Hat-y Holidays
Holiday cards were high on my to-do list during our early years as parents. I am quite sure that Mike suppressed some eye-rolls, as pairing the right photo with the right holiday message took more effort than was practical sometimes. My standards never changed: Humor was important; no bragging, no whining.
We retired photo cards sometime in the 2010s, briefly dabbled in digital greetings, and then our commitment faded. We got busier. Life got less funny for a while. And then it dawned on me one day, not long after Leah's most recent IEP meeting, that mailing holiday cards would offer Leah a chance to practice the pre-vocational skills that have become a big component of her school program. I even devised a workaround for our lack of family group photos.
Leah's sixth sense must have pinged at that point, because she took advantage of a small window of time at home alone with her sisters (half an hour between my departure and Mike's arrival), broke out the clippers I use to maintain her pixie cut, and shaved off most of her remaining hair.
When Mike walked in, she told him, "I'm baldtastic."
I saw a new holiday theme, dropped in my lap: Christmastime is Hair, built around the baldtastic photo Mike snapped when he saw Leah's new 'do. Far better to draw a smiley face in one of the bald spots and move on, I thought, instead of tearing my own hair out over Leah's latest DIY job.
Angst also turned out to be unnecessary, because within hours, Leah experienced it herself. Being bald(ish) seemed less -tastic, and more like an experiment she regretted. And with that, Christmastime is Hair didn't feel funny anymore. The point, after all, was to laugh with Leah, and to enjoy that she is more daring than most people we know. When she covered her head for several days straight, I realized that for the first time in her life, Leah was self-conscious about her appearance. I needed to treat her baldtastic step with much more care, to avoid laughing at her instead of with her.
The fresh-off-the-clippers picture was quietly archived, and I shifted our greeting to wishing our mailing list a Hat-Y New Year. Hamiltons in hats is a year-round phenomenon, regardless of hairstyle, making it unnervingly easy to find current pictures, and to mix in a few new holiday-themed poses, with Leah as a willing participant. Our return to annual peace-and-goodwill holiday greetings got its shot of humor, along with a chance to think hard about how to apply humor to Leah. She's amused herself plenty of times with grand, quirky gestures that make it easy to add our laughs to hers. But if her laughter stops, ours should too.