It's the day after Christmas and the three of us are glad to have the holiday over. It started out when we woke Christmas morning to near blizzard conditions. There are those who sing of "dreaming of a white Christmas", but the truth of the matter is a different thing. The weather conditions by themselves made for challenging holidays for most of the people in the plains, but our Christmas was of the Garrison Keillor kind...straight from the shores of Lake Wobegon. My husband started shoveling out, coming back in every twenty minutes to warm up. His cheeks were so rosy he looked like Santa Claus. I thought it was going to be a merry day, so I started preparing our Christmas dinner, thinking about "Julie and Julia" the movie which we watched the night before. I was thinking how much I resembled Julia Child, not because of my cooking, but my propensity to make such a mess that I have to mop the floor after preparing for any major meal before the guests arrive. In the middle of the stewed tomatoes, the phone rang. It was my 90 year old mother from next door, hysterically crying..."Felix is dead", she wailed. "What?" I asked. Felix is her ten year old cat who has always been the picture of health. "I went down in the basement and he was just lying next to the washing machine. I don't know what to do." That was the beginning of Christmas day. She's sobbing because we can't bury him in the back yard...obviously not because there is over a foot of snow on the ground which is frozen solid because the temperatures are hovering around five degrees. So I yelled at my husband to stop shoveling because Felix was dead. That woke Corina who came running down stairs to see what was going on. Anyway, Phil went over to mom's and did the only thing possible with a dead cat on Christmas day...he put him in a double trash bag and put him in the trash where his frozen corpse remains,waiting for the trash man who comes on Monday. That crisis averted, Phil kept shoveling and I put in a load of towels because we kept having to mop up all of the snow we were tracking in. The next thing we know, the washer is overflowing because the drain from the washer has frozen. Fortunately, I was doing a load on the hot setting and after only dumping a couple of gallons on the floor, it began to drain. And on it went...My brother managed to make the 100 mile trek down from the city, only because he is a truck driver and they are used to any conditions. My mother insisted on coming over to our house even though she has to use a walker to get around and they don't work very well in ice and snow. Her care worker last week had a cold and passed it on to her, as if a 90 year old woman with a failing heart would be immune to any germs. She comes over without even her face being covered, but she's stubborn like that. While we were exchanging presents and there was none for my brother, I ran upstairs and found I had forgotten to wrap his. I wish I could say it ended there, but later that night, just before I went to bed, the toilet upstairs stopped up. I had to wake my sleeping husband, and after searching all over the house, we finally determined that the plunger was next door at mothers, and it was definitely too late to wake her up so we could only hope that no one would wake up during the night and use the bathroom without thinking..
This morning the toilet was still full to the brim, but with some work once we got the plunger, it is now it's normal self. We had more snow during the night, but nothing that could not be handled. We took mother to the emergency room and it seems her cold has turned into bronchitis, but with modern medicine, she is back home in her cozy house next door. I finally laid down to take a nap this afternoon, exhausted, and thinking that this would have been described as the 'Christmas from hell.' But then it occurred to me, there is no Christmas from hell. Hell would never have and never will give us anything to celebrate. And that is what this day and this season is all about. It's not the gifts, it's not the decorations, it's not the food, it's not even our families. It is "The Gift" the one thing, the only thing that makes our lives worth living. the only thing that enables us to be givers ourselves. That's it, that's what we celebrate.
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