Fun Fact: My brother and I once drove 6,000 miles in 6 days! We did it so that we could see Alaska, which was the 49^th state we had been to at that point. Some of our friends thought we were foolish.

We weren’t, of course. For guys like us, travel is always deeply, inarguably worthwhile.

But something I did the week after our Alaska trip proved them right, in my case, about the foolishness.

It was fall 2002, almost 2 decades ago. I had already been solo road-tripping through the Pacific Northwest, and after Nate joined me for our brief, brotherly Alaska adventure, I continued by myself through British Columbia and a little of Alberta. A bona fide mountain paradise. Banff, Jasper, Lake Louise (see picture below), Kelowna, Revelstoke — each of those words now feel to me like a sacred incantation.

I remember stunningly picturesque hostels in the Canadian Rockies, most memorably one in the town of Squilax. At this rustic hostel, I slept in a converted train caboose, fed a pair of standoffish llamas, exfoliated in a tiny cedar-scented sweat lodge, took an eye-opening polar bear plunge into a wide river under gleaming stars, and watched bright red salmon spawning en masse in that same river the next day.

I have a treasure trove of glistening, blissed-out road-tripping memories from that trip. More than I can keep track of.

But I also have this memory: Waking up in a hostel bed near Lake Louise with dark fog in my brain on a Monday morning, with no earthly memory of how I got there.

I had planted myself at a sports bar in the bustling tourist town of Banff the day before, watching an Eagles game with some Canadian fellow (American) football fans. I don’t remember what I drank, but knowing my 2002 self it was likely bright yellow and vodka-based.

And as sometimes happens when consuming candy-colored alcoholic beverages, at some point I blacked out and stopped making memories of any kind. What kind of conversations did I have during that blackout? Did I make America look bad to the bar-hoppers of Banff? Did I embarrass myself by flirting with someone in my word-slurring state? I’ll never know because those hours are lost to history. Or they were not so much lost as I willingly, eagerly relinquished them.

The ghastly (and frankly criminal) thing I do know is this: Despite my sloshed state, I drove the 25-30 miles up the Icefields Parkway from Banff to my rustic hostel in my ’91 Toyota Corolla. Then I collapsed in a drunken heap on the bed I had paid for earlier, and woke up the next morning with a dull, grinding headache.

I can still picture, even though I can’t remember her name, the warmly maternal middle-aged woman who ran the hostel. I remember regaling her with the anecdote about how I didn’t know how I had gotten back from Banff the night before. I remember telling her this story as if it was an entertaining or even faintly impressive fact about myself.

I had bought into that tenet of frat-boy culture — distilled in Old School and The Hangover and a hundred other frat-boy movies, and toxic in both senses of the word — which says that drinking alcohol is an innately interesting act.

But the hostel-owner woman didn’t find my story remotely interesting, and certainly not impressive. She, being of sane mind and good conscience, was aghast that I had driven my car while blackout drunk. In that moment, she acted as a surrogate for my own warmly protective mom, more than 3,000 miles away. And I vividly remember the woman, in the lobby of that mountain hostel, telling me that the reason my body felt awful was that the alcohol was literal poison coursing through my veins.

I was 22 years old and had grown up being given every possible impression that alcohol was bad. But I had never heard it stated in quite that way before. Alcohol as poison. Poison that needs to leave the body, sometimes by force, before the body can regain its health.

It was another 5 years before I got my head straight and sobered up for good in 2007. But I’ve never forgotten that nurturing and deeply principled woman trying, with solemn and warmly stern wide eyes, to get me to understand that I was willingly poisoning myself.

So many times since that day, I have thought with horror about how easily I could have killed some innocent pedestrian somewhere on that blacked-out road from Banff to Lake Louise. Maybe a fellow starry-eyed wanderer like me who was visiting Lake Louise to drink deep of the staggering wonders of the Canadian Rockies. Or some resident of Alberta just having an ordinary Sunday night. I could have easily ended a life that day. Someone else’s or my own.

I forged a lot of spectacular, epic memories in my 20s. And I somehow dodged a lot of self-inflicted bullets too. I survived my own foolishness. I’m deeply fortunate that I made it from age 21 to age 27 in one piece. I am forever grateful that I lived long enough to find the 3 great loves of my life.

Some would say that I got lucky. Pure dumb luck that kept me from misfortune (or jail). Other people I love would say that I was divinely protected. That God watched over me and kept me alive long enough to finally collect my wits, and my survival instinct, and pursue the life I was meant to live.

I’m not dogmatic on the exact coordinates of that point, because many people who are much better than I am have died young for no good reason. But I’m happy to default to the latter view. Because I do see my life as a gift from God.

But in moments like that one in Banff, I looked the gift horse straight in the mouth. Tempting fate and threatening to return the gift to sender.

I’m so glad that I embrace that gift now. I’m grateful I can be grateful. I am fortunate that I lived to savor all of those unforgettable travel memories, in the jagged mountains of western Canada, the lush greenery of the Pacific Northwest, the orange canyons of the Southwest, and beyond. The grand tour.

And at 42, I’m fortunate that I can gradually give my kids their own grand tour. So that their mental scrapbook can be as colorful as mine, and overflowing with snapshots.

That is, and will be, my gift to them.

Our 5-year-old has an odd, endearing, and exhausting obsession.

I’m out of the loop and don’t know what most kids his age are enamored of in 2022. But I’m guessing the list would include some video games (is Fortnite still a thing?), some Marvel superheroes (I hear that kindergartners go to PG-13 movies now?), and some toys that I’m not aware exist since we don’t have cable and thus don’t keep up with the commercial circuit.

But do you know what our Greyson can’t pry himself away from? What he has loved more than anything else for 3 full months? What consumes much of his play time, both by himself and with his little sister?

Christmas carols. That’s right. Yuletide songs. The first, second, and third noels — along with all the rest.

It’s a genre of music which is quite charming, but which most adults would strongly prefer to be sequestered to a 1-month period. Heck, some people would vote for a 2-week limit due to how these songs ruthlessly pummel our eardrums into cheerfully mandated submission during that period.

But Greyson doesn’t share that sense of restraint. He doesn’t honor holiday boundaries. He’s a Christmas universalist, if you will.

Hark the Herald Angels Sing. Joy to the World. Deck the Halls. Jingle Bells. O Christmas Tree. O Come All Ye Faithful. O Little Town of Bethlehem. Pretty much all the songs that begin with the old-fashioned word “O,” it O-ccurs to me. (O brother, I know.)

He knows all of those, but he also knows about obscure Christmas songs that neither of his parents (or just about anyone else’s parents) have ever heard. 18^th century relics that no one but those seeking a doctorate in this realm (the realms of glory, if you will) would likely be familiar with.

Greyson is basically a graduate student in canonical Yuletide music. Is this offered as a major at any bastions of higher learning? Maybe I should encourage him to submit an application to Yale’s music department. Or to write a thesis, just for fun.

We hear these songs recited dozens of times a day, in Greyson’s sweet little voice. He sings them. He reads them in a spoken-word style. He dissects their verse/chorus structure and notifies us when a song doesn’t seem to have a traditional chorus, or when different songbooks show different numbers of verses. He verbally deconstructs the rhythm and meter, and then reconstructs them in offbeat ways.

He and Violet also like to pretend they’re going to the Christmas songbook store. When it’s closed, they go to a different Christmas songbook store. (It’s apparently a national chain that’s open year-round. Doesn’t seem like a good business model to me, but I’m no venture caplitalist.)

Our little carolers even use these songs as characters in their various stories and imaginings. We’ll hear them in the other room talking about how Hark the Herald is having a birthday party, or Joy to the World is going to Hersheypark. They’ve essentially brought these songs to life. They’re like the Victor (and Violet) Frankenstein of Christmas.

Greyson has always been a boy who is deeply, exquisitely devoted to one fixation at a time. When he was 1½, he had a car or truck in his hand everywhere he went, all the time. He always wanted to read car and truck books, and he had every single type of truck memorized by the time he was 2. When he was 2½, he became obsessed with animals. Every imaginable toy animal or animal book was his prized possession, and he would even carefully read the index at the back of each animal encyclopedia. When he was 3½, birds became his specialty. He devoted himself to learning every imaginable bird, and he grew into a bona fide expert who was known to run the table on avian-themed Jeopardy categories. And now that he’s 5½, his obsession du jour (du year?) is Christmas carols.

I know Hitchcock would warn against this, but… can we maybe invite the birds back?

Because here’s the not-all-that-surprising thing: Christmas carols are exhausting to hear for 3 months straight. For 4 decades I have loved most of the songs Greyson sings. But by about mid-February I started not loving them so much. “Joy to the World” doesn’t bring me quite as much joy as it did in December, sometimes I wish I’d never heard those Angels on High, and I have to admit: I wouldn’t mind silencing “Silent Night.” At least for the next 8 months or so.

But in my better moments, my moments of wider perspective, I remind myself that it’s a gift to have such a sweetly innocent 5-year-old. A peaceful boy who has never witnessed a violent act (other than an occasional predator/prey snack in a nature documentary) and has virtually no aggression in his body. A goofy boy who loves to sing all the high notes and has no concept of trying to be cool or relevant. A boy of simple pleasures who is ambivalent to screens, and obsessed with reading Christmas sheet music.

I have sometimes found myself saying “Greyson, stop looking at your Christmas carols and try to focus on this show! Reading Rainbow is really cool!” I never imagined that my parental struggle would be trying to get my child to watch more television.

So I’ve learned that having a Yuletide-loving 5-year-old is both a blessing and an (admittedly very minor) curse. I know that when he’s 13 and wouldn’t be caught dead singing a Christmas song to himself, I will ache for these simple days when he didn’t have an ounce of jadedness or self-consciousness. And I will ache to hear that adorable little voice singing “Fa la la la la… la la la la.”

So here at 6:59am, I will brace myself for the next round of Away in a Mangers and O Little Town of Bethlehems. Which will invariably bubble out of his mouth once he wakes up in a few minutes, we read our (thankfully non-Christmas-themed) books, and he gets acclimated to the day.

And when he belts out that first bar of Deck the Halls, I will try to be grateful for the simplicity of our kids who never, ever, ever tire of Christmas songs.

It’s almost April, and we all know that singing Christmas songs after January should be a felony.

But you do you, Greyson. And you too, Violet.

I’ll let you both off because you’re minors.

And because I love you both majorly.