Chris Erskine: Man of the House

By Chris Erskine

Dec. 18, 2010 12 AM PT

I devote a lot of valuable time to a small nonprofit that’s very special to me — my own family. We never turn a profit. Which is why I need to be inventive come the holidays.

For instance, I bought my wife a TSA pat-down for Christmas. The TSA actually works on an out-call basis now. All major credit cards accepted. For a small additional fee, it also will misplace your luggage.

“Your husband is so thoughtful,” her pals will tell her.

“Yeah, he’s a saint,” my wife Posh will sneer.

The district attorney is currently investigating this new TSA outcall service, but I’m hoping the grand jury indictments don’t come down till after the holidays. Then I’m good. And Posh is always effective on a witness stand.

Listen, find me a mother who couldn’t use a thorough pat-down right about now.

“Christmas kills me,” Ethan’s mom confided at the tree lighting.

“Posh too,” I said.

“Really?”

“Hates the holidays,” I whispered.

The other night I’m watching this made-for-TV movie about a bunch of Chardonnay moms who go on strike over the holidays because their families take them for granted. Daphne Zuniga starred. You may remember her best as Princess Vespa in “Spaceballs.”

I think I smell an Oscar, Ms. Zuniga, though that could just be the tree water, which gets a little funky from the dog drinking it. I send the kids under to check it now and then, and they always reappear as if they have just visited a secret world.

“There’s, like, some sixth dimension down there,” the boy says.

“Take me with you,” I plead.

“I can’t,” he explains.

“Why not?”

There’s a cover charge.”

Meanwhile, the Christmas card is in its final editing stages. The executive editor of our card, Posh, went round and round with the guys at the card shop. She asked them to change the light source in the family photo “to something more celestial, like that dude Da Vinci used.”

I don’t remember Da Vinci ever working on our Christmas cards, but I’m not ruling it out. Might’ve been a few years ago.

When I pointed out that it looked as though our daughters were actually holding down their little brother so he couldn’t bolt — gripping him with four hands as if in a prison movie — Posh became fixated on that instead. Last I heard, she was having our daughters’ arms Photoshopped out. Instead they will have angel wings, Pixar hair and dimples they never had.

Just between us, there’s a week till Christmas and I am one chocolate strawberry away from complete organ failure. I am one drink away from a month at the Charlie Sheen Institute. The other day, seeking solitude, I considered taking the kids up into the mountains for a family trip.

“Would you leave them there?” a friend asks.

“Duh.”

“They’d find their way back.”

Yeah, I know. But at least I could watch the Packers game in peace, till the kids came barging through the front door, having left Starbucks cups behind them to find their way out of the woods.

“Welcome home, Hansel,” I’d say.

“Very funny, Dad!!!”

Around our house, Christmas is a constant work in progress. It occurs only because there is a hard and fast deadline. The kids will often ask for extensions, as if late to file their taxes. But I usually deny that. Among other things, Santa invented tough love.

The only one who seems to have his act together is the little guy, who made three ornaments in his Cub Scout meeting the other night. Now he’s trying to determine who gets them. I’ve got my eye on the Frosty he made out of Popsicle sticks. If not that, there’s a reindeer made out of clothes pins. I didn’t even know they made clothes pins anymore. The last time I saw laundry on a line, I was 4.

But clothes pins live on. These appear to be stained — intentionally — a shade of brown that makes them look like yacht teak. Never underestimate the artistic skills of a mom holding a fishbowl of $6 Chardonnay.

So, naturally, I’m being extra nice to the little guy this week before Christmas, in hopes of snagging either Frosty or Rudolph. The consolation prize is an ornament that looks like chicken organs all stirred together.

“What’s that?” I ask him

“Mostly gizzards,” he says proudly.

In any case, I’m still in the running for the other two ornaments, and that’s the important thing. I’m sort of like Sarah Palin, in that you’re not sure of my motives; I just seem to be out there chasing some nebulous prize.

Which is Christmas, after all, a holiday of small nebulous prizes, one after the other — some that can’t even by wrapped.

These days, our house is full of them.

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