Two Weeks 'Til Christmas: Nothing Done, and That's OK

December 11, 2019. Two weeks 'til Christmas & we've done almost nothing to get ready. There's little to do when Christmas, The Great Family Holiday, will be spent alone, again, and you can't commit to volunteering somewhere that day because disabilities and/or illness are an insurmountable barrier. But as some of my single friends like to throw back in my face, "Well at least you have each other." Yes, we do, and for that I am immeasurably grateful. Things could be much worse. (And probably will get worse as the years go by - it's part & parcel of growing old in poverty.) Yet being part of a couple doesn't lessen the longing and loneliness inherent in spending holiday after holiday alone. Not all families are flush with money to fund holiday travel. Some use what little extra they have to help other family members pay their bills or put food on the table. Many of us older folk who are too limited or impaired to do anything else resign ourselves to sitting at home in front of the tv watching Christmas specials, wondering what our children and grandchildren are doing over at the other grandparents' house, hundreds or thousands of miles away. If we have children. If we have grandchildren.

According to the book of Ecclesiastes, there is a time for everything. My time for running the Christmas rat race is long over. Now, attending a Blue Christmas service somewhere will be sufficient, for me, to celebrate Christmas. No need to put myself through the Christmas Eve torture of being surrounded by happy grandparents with all their kids & grandkids around them and the acute discomfort of hearing them say "Where's your family?" or "When is your family arriving for Christmas?" or some other innocent but thoughtless comment.

It's almost impossible to get excited about another solitary Christmas. So even when I'm not contagious, if I think I won't be able to put on a happy face, I stay home, which just makes the isolation inherent in chronic illness and disability even harder. But I don't want to "drag anyone down" with me (or be accused of doing so): I've learned the hard way that many people, including some who are "friends," will avoid you like the plague if you're not Miss Pollyanna Sunshine, ready to inspire them and "make their day" almost every time they see you.

In the fight against despair this week G and I each in our own small way have given "the finger" to the often overwhelming depression we both feel in November and December. We both defied the dark, for at least a few minutes, despite the horrible sore strep-infected throats, eye infections, coughing, his ear infection & chronic nausea, and my asthma on top of everything else. I plugged in the tiny hand-me-down Christmas tree we were given last year. It wears no ornaments, but that's ok - the lights are cheerful. The next day G dragged himself out of bed and gave me a priceless gift: he hung the transparent white lights along the shade plants on our back balcony, creating a fairyland for imaginary elves. The next afternoon he expanded that gift and taped a string of red, orange, green, blue, and fuschia Christmas lights around our bedroom window. I loved it so much, that night I couldn't make myself go to sleep. I didn't want to stop gazing at the colorful lights!

Other than that, we've done no decorating, no getting crafty, no gift-making. He forced himself to go back to work today even though he feels terrible. Several huge sneezes this afternoon set me back a few months in terms of back pain. We need to spend the rest of this month trying to heal and recover. We've both been sick since before Thanksgiving, reduced to survival mode. We didn't have Thanksgiving dinner - I was too weak to cook it, and neither of us really had any appetite. It was cereal and milk, crackers, or nothing at all.

There is one questionable blessing in spending Christmas alone. Like last year, there's no pressure to be a good hostess, to perform, to please, to avoid disappointing my own or others' expectations. There's no one to let down but the two of us, and we've learned to have zero expectations. The last time we hosted family for Christmas, back in 2010 or 20ll, it was a nightmare. I was experiencing some of the worst side effects of a high-dose regimen of prednisone, unable to control my emotions, living in a constant cold sweat with tremors. It was awful. I was so desperate to make Christmas "perfect" for them that I made myself sick with anxiety, afraid they'd never want to spend Christmas with us again if I failed. I fell apart. I failed, miserably. We had a "family meeting" and admitted to our daughter and her husband that I'd been far sicker than we'd let on. (And at that point, we didn't know I had/have cancer and didn't know, for sure, that I have a potentially lethal autoimmune disorder.) Our daughter and son-in-law were gracious and compassionate. They had never put pressure on me to create a wonderful Christmas; I was doing it to myself. So I let go, and stopped the self-flagellation.

At my last trip to the food bank, the volunteers asked if we'd like to receive a ready-to-eat Christmas dinner from the Rotary Club delivered to our apartment. I stood there speechless, confused and amazed. One whispered loudly "Take it! It's free!" Finally I said yes, because it dawned on me that with my health, Christmas dinner could be a bowl of cold cereal and milk, again. With that wonderful gift from the Rotary Club, now the pressure is really off! I can just, be.

Previous decisions reduced the materialistic distraction from the real "reason for the season." As a couple, we stopped exchanging gifts several years ago - bone-deep seasonal depression and lack of funds ended that tradition.  I'd always found my Church of Christ in-laws' obsession with gifts and Santa, to the exclusion of celebrating Jesus' birth, offensive and hypocritical, so I didn't much mind. Years before that, G and I confessed to each other that the Christmas stocking tradition was a super-stress-inducing, onerous burden for both of us. We were so relieved to permanently shelve that time-suck. I also stopped obsessing about sending Christmas gifts to our grandsons, after realizing that our humble offerings would disappear under the mountain of thrilling, big-ticket items lavished on them by their other relatives and the Jolly Old Elf.

Instead, their handmade "Christmas" gifts will be winter gifts, mailed in January or February or March, giving me time to work on them without feeling the time pressure of getting it done two weeks before Christmas (since extra time has to be allowed for shipping gifts across three states). This is a better, simpler, far more peaceful way.

A sweet memory arose on the way to the pharmacy: Grandma's shopping for supplies to make, for me, either a now crispy crunchy royal blue hat & scarf or the softer and scratchier afghan. I can't remember the name of this former five & dime on N. New Hampshire in Covington, but I remember Grandma taking me along for what was an almost unbearably exciting expedition for a girl growing up in a tiny town. I watched her sift through the yarn bins for just the right colors of what fiber snobs would call "cheap acrylic" yarn, to crochet gifts for her family. The building wasn't this upscale back in the 1960s-1970s, of course. Gentrification has made old Covington far more attractive but also far more exclusive and inaccessible to many of its former residents. It can't steal all my memories, though.

It must have been the afghan for which she was choosing yarn, because Grandma was looking for just the right shade of white to match the lavender and soft blue yarns. She, as so many poor people have to do, settled for what the dime store offered instead of what would be "perfect.". It was the 1970s in a still very rural parish of mostly villages and small towns. Either the labeling was incorrect or she couldn't see well enough to read it, but she got more than she bargained for!

The afghan was beautiful. I loved it! Grandma was so proud of her gift. She must have worked  dozens of tedious hours to produce something big enough to cover most of me.

And then, we washed and dried it. Or Mama washed it. I can't remember. Who did the washing and drying doesn't matter - what mattered was what it did to my 70+ year old grandmother.

Grandma wept when she saw it. After the damage was done. Angrily berated herself for not realizing the "white" yarn she'd chosen was 100% sheep's wool. The blue and lavender were acrylic. Reminiscent of the biblical warning against sewing a piece of new skin onto an old wineskin. Of course when the work of her crippled, arthritic hands went into the hot dryer, the wool shrank. A lot. Suddenly the perfectly straight edges had unsightly ripples and the perfectly flat fabric she'd created had huge buckling puckers. Everywhere. It was every crocheter's or knitter's nightmare. What had been a lovely zig-zag that draped well was now an odd-looking zig-zag with tight, dense, scratchy bands of felted cream wool pulling on the still soft and supple rows of the other two colors, distorting the entire piece.

Grandma was crushed. I don't know if she ever picked up a crochet hook again after that. But that wonderful rectangle of love continued to keep me warm on cold nights and lay folded at the end of my bed, on top of the blue & lavender iris bedspread, on warm nights. For the rest of my life it's moved with me to each new dwelling place. With each washing and drying (yes still in a dryer) the acrylic yarn softens again and the wool tightens up a wee bit - but somehow they have made peace with each other, and it looks so much better than it did four decades ago.

How I wish Grandma knew that over forty years later her gift of love still warms and comforts me, often when I need her the most.