder Vasquez and Fabian returned. Fabian left a short while after, abandoning us to our mutual contempt.

Well, I wish I could tell you this story has a happy ending. I mean, it does, in the sense that I didn’t beat Elder Vazquez to death with a baseball bat. But it doesn’t in the sense that we never really came to like one another. I suppose there are a few redemptive nuggets to be gleaned from my story. The first is that I was able to feel less guilty for waiting for Elder Vazquez to get in the shower before opening and gobbling down the Christmas treats my Mom had been sending me. The second is that my second Christmas in Argentina was much, much happier than my first. I had a companion I liked, we were working hard, and we had a really enjoyable Christmas. The third and final one is that even if Lyla somehow burns down our apartment, my third Christmas away from family and Utah won’t be as bad as my first.

(Ed note: I should specify that neither of the missionaries pictured with me is Elder Vasquez. I’ve burned any pictures that he’s in. And yes, these pictures are evidence that I wasn’t always a big guy.)

On the day before Christmas, the day Rex turned two years old, he and I went out all bundled up to deliver small gifts to our neighbors. Few people were home that morning, so after letting him knock on each door for a while, I’d hand him the small bundle of treats to be left there, and let him place them on the doorstep. The first time he did this, he seemed hesitant to just leave the treats there for absent people— treats that might be greatly enjoyed by a two-year old who was entirely present. Nonetheless, he did as he was asked, stood up, and off we went to the next house. As we rounded the walk from that first house though, he stopped and turned to view the goodies once more and quietly said “Bye-bye tandy.”

This sad scene was played out three more times that morning. At each house, Rex would get a bit sad that these treats were being abandoned, as if to express to me what a good home he’d be willing to give them. And each time, he submitted, surrendering the candy to another impassive doorway. It made me sad that today, his birthday and the day before Christmas, I was forcing him to march around in the cold and give all these delicious treats to other people, and that once we were finished there would be nothing left in our bag for him. But we had to get them all delivered, so we soldiered on through the snow.

Finally, Rex had delivered everything, and our bag was empty. The series of sad farewells had taken a small toll, and I wished I could explain to him the beauty of giving, and how much we get back when we give to others. That wasn’t really a lesson he could understand.

As we walked home, I noticed a crowd in the street ahead of us, surrounding a car stopped in the middle of the road. When we got closer, I could see that the car was a convertible, and it carried a very jolly Santa Claus perched on the back seat as if in a parade. Santa passed out presents to the group of kids gathered around the car, and then drove forward down the street. Another group of people had assembled a few houses down, and Santa pulled up to them just as we did. Rex was excited to see Santa (as long as we kept a good distance from the big red scary guy), and got pretty chatty, talking about him. Santa had presents for all the children of that street, pre-arranged by the parents who had invited him.

When he finished with them, he looked over at us– the strangers on the street, standing and smiling at the display of neighborhood cheer. He reached into his sack and pulled out a little bag tied with ribbon– stuffed with cookies and a big candy cane. He tossed the bag to me and smiled, and then the car drove off to the next house.

Rex took the bag from me and started talking about cookies and candy canes. As soon as we could get it open he got several into his mouth at once. As we walked home, I thought about the nice little lesson that was probably lost on Rex. Still, it meant something to me. After a whole morning of giving that involved no small sacrifice for a two-year old, Christmas delivered on its promise. Santa came, and we received in proportion to what we had given. Maybe someday I’ll tell him this story when he can understand it. But right now, there’s no lesson he understands better than candy canes and cookies from Santa himself.

(All grown up, and still just as excited to see Santa)

A lot of recently returned LDS missionaries will tell you that the best Christmas they’ve ever had was one on their mission. 10 out of 10 of them are lying. Don’t get me wrong, I loved my mission, and was VERY successful. No, I’m not going to tell you how many conversions I had because that would be tacky. We’ll just say it was 5.1 times the area average.

My first Christmas as a missionary found me working as the designated “Car Fleet Elder,” due to the fact that my rotten companion, who was a few months away from going home, refused to do missionary work. So they put him out to pasture in the mission office, and I had the misfortune of having to tag along with him.  I have warm memories of vacuuming floor mats and changing oil during the ’99 holiday season. Elder B., if you are reading right now, I want to thank you for ruining 3 months of my life. But I digress—I started this post with the intention of talking about my best Christmas memories and we got off track.

The thing I remember most fondly about all my childhood Christmases is the traditional routine just preceding the grand unveiling. Christmas Eve brought a big Thanskgiving-like dinner, a reading of Luke 2, and the viewing of It’s a Wonderful Life. Afterward, all 6 kids would sleep in the bedroom of the oldest sibling still at home. I spent most of the night restlessly watching the digital alarm clock crawl from the still-exciting 12:00’s to the bleak 4:00’s, then drifted off before the 5:00’s popped up. I would be shaken awake at 6:30 or so to the squeals of delighted older siblings.

We then went upstairs, each wrapped in our own family-made quilt. We were restricted to the living room while Mom and Dad finished setting up in the family room. I disliked this part because of the painful anticipation, but also because I disliked the living room in general. Nothing good ever happened there for a special little boy afflicted with A.D.D. Piano practice, hour-long Family Home Evening lessons, meetings with a creepy old lady trying to motivate you to stop wetting your bed by giving you Strawberry Shortcake stickers, and one-on-one parental conversations about awful topics like puberty. These were the ugly ghosts haunting that living room, and I had no use for the place.

After an eternity of 10 or 15 minutes, we were allowed to enter the room of lights and lucre. For some reason our presents were never wrapped, but were naked in shiny, giant piles. This seems odd to me now, but I liked it that way as a kid. It was all business. Each kid’s pile was always in the same place, so we knew exactly which part of the room to sprint to without so much as a scan to see whose pile was whose. One year the folks accidentally switched my pile location (I was around 10) with my 4 year-old sister’s, and I ran right up to the little play kitchen and My Little Ponies. It didn’t occur to me that this pile didn’t belong to me. This was my spot; that much was immutable. I was baffled but managed to fake excitement about my little plastic kitchen for a good 20 seconds until a higher authority realized what was happening.

I never really knew what gifts to ask for, so the folks had to wing 80% of my presents. I recall Ryan being the same way. He just needed a few things from Deseret Industries to replenish his perpetually wrong-decade wardrobe. Not Davis though. No, greedy little Davis would have a typed list worth 5 or 6 times the allotted amount, requesting things from stores existing only in Paris and New York. A big percentage of my take was always a surprise, and I was usually very pleased. The biggest, best surprise of all was a guinea pig, which was awesome until he died a couple months later when I left the bedroom window open for a few hours. Apparently, all that fur and fat is only for show.

After rifling through our loot, we would play with our toys, the two sisters and Davis would try their new clothes on, then we all gorged on cinnamon rolls and orange juice. After a few hours we would head up to visit both sets of grandparents in Ogden, which we called “Hog Town” because it sort of rhymed and mostly because it seemed like a funny thing to call it.

My  maternal grandparents hand-made many of their own elaborate Christmas decorations, so their house was a lot of fun that time of year. My favorite part of the decor was a big motorized iceberg set that would lift an endless line of little plastic penguins up an escalator thing and send them sliding down to the bottom. My paternal grandparents lived in a big, funky old house near downtown. That house always felt cozy to me, and those two were good times to visit. One recurring memory of these visits is of Grandma passing around a used gallon-sized ice cream bucket full of strange, old-person cookies. I wondered what possessed the elderly to have such weird tastes and why an otherwise socially masterful woman failed to notice the bucket coming back with nearly the same level of cookies as it had before being passed through 48 people, year after year. After hours of cousin play, we returned home, played some more, then went to bed, secure in the fact that we had tons and tons of time until the resumption of school and real life.

Those are my favorite memories. Feel free to share some of yours.

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