By the time this is published I probably will be on the road to being a closer-to-normal person again, whatever that is. I would wager that, from the day after Thanksgiving to the day following Christmas, the person who identifies herself as me is not normal, not even close. Yes, I have normal things to do. Laundry, housework, paying bills, etc., but those take a back seat to the overarching preparation for Christmas. It has always been a fight through the weeds to get everything done.
I do make lists, sometimes spread sheets of the persons to whom we will shower with appropriate and cleverly chosen gifts, those to whom I will laboriously write and send greeting cards (careful to not send anything with a religious connotation to those for whom Christmas is a secular holiday or, more specifically, an economic exercise), lists of things that have to be done before our house guests arrive and, finally, menus.
For me, it’s the last that weighs the heaviest. What to bring to my daughter’s Christmas Eve feast? What to serve our house guests for breakfast and supper on Christmas day? It wasn’t only the choice of dishes, but the necessity now-a-days to be cognizant of allergies and food preferences including the growing abhorrence to certain “textures.” I remember the first time that I was told that coconut tastes good, but its texture was unacceptable. The same was a description for tapioca. I am happy to comply with such limits, but, as time goes by, the number and variety of preferences, positive and negative, seems to increase. Do I want to spend hours making dishes that are passed over with a texture nullification? At any time in life’s cycle that would be a significant question. It is more so now. Would it be OK to just buy some of the foodstuffs? Then it would only be money that was misspent rather than precious time.
Let’s consider Christmas cookies.
What I want to know is, why I should consider baking a bazillion cookies? I don’t remember my mother doing this. Yes, my grandmother would bake lebkuchen, a German cookie … which was strange since she was a Cornish woman from the UK, but, other than that, there were no cookie baking days at our house. There was one day when my grandmother would make her carrot pudding … a version of what is called Figgy Pudding, but from a very old recipe that included grated carrots, grated potatoes, bread crumbs, flour, sugar, golden raisins, ground cinnamon, allspice and cloves and grated suet. Sounds like a recipe for cake food for birds, but mixed together and steamed for three hours, it was pretty good. The degree of goodness was directly related to the amount of spirituous beverages that had been added to the sauce that is served over the pudding. I didn’t come to appreciate this pudding until the childhood version of hard sauce, vanilla pudding, was replaced with the bourbon-laced version.
And what about wrapping gifts? A pleasantly-wrapped gift is a delight for the recipient and instills a sense of pride in the creator. However, wrapping levies an unpleasant cost to my lower back that is substantial. Wrapping many gifts means resorting to opioids … if I could get any, which I can’t.
And when it is all over, as it is now, there is the “putting it all away,” which translated means packaging all of the trimmings and gee-gaws so that next year they can be found. The first to be “put away” is my “open this first” box, which contains scotch tape, ribbons, extra Christmas and non-Christmas cards and the Christmas card list, which I am proud to say is now typed and copied into my computer. The box also contains unused shirt-sized boxes (tops and bottoms,) assorted tags, two Sharpie pens that never seem to dry out, pieces of wrapping paper too small to add to their original roll, but big enough to wrap something …and some ancient, perhaps from the 1940s or even earlier … ephemera …stickers that have lost their stickiness, designed to identify the recipient of a gift. I’ve had these antiquities for years but never found a way to use them. There are scissors in the box too because I can never find a paper-only scissors when needed and two or three items that might be gifted to someone someday.
The contents are written on a sheet of paper for anyone other than myself who may want to use it.
And, as in years past, as I gradually readjust my focus, I realize that all of the stresses and anxieties of the season are of my own creation. I grew the weeds that made the journey so difficult at times. There are no perfect gifts, let along perfectly-wrapped gifts. It is the thought that counts. Special celebratory foods are only celebratory because of the people who share them. A pretzel is a celebration with loved ones. Greeting cards are nice, but not necessary, except when they close distances, whether that distance is close by or miles away, to share the essential meaning of the Holy Day or the season.
Yes, it’s over and I am pleased, if very tired. Once again, I found my way through the weeds to celebrate the birth of peace and love in a world that is full of weeds.
