Tag Archives: Christmas

So That was Christmas?

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The day after Christmas, I was reading my daughter a bedtime story. It was Zen Shorts by Jon J. Muth, a book about three siblings who each learn a Zen principle in an encounter with a giant panda named Stillwater. One such lesson was “misfortune becomes good luck.”

It was not my daughter’s book. It wasn’t her bedroom. In fact, we weren’t even in our own house.

Ava and I were staying for an uncertain length of time at our friends’ Michael and Nicole’s home just 10 minutes away. Earlier that day they had traveled with their children, 9 and 14, to Atlanta when Michael passed out at the American Girl store. (It’s okay, you can laugh; he’s all right now, we just weren’t sure at the time.) He was rushed to the ER. Our friends are transplants to the South and don’t have family to call on, but they do have us. And having fixed us a fabulous Christmas Eve dinner, I guess we owed them. So when Nicole asked if Ray could drive to Atlanta to get the kids and bring them home so she could focus on the situation at hand, he hopped in the car without a second thought (I mean, it was a really good dinner).

But let’s rewind to Christmas morning.

It was our second Christmas alone. Ever. We didn’t have the money to fly home to our families so we raked up our sorry-for-ourselves feelings and tried to make the best of it. It was working, right up until the wee hours of Christmas morning when I suddenly woke to my throbbing upper lip, or what used to be my upper lip and was now a suitable perch for a barn owl. By sunrise, it had grown so large it could sustain a flock of seagulls. Better yet, the Flock of Seagulls, their groupies and a touring bus.

I lay in bed considering the possibilities. On Christmas Eve, I thought I might be getting a cold sore, but this was clearly so much more. Flesh-eating virus came to mind. How inconvenient.

I woke my husband and told him that we might as well enjoy our last Christmas together, or at the very least, my last Christmas with this particular lip.

“What are you talk—” he rolled toward me and opened his eyes, “Whoa!”

Yeah. About that.

As our daughter merrily tore through her Christmas stocking, I drank my coffee through a straw and felt bitterly sorry for myself quarantined and alone on Christmas Day. I dodged Ray’s picture taking even as he tried to convince me that the size of my lip “didn’t translate two-dimensionally.” Apparently he was lying because when I Skyped my mother she shielded her face with her hands and yelled, “Oh my God! Dad, come here! Quick! Look at Andrea’s face!” Dad and Mom gawked and pointed in horror like I was a legless giraffe at the zoo.

“It’s spreading up the side of your face!”

It wasn’t; makeup just wasn’t a priority that morning. But thanks.

Clearly, it was bad. But it was going to have to wait. It was Christmas, after all. And more than that, even my dermatologist couldn’t see me like this.

Things improved moderately overnight. I went from circus freak to Botox gone horribly wrong. We had just gotten the call from Nicole, so I knew I would have to venture outside sooner or later. There I encountered my neighbors and quickly acknowledged the elephant woman in the room.

“Ray got me lip injections for Christmas.” Cue the recoil.

“Just kidding. I have a lip funk.” They laughed, somehow comforted with the thought of a communicable disease over restylane. Clearly I played this right.

Sure, they dispersed moments later, citing a variety of made-up errands. I couldn’t blame them. Survival of the fittest. And I was not fit for public consumption.

All the same, I had things to do. I had our friends’ children to care for. When they arrived, they kindly averted their eyes and never mentioned my lip until two days later when the swelling mercifully subsided.

“What happened anyway?” the 14-year-old asked.

Christmas happened. Somewhere between my over-inflated lip and the rush to our friends in need, the holiday spirit swept through virtually unnoticed.

Or maybe not.

Maybe I need to heed Stillwater’s Zen wisdom. All this bad luck was actually good luck in disguise. I didn’t spend Christmas “alone.” I spent it with a husband willing to drive ten hours to help our friends, friends willing to trust us with their children and home, and my daughter willing to believe the whole thing was one big adventure.

And the lip? Well, if I had gone home for Christmas I inevitably would’ve run into 50 people I went to high school with who would then permanently fix the vision of my lip into their collective memory and forever refer to me as the girl who “used to be pretty.”

Thank you, giant panda, for a memorable Christmas.

Yeah, I BET you wanted to see a picture of my lip.

A Christmas Funk

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Illin' on the couch

Two days before Christmas, I woke to the feeling of being trampled by 8 not-so-tiny reindeer. Every hair follicle on my body ached. My stomach cramped, heaved and lurched. I tried to stand up three times, but I was dizzier than Grandma with a double-shot eggnog.

I don’t have time to be sick, I thought. I wasn’t worried about infecting my relatives or yakking in the Jell-O salad. I had to get toast tongs.

I had been steadily shopping for the past three months. My lists were checked, my coupons redeemed. But my Christmas shopping was not complete until I found toast tongs—the one thing that stands between my mother-in-law and certain death. You see, she has a habit of retrieving her toast by jamming a steel fork into the toaster. A lesser daughter-in-law may never mention the invention of toast tongs, leaving Darwinism well enough alone. But I love my mother-in-law and that’s not just the Christmas spirit or sparkling wine talking. She’s actually very cool. Her one fault, however, is her consistent misuse of kitchen utensils. She scrapes Teflon pans with metal spatulas, leaving us to pick the “pepper” out of our scrambled eggs. Her Tupperware is scratched, stained and misshapen, but apparently still good enough to use in the microwave. I’m surprised that my daughter wasn’t born with a radioactive third eye given the high-levels of toxicity we’ve been exposed to while dinning at Mom’s house.

So this Christmas, finding toast tongs became my passion. Before Thanksgiving, this was not a problem. You couldn’t swing a dead cat around a Bed, Bath and Beyond without hitting stainless steel, bamboo or wood versions in a variety of lengths. But like the illusive purple unicorn Pillow Pet that was in abundance for 333 days but suspiciously disappeared at the first sound of a Christmas carol, Black Friday marked the death of all toast tongs.

I hadn’t exhausted all of my resources. Sure, there’s the mall, major home-shopping stores and your kitchen specialty shops, but hard-core shopper such as myself know about back-alley retailers who carry the hard-to-find objects for a little more dough, but it’s the literal price I pay for the perfect Christmas.

Now before you get all high-and-mighty anti-capitalist Christmas on me, let me remind you that the toast tongs will spare my mother-in-law’s life. Pure charity and goodwill disguised as a mere kitchen utensil. It just so happens that she’s really difficult to shop for and the toast tongs are all I have going for me.

So I drag myself out of bed, drive 20 minutes to retrieve my mom (we don’t shop without one another) before we head to our black-market dealer. But when I get to Mom’s house, the nausea is too much to bear. I run past my mom to the sofa, calling out, “Sofa! Heating pad! Sprite! Antacid! Foot massage!” The only thing that makes dying bearable, is dying in the loving hands of your mother.

With the image of toast tongs dancing in my head (and a 20-minute foot massage), I rallied. I used the shopping cart to hold me up as we searched our secret-shopping location. Parents shot me disgusted looks, as if I drank too much at last-night’s Christmas party. I carried a plastic bag in my purse, just in case. Waves of nausea crashed over me until I caught sight of my Holy Grail: the most beautiful and petite toast tongs ever made.

My eyes watered. The Halleluiah Chorus rang in my ears. Move over, Tiny Tim. This is a Christmas miracle.

I couldn’t stomach food for another 24 hours, but finding the toast tongs was nourishment enough. When my mother-in-law opened them up on Christmas Eve, she exclaimed, “Oooh! Salad tongs!”

“They aren’t salad tongs.”

“Ice tongs?”

“Nevermind.”

The next morning, I heard the familiar sound of a fork being jammed into the toaster.

My husband suggested that my untimely Christmas funk might have been a sign that I should take it easy, sit back and enjoy the holidays without all the frantic shopping. Sure, easy for him to say since the holiday shopping usually falls on the shoulders of mothers, grandmothers, wives, daughters and daughters-in-law (or shall we keep it simple and just say “women?”). But it’s going to take a lot more than the plague to slow me down. This year, I scrambled for my mother-in-law, but I’d do the same for my daughter, and one day, when she’s old enough to wield her daddy’s credit card, she’ll do the same for me. Holiday shopping is not an easy burden to bear and it’s not a responsibility most women lightly. And I’m guessing by the desperate looks of my fellow Eve-of-Christmas-Eve shoppers, I’m not alone.

In hopes that you found all that you were looking for this holiday—retail inspired or otherwise—Merry Christmas!

Then pushin' through the pain

 

Must-See TV?

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My family doesn’t watch much TV together. And hardly ever at night. I’m usually racing to get our daughter bathed and in bed so I have enough time for what I call Dora Déjà vu. For 133 consecutive nights, I’ve read “Dora’s BIG Birthday Adventure,” which takes exactly 11 minutes and 22 seconds including time for “content questions.” For example, on page 8, Ava asks, “Why is the witch smiling if she’s mean?” And page 12, “Why do the flowers bite Boots?” (These are good questions, and apparently my answers are unsatisfactory since she repeats them. Every night.)

Plus, I’m always working at my computer in the evenings and my husband is prepping for the next day’s class (which means he watches movie trailers online in the name of “research”). It’s not that we think TV is bad; we just considered Family TV Time a luxury that our busy lives couldn’t afford right now.

But once a year, we get the rare opportunity to enjoy Family TV Time while visiting our relatives over the holidays. And if you’ve ever watched TV as an adult with your parents or in-laws, then you have experienced—as I have—a little piece of your soul slowly dying away, like a withering bed of garnish under Grandma’s Jell-O salad.

My parents watch holiday country music concerts sitting three feet away from a 60-inch TV screen. Mom wears these special headphones so that she can control her own volume because Dad has had sole custody of the remote since 1983. It hasn’t put an end to their constant bickering. Dad has taken to flipping the channel at random. Sometimes it’s at the end of the holiday program when all the country music stars gather on stage for an ensemble performance, but usually he does it when Mom fancies herself a little bit country and starts singing along without actually knowing the words. Oh Christmas tree, Oh Christmas tree, thy duh duh dum duh dee dee-ing…

Last week, I sat there in the midst of their very un-Christmas-like conduct, wondering why they try to watch TV together. My answer came in the form of a Jack-in-the-Box commercial.

Mom hollered with delight at the sight of the guy in the suit with the oversized clown head: “Oh, there’s that crazy Jack!” He said something so lame that I’d forgotten it as soon as he said it, but Mom erupted into a shrieky laughter, and slapped me on the thigh. I looked to Dad for sympathy but he was chuckling along with her! After enduring the longest 30 seconds of my adult life, Mom slowly recovered from her hysterics and Dad wiped tears from his eyes. Then they smiled at each other lovingly.

It’s come to this.

My in-laws have Family TV Time figured out—and by that I mean they don’t bother. After dinner, Ray’s parents gather in front of the TV in the perfect image of togetherness. His dad selects some reality program to my mother-in-law’s liking, turns it to the ideal volume, and sticks around for an obligatory seven minutes—right about the time the bachelorette’s mascara starts running down her face like an oil spill. We don’t see him sneak away to his bedroom where he’ll watch a 4-hour “COPS” marathon, but we know he’s there. And we know he’s happy.

I, on the other hand, was not happy. The reality shows were bearable, but once they were over my mother-in-law flipped to some black-and-white movie on some outer-limits station. I’m sure the only other person on the planet watching that station was a 94-year-old woman in Kansas, and that’s only because the batteries in her remote died back in ’91 and her walker has a bad wheel.

When the actresses’ nasally whines and feebleness became too much to bear, I retreated to the guest bedroom where I found my husband in bed wearing headphones and watching movie trailers on his laptop. So I pulled out some headphones of my own, turned on my laptop and dialed up Hulu.com.

I would like to thank my relatives for teaching me a special lesson this Christmas season: Family TV Time is grossly overrated. I should no longer feel as if I’m missing out on quality togetherness. Because like grooming and going the bathroom, watching TV should really be a solo sport.

 

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas

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As I hauled our luggage out of the attic last week, I glanced at the boxes labeled “Christmas” with a black Sharpie. Those three boxes contain my entire collection of Christmas decorations. By most standards, it’s a meager collection—a couple of mangy stuffed snowmen holding dusty brooms, a few chipped Santa-head mugs, and one artificial tree that’s probably infested with mites. The tree’s already decorated because by the time February rolls around, I’m so over it that I cover it with a garbage sack and drag it back to the attic like the corpse of Christmas past.

But that day I smiled sheepishly when I saw the Christmas boxes, like I was getting away with something. Because I was.

This year, we came home for the holidays to stay with our families who happen to live in the same town in the Pacific Northwest. And inside 24-hours of landing, my mother-in-law was showering our daughter with gifts and spoon-feeding my husband and me dinner (he’s her “Golden Boy” and I am the “Golden Womb”—the provider of progeny). It’s not a bad gig. But the best part is that I get to dodge the decorating.

Every year for as long as I can remember, my mother transformed my childhood home into a Winter Wonderland. But the transformation was not overnight, nor was it magical. See, Mom has a lot of stuff. Think cut crystal, porcelain plates with creepy faces hand-painted on them, and black-and-white family portraits of deceased relatives staring blankly from behind their glass encasements. But after Thanksgiving, my sister, mom and I would dutifully lug half the contents of the house upstairs, where it was stored for the “off season.” But even when we removed the fall decorations one armload of china at a time, we only created enough space for the platoon of plastic poinsettia arrangements, because jammed in mom’s attic were 15 boxes, 6 garbage bags, and 5 free-floating wreaths of Christmas calamity that I had to lift from the depths of the attic and carry downstairs, sweating and straining, because I was the “sturdy one,” while my post-back-op Mom and pasty sister sat in chairs, unwrapping the ornaments. I wanted to get to the tree decorating, but after watching Mom reposition every Christmas ball I hung, and hearing her say, “Oh, not this year, honey” when I put up the pastel paper mache ice-cream cone ornaments I made in 3rd grade, I lost interest. So I rested my spasming back the couch and listened to Mom grumble about having to do all the work and how next year was going to be different.

It was. With each passing year, the boxes multiplied like reindeer pellets.

But once all the decorations were up—garland hanging from every curtain, doorway and lampshade—you could stand in the one-square-foot of sacred space in the middle of every room, spin with outstretched arms, and touch artificial greenery and overheated twinkle lights in every direction.

I never caught the Christmas-decorating bug, but at the same time, I can’t imagine experiencing Christmas without feeling as if I’m encased in a plastic pine tree. This year I reluctantly did my post-Thanksgiving duty and hauled Mom’s Christmas boxes from the attic. But come time to decorate the tree, I questioned the quality of last-night’s stuffing and sought refuge in the bathroom. My 4-year-old daughter is still naïve and was excited to help her Grandma decorate. I smiled as I heard Mom tell her that she could “hang all the brass ornaments,” of which there are maybe five. The rest are oversized blown-glass pieces that that have slowly replaced the “outdated” ornaments one paper mache ice-cream cone at a time.

Mom’s decorating bonanza is what separates us from the family who adorns a single window with a strand of multi-colored lights, half of which blink (shudder). And I have to admit that without herniating my back, bickering over the placement of ornaments, or watching Mom nearly hang herself while trying to untangle tree lights, it hardly feels like Christmas at all. I fear the day that my mother will no longer be able to carry out the tradition of decorating our Northwestern Pole. I didn’t inherit her enthusiasm, but one day I will inherit the now 21 boxes, 8 garbage bags, and 7 free-floating wreaths. It is my burden to bear. But until that time comes, you’ll find me on the couch.

Have you seen "Hoarders?"