Bah Humbug

Poor Bill. Poor dogs. Poor friends and relations. Poor anyone who casually knows me.

Am I the only person alive who will be happy when all this holiday crapola is over? If you are a person who loves all things Christmas or Hanukkah or Solstice or whatever, you just go right on to your next blog and have a wonderful, blessed, happy winter. Please. Read no farther. You've been warned. But if this time of year makes you yearn for July, this is the place for you. I do understand.

OK, let me back up a bit. It's raining. It's been raining for three weeks, I swear. All day every day. All night every night. Actually what I hear on the bedroom window right now sounds more like sleet. Yup. Definitely sleet. So we've now gone from three weeks of constant hard rain to the only thing better: frozen rain. Oh glee.

The dogs are bored out of their collective gourds. And the only thing they hate worse than cold or rainy weather is cold and rainy weather. But they are, unlike their grouchy Servant, penultimate optimists. They ask to go out with eager anticipation that I've fixed the weather situation. They fly through the door like those little individual fighter plains that Luke Skywalker piloted: zoom, swhoosh, nyarrom. Only to skid to a disgusted, disappointed, united halt at the breezeway steps when they see the rain. Again. Nope, they were mistaken, they don't have to go out, after all. Until five minutes later when they think, "Hey! Maybe she's warmed it up and dried it out. Let's go see! Let us out, let us out, let us out!" I open the door, they swoop out. They turn around mid-swoop and slink back in. Yuck.

Forget walks. It is just way too cold and it's pouring. Forget it.

Ok, so that's on top of not such a great holiday childhood. From the minute I could speak, I wanted a horse. I mean I lived for a horse. Every Christmas list consisted of (1) horse, (2) dog. And that was it. No number three. (When I was eleven, I think I put a Barbie as number three, to my poor mother's relief, but then I tried to iron her hair which melted into a horrifyingly putrid blob on my poor mother's iron.) And my father was not such a happy soul. We have ten or so years of home movies. Three excited little girls, dressed to near immobilization in snow suits, sporting scarves, hats, and mittens knitted by the woman holding the camera. Off the family trudges up the Berkshire Mountains behind their house. You see the tree being chopped and sawed, but the actual felling always eluded my poor mother. You see the tree lying on the snow. Then the camera captures the three little girls being stabbed by pine needles as they struggle to help carry the thing back down the mountain through the knee deep snow. The father has managed to belittle each one of us in such a special, stinging, particular way that all three of the little girls are privately crying. Our mother makes us hot chocolate and tells us to hush while our father chops off a couple of feet and then a couple more from the bottom of the way too tall tree, just boiling in an anger stew. (We had suggested that perhaps the tree was too big, and we had been made fun of, and had been made to feel stupid and worthless. Being right didn't help a bit, what with all that stupidity and worthlessness weighing us down. Plus, being right created a whole new subset of anger.) Then we got to decorate it. Unless you were my father, you couldn't put a decoration in a right place. ("No, no, no not there.") And my sister always managed to drop a fragile ornament which always broke and always resulted in such disgust from my father. Tsking and sighing, and what's-wrong-with-you. (Gee, I don't know do you think it could have been the slight case of Cerebral Palsy? Just a guess here.) And then we all started crying again, ran up to our rooms, and my mother finished decorating the tree.

And, no matter how hard I tried, and Lord knows I tried, I couldn't make my own son's Christmas much better than mine had been. All he wanted was to be important to his biological father. I bought him way too many presents, and he knew how much Bill - thank God for Bill - and I loved him. But he wanted to be valued by his dad, who could value nothing but himself.

And while we're on the subject of Fathers and Sons. The Christmas story is supposed to be so sweet and lovely, but to me it's not so much. Mary has to give birth to her first child in a cold barn. No midwife, no women relatives helping, no epidural or I.V. Demerol. Just days of exhausting travel on a donkey at full term due to some tax law, followed by being in labor during a panicky but futile search for a hotel. An then, after raising her treasured Son, whom she has been told is Pretty Special, she gets to sit and watch him take three days to die of crucifixion. Probably not what she had in mind when the angels told her he was the King Of Kings. As a mother, I just cannot get my heart around the immensity of that horror. And as a Father, could God have not planned something just a wee bit more loving for his only Son?



So here I am. Kids are grown. Grandkids are far away. And I am old enough to feel like I don't have to pretend any more. I've decided I don't like the whole holiday thing. I am dismal at present getting. I can't plan ahead worth beans. And if I do find a perfect gift in June, I give it in June. When I do the dreaded Christmas shopping, I spend literal hours on each person, stressing over just the perfect gift, and then spend too much. While I'm wrapping the thing, I realise it is the most colossally inane bit of idiocy, and I just know that the recipient will hate it. Not just hate it but be offended by the lack of forethought, by how stupid a gift it is. I wrap the thing, but I just want to cry. And go away.

The only decorations in the house are the scores of festive cards. Almost every card has a whippet photograph. Every card makes me feel so guilty because I haven't carved the time to make and send my cards. Great.


Did I mention it's been raining forever?

We woke this morning to a dusting of snow. The old dogs are not impressed. But the two youngest are ecstatic. They are silly and zoomy and so thrilled not to be rained on. They are running too fast to notice the biting cold wind. They make me smile, despite my ludicrous self. We are the last stop tonight of a progressive dinner for around sixteen of our friends. Dessert - my weakest culinary link - and another Dirty Santa gift exchange. I hope this is the one where we're supposed to do gag gifts, because I'm doing the old poop calendar one more time. Only this time instead of the poop candle, it's a quarter pound of chocolate in the shape of a poo. I have another gift wrapped up just in case... If the rest of the diners do not put gag gifts under that tree, I'm you betcha hiding the poo calendar and chocolate poo and replacing them with the nice gift. Oh only there isn't any tree at our house. We're going to hang a wreath on the coat closet door and put the gifts under that. Deck the halls.

This house was on the Christmas tour the first couple of years we lived here. Open to the public who had bought tickets with the proceeds going to charity. Decorated to the gills. I bet our friends coming tonight are expecting holly and tinsel. I hope the smell of the freshly baked pies and gourmet coffee will distract them. (Who am I kidding? I stink at pies!)

So there it is. I hope I've made you feel better by realizing you are not the only one who feels like this. I'm going to start baking and cleaning. I know tonight will be fun, and I know that July will indeed come again. I think that this year on Christmas day, I'm going to go to the homeless shelter and help serve meals. See, this big ranting entry brought me right to that very wonderful decision and now I'm feeling much better about the whole holiday thing.

Maybe I'll dig out a decoration or two after all.


Hug your hounds.

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