How I survived Christmas

“Christmas means carnage!” – Babe (the pig)

I’m old. I know I’m old because I’m sitting in my kitchen the day after Christmas–ignoring the carnage in my living room–and watching a fat, ugly squirrel steal the peanut butter and walnut suet from my kitchen window. I should be in bed asleep, but I have arthritis and gas. The first wakes me up and the second wakes my husband, so there’s no point hiding under the covers. (No one ever tells a young bride about the agonies of undercover farts–but they really should! Instead of rice at weddings, we should throw gas-x, but I digress.)

I need coffee. I need coffee like a gazelle needs to run. I puttered to the kitchen this morning, stared lovingly at my coffee maker and then boiled water for green tea. You see, coffee gives me anxiety and insomnia–as if I don’t have enough trouble sleeping already. So, I poured a delicate little cup of Jasmine tea with stevia instead, and Friends, it’s just not the same.

But I survived Christmas.

I cleaned the house, bought the presents, baked the cookies, cooked the feast—and everyone left happy. There were no family fights, no eye gouging, no hair pulling and only minimal dog anxiety. And that was because one of my son’s asked me to dog-sit his giant blue tick coonhound puppy while he went with his girlfriend to their family celebration. His poor pup thought he had moved to Alaska to hunt Moby Dick and was never coming back so he ran around the basement peeing all day. Or barking. he also thought he was a Bumpass Hound (see A Christmas Story) and kept trying to steal the turkey off the kitchen counter. So, when we sat down to eat dinner, I locked him in the basement with my boxers and he lost his ever-loving mind. Best Christmas memory, my 14-year-old blessing the meal while the dog barked and bellowed loud enough to shatter our eardrums. My son later told me this is why they own a shock collar. Funny how he left that at home. (For all you animal lovers out there, I’m not saying I would have USED it. At least, I don’t think I would have.)

Cooper’s Hawk eating a starling

Right now, there are some folks thinking I’m a stinky Christian because I should probably be expounding the merits of Jesus incarnation but I’m sitting here nursing a sinus headache while bellyaching about greedy starlings. These damnable birds are destroying my feeders and what they don’t steal, the squirrels get. That might be why my son and I enjoyed watching the Cooper’s Hawk pluck and devour one unfortunate speckled varmint a few days ago. Serves it right for existing. If you don’t have a bird feeder–think of starlings as the avian playground bullies that steal your lunch money every single day. Everybody is happy when they get their comeuppance.

The thing is, I love Christmas. I love it the way I love running–it feels awesome when it’s over. I just lay there panting and nursing my hip. Wait, my hip didn’t hurt before Christmas! Am I really old enough for an aching hip? Good grief.

I did enjoy watching my granddaughter open her jammies and hat. I didn’t even bother to get her toys this year. The parents always go all out for a first child, and she is no exception. She could swim laps in all the gadgets and gizmos she has at her house and I don’t feel the need to compete. But I did have a philosophical moment amid the frenzy of wrapping paper and cosmic exclamations; we sure do know how to ruin the future Christmases of every child in the world. How, you ask? By making everything so stinking wonderful. It’s all downhill from here, folks. After a person reaches ten or twelve, it’s all over. Like my Uncle Dan said (in a well-timed Christmas text), “Santa’s not real. It’s your parents.”

How’s that for Christmas spirit?

Right about now there is somebody reading this thinking, “There goes that privileged white girl prattling on about the luxuries of sitting in a warm house with plenty of food and presents while some unhoused person is shivering in the cold with a hungry belly.” Send him to my bird feeder. He or she or THEM (after all, I want to be sensitive to those whose pronouns don’t match my own) can fight the starlings for the peanut butter and walnuts outside my sliding glass doors. They can stand on the warming mat I put out for the possums. If they’re really stinky, I’ll let them in for a bath–but don’t try to use the bathroom sink, my husband won’t hook up the vanity (in my only bathroom) because it doesn’t match the new tile he installed four months ago. That’s probably why I’m sick. I have to walk all the way to the kitchen in my house to wash my hands–with no water pressure. Did I mention my husband is a handman? He promised he’d hook it up for the holidays but…he got sick and stayed in bed for two weeks. See, this is the difference between women and men; when men get sick, they lay in bed and moan for days and years while women take some Advil and decongestant and do what needs to be done. Sorry, digressing again.

Not that I don’t believe in “the Christmas spirit”. I still get that “magical feeling” when the tree lights up for the first time. I truly love when I don’t have to make a trip to K-Mart to buy new Christmas lights (yes, I am miserly enough to keep fixing old strands of lights). I even got three whole ornaments on the tree this year and two of those were ones I forgot to put away last Christmas. The third was a gift from my mother. (Thanks, Mom!) As much as I hate shopping, I enjoyed foraging through aisle after aisle of crafts shows over the past few months for those special things ‘hand made with love’ by some other old ladies because I work for a living. My personal favorite was the goat milk soap. I was so excited about that I asked the Goat Lady how she makes it. She replied with glee, “First, you milk the goats.” I’m still chuckling over that one. And nothing puts one in the Christmas spirit like baking Christmas cookies. Every year I say I’m not baking cookies because I can’t eat them and then I bake them and eat all of them between December 26th and New Year’s Eve. Did I mention Christmas mean carnage…? Carnage on my waistline, that is. But maybe I’ll do better this year. Maybe I’ll learn discipline this year–after all, I’ve got a whole week left. If that doesn’t work, that’s what New Years Resolutions are for.

I did do a lot of praying over the holidays. These were truly reverent prayers, “God, please help me not to murder my son or my husband this year. Help me to forgive as I’ve been forgiven.” This was especially reverent as I gave my son the gift “not throwing away every single Lego on the floor of every single room in the house.” One would think the floor was made of metal and Legos were magnets.

And that, my friends, is how I survived Christmas. Prayer. Advil. Green tea. And while I know I will soon find myself in a luxuriously hot Epsom salt bath with an old boxer dog slurping up bath water while I listen to a Voddie Baucham sermon, I will cherish the gifts this Christmas is still giving to me; mom’s homemade fudge, the memory of my son grinning over the new shelving unit I spent hours shopping for on Christmas Eve, and my friendly little neighborhood wren. He reminds me that no matter how many starlings steal the peanut butter and walnut suet, he just keeps singing. And so will I!