BAH HUM

I’m not saying that I’m anti-holidays this year. It may look that way because I have yet to put up our Christmas tree and I am opting out of Christmas cards this year. I did buy us a new dinosaur menorah that we’ve been calling the Menorasaurus and my lovely holiday wreath is hanging on the front door. I will get our stocking out of storage, but I’m skipping the tree this year. Here’s what happened. The distance between Thanksgiving and Christmas got shortened. I spent Thanksgiving driving to Oklahoma and back. I got sick again and I’m now on antibiotics. I figured that by the time I had enough energy to clean the house and set up the tree, it would be time to take it all down. The idea of it did not spark joy.

Instead, I’ve decided that I am celebrating the holiday season in a more selective way.

Years ago, my family started a new Christmas Day tradition. Instead of turkey or ham for the big holiday meal, we picked something that we all really loved that we didn’t get to eat as often as we liked and that was fried oysters. Randy and Katrina would buy the oysters from the White River Fish Market and then Katrina and Mom would cook the oysters all while fending off anyone walking into the kitchen trying to snag a fried oyster before sitting down to dinner. Eventually other things got added like shrimp cocktail and then there was that hilariously fun year we had a fondue pot. This is Christmas for me. My head is filled with visions of all of us gathering in the old family house, crowding the kitchen or setting the table. It took four of us to make the cocktail sauce, each of us contemplating flavors and always agreeing that we needed more horseradish. That cocktail sauce is the only reason my parents always had a bottle of gin in the house. Yes..put gin in your cocktail sauce, heavy on the horseradish, light on the ketchup, some lemon and a dash of Worcestershire sauce. Do not buy a pre-made cocktail sauce.

This kind of Christmas has been lost to me for many years.

Once my dad was placed into a memory care facility and my mom quickly sold our house to move into a much smaller house, we have failed to maintain this tradition. I think we tried it once or twice but I never felt comfortable in the new kitchen space and we gave up trying, opting instead to just eat at White River Fish Market where they cook the oysters and clean up the mess. It’s fine. I’ve told myself (keep telling myself) that the food is not important. It is the gathering together in one space that is important. This year, I’ve been having a much harder time believing this. I have felt untethered from my home in Oklahoma for some time and after moving our mom into assisted living, I completely lost an anchor. At Thanksgiving, I slept on my brother’s couch so I could have Thanksgiving dinner with my family at the Cracker Barrel. While standing in the storefront with Mom, waiting for a table, Mom said “it doesn’t feel like Thanksgiving.” I couldn’t disagree with her. There was something slightly depressing about the whole thing and I knew this going in. I was already scheming up a new plan for Christmas.

Michael and I booked an Airbnb in a neighborhood near my mom for the weekend before Christmas. My idea is to create a comfortable space for us all to gather. We’ll cook oysters and have shrimp cocktail. We’ll spend a day just being in a comfortable living room together without the chaos of restaurants. I am not delusional. I know this will not be like old times. We’re missing some very important players from the old times. One might even say that at least one of those players was the cornmeal to this fried oyster tradition. But part of celebrating the holiday in a more selective way is making choices for comfort and choosing something familiar to all of us. A large kitchen and comfortable living room for gathering. Fried oysters and cocktail shrimp. These are familiar things.

We’re two weeks away from this and I am already anxiously hoping for perfection. I’ve been compiling a list of things to take with us like extra chairs, throw blankets and pillows. Plus food. I’ve put siblings in charge of specific tasks. And it already feels brighter than Thanksgiving. I am coming to terms with the fact that my family is no longer growing as much as it is aging. In some ways that makes things easier. We no longer do physical gifts. Instead we gift each other time. The aging part is made more difficult when we try to hold onto the way things were, desperately grasping to a life that is no longer the same. So, what if instead of desperately grasping to the past, we just remember the past while being in our present? Any way…this is my Christmas wish for this season and I don’t need a tree lit up with lights to make that wish come true.

I’m choosing to be bah hum….not full strength bah humbug.