Normally, you’d think of my husband as the kind of guy who likes to plan things in advance. Rick is a farmer by instinct, and so he knows that if he wants pumpkins by Halloween, he’d better plant seeds no later than Flag Day. Lambs in the spring? Then the ram needs to go in with the ewes in November. And as treasurer up at the church, he’s the one who in August is making sure that there’ll be money to pay the minister come June.

You can imagine, then, my surprise during the early years of our marriage when I came to realize that when Rick had first told me that he liked to do all his Christmas shopping on Christmas Eve, he wasn’t kidding. We lived in Boston then, and Rick’s friend, Keith, who shared this rash tradition, would show up after work on December 24 and the pair of them would head off to Downtown Crossing, giddy with the sheer recklessness of their behavior.

I found all of this hard to understand. I come, you see, from a family in which we knew on December 26 exactly where we’d be eating dinner the following Christmas Eve (Aunt Helen’s), and when we’d arrive (6 p.m.—sharp), and what we’d eat (roast beef, cooked rare). The holiday never came fast enough for me, and even back in the days when the season really did wait until the day after Thanksgiving to begin, I’d have my Christmas records out mid-November. Convention be damned: one month simply wasn’t enough time to listen to all that great music.

I should come clean up front that my tastes here run toward what I tend to think of as the candy corn of Christmas music: “Jingle Bell Rock,” and “Holly Jolly Christmas,” and just about anything by Elvis. I do love The Messiah, of course, and the gospel “Christmas of the Black Nativity,” and even The Nutcracker if I’m in the mood to leap about the kitchen. But in the end, it’s “Frosty the Snowman” that really does it for me.

I’m not alone in this passion. The only speeding ticket that my mother ever got occurred when, carried away with singing along with the car radio to “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”, she lost track of how fast she was going. My friend, Glenn, can play a rocking version of “Good King Wenceslas” that you can almost dance to. And all three of my children, at very young ages, knew every word to “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.”

And then there’s my husband, Rick.

I should be clear that Rick’s penchant for postponing Christmas shopping came not from some Scrooge-ish lack of pleasure in giving gifts, or some cultural blindness in which he never quite understood that one is supposed to spend the month of December circling slowly around the mall parking lot, hunting for an open space. No, Rick’s Christmas Eve shopping tradition always had more to do with taking this holiday on his own terms, on his own schedule, which, I suppose, is not all that different from me and my music. And besides, for Rick at least, shopping on Christmas Eve was always fun.

“You can’t believe what it’s like down there,” he’d tell me when he and Keith returned, eyes wide with the adventure of it all. Imagine that Christmas Eve shopping scene, picture, if you will, the old downtown Filene’s. It’s dark outside, snow falling, but inside, the store shines with holiday decorations. “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” pipes through the speaker system, and the aisles are filled with more people than you’d ever imagine would still have shopping to do on Christmas Eve. It’s all men—every Filene’s shopper on Christmas Eve is a man—Rick tells me, but the mood is jovial and friendly, as all those last-minute men look around the store and feel the shared bond of mutual crisis.

“What are you giving your mother-in-law?” the stranger standing next to Rick might ask.

“Golf balls?” Rick queries, as if there’s a right answer.

“Mine doesn’t play golf,” replies the stranger.

“Neither does mine,” says Rick.

Those were the old days, though, and Keith lives in London now and we live out here, and with gifts to buy for three children, the risk of putting it all off until the last minute is too much even for Rick. His tradition of taking Christmas at his own pace has not been lost entirely, though—just transferred to a new activity.

“Remember the year that we waited so long to cut down the Christmas tree that all the places were sold out and Lily and I ended up getting the tree at the hardware store in Hudson?” he asked just the other night as we were all sitting around the dinner table.

I do remember, and I remember the sway-backed specimen that my husband and daughter, flushed with the thrill of even being able to find a tree on the morning of Christmas Eve, proudly dragged through the front door.

“Was the tree any good?” asks Mac, too young at the time to have a memory of his own.

“It was awesome,” Rick answers right away. “The best tree ever.”

And you know what?

It was.

Andy Perkins lives on Bolton Road with her husband, Rick, their three children, assorted farm animals, a large collection of Christmas music, and, maybe sometime this month, a Christmas tree.