Christmas at our house

If you have a niece, and she marries someone ( a male in this case), what relation is her husband to you? If said husband is known to behave better when he’s drunk, should you administer a breathalyzer test before allowing him into the family gathering on Christmas Eve?

The niece in question has lupus. She wasn’t even supposed to be able to get pregnant, but someone managed to have two boys, now ages 3 and 7. She has been on prednisone for the lupus, and this caused her to swell up and appear chubby. She is now off the medication and really looks terrific. So this individual she married started picking a fight with her at our house on Christmas Eve, saying she needed to lose weight, start going to the gym, that sort of thing. Her mother, Kathy’s sister, spoke up for her daughter, reminding him that she is sick. He decided to leave, oddly wishing everyone a Merry Christmas as he went out the door.

The same group of people will be back at our house on New Year’s Eve. We considered inviting only our niece and her children, but realized we couldn’t do that without making her life even more difficult, so everyone is invited.

Since I don’t drink, it never occurred to me to buy beer for the party. I forgot that the nephew-in-law or whatever he is likes beer. Kathy and her sisters drink wine, so there was plenty of that. We think he acted like that because he was unwillingly sober. Maybe with a few beers in him he will sit quietly and not bother anyone.

Christmas Eve Mass was a lot of fun. I was the lector and I had finally memorized the readings for the day. When I walked into the sacristy, the pastor said, “John, why don’t you read this instead?” and changed the readings on me. Of course, he likes to read the traditional Christmas gospel and he didn’t change that. I ran down into the basement of the church and practiced the new readings about five or six times, asked the Holy Spirit for help, and then had a great time with the new readings when the time came.

After Mass this woman came up and told me very excitedly how she loves when I do the readings and then I recognized her as someone who used to live in the parish, but who moved away years ago. She never tells us she’s coming, and she is always leaving town within hours of seeing us at Mass. One Christmas Eve I didn’t know she was there until I was at the ambo do the readings and saw her in the congregation. Maybe we’re not the sort of friends people want to see when they come to town once a year. Or, however many times she comes, because we really don’t know.

The kids loved their toys. Our grandson loves things that shoot, to his father’s horror, so when he opened some innocuous toy that blasted little rockets for maybe six inches , he spent the rest of the night playing with that, ignoring everything and everyone else.

Contrary to Kathy’s fears, the dog did not wreck the Christmas tree after all. He is fairly indifferent to it, and did not knock off all the low hanging ornaments with his tail, as she had predicted.

Since I was off work all week, I’ve been cleaning the house, picking one trouble spot each day and straightening it out. Today’s target is my computer desk.

So how was your Christmas?

The Sock Fairy

I have these gray socks. They’re sort of dress socks, but I wear them with my jeans and Columbia hikers sometimes for a dress-up jeans occasion. You know, when you don’t want to put on scratchy old dress pants, but you want to look nice and be comfortable at the same time, so you wear almost new jeans like Levi’s 502’s, not the ones that look like you just crawled out from under your car doing a grease job, though no one really does grease jobs anymore since they’re all sealed fittings, but you already knew that. It’s just a simile, not something heavy like an actual metaphor. Had this been a real metaphor, you would have been instructed where to look in your textbook to find the definition and perhaps some examples.

So, back to the socks. They’re gray, I think I mentioned. Usually I wear white socks with my jeans because I usually wear white walking shoes (read: Nikes) and they sort of go together. Lately, in the winter months, I’ll have my Columbia hikers on, the low cut ones—don’t get excited—I’m not talking toe cleavage, but rather ankle display. One day I broke out of that particular box by trying the gray socks I had bought some years ago and never worn. Because again, I’m wearing either black or brown dress socks, depending upon the shoes I’m using on a certain day. My entire dress shoe collection consists of one pair black, one pair brown and since I don’t get dressed in the dark, I’ve never gone out with a mixed set--“I bet you have another pair like those at home” sort of joke.

At a conference back in November I tried out my new outfit. Socks-wise that is. Either no one noticed or they were too stunned by my fashion statement that they couldn’t wait to run out and procure their own gray socks. Some people get dressed up on that particular day of the conference, but I knew I was getting on a plane in a few hours so I figured I should be comfortable. In any case, I was pleased with my get-up and decided to replicate it last week when the boss declared Friday to be Jeans Day.

It doesn’t happen that often—Jeans Day, that is. Usually he’ll do it when he knows he won’t be in the office. I don’t know why he’s anti-demin, perhaps he was attacked by a jeans salesman at one point in his childhood and the experience warped his perception of that comfy cloth. So I’m getting ready for Jeans Day, and of course I want to make the right statement with my socks, but I can’t find them. They’ve gone missing.

After frantically searching the likely drawers in my dresser and admittedly I’m a lousy looker, as my mother would attest, were she not presently in heaven, I completely emptied said drawers to no avail.

Then I mentioned to my son, “Gee, I can’t find my gray socks. I can’t imagine where they went.”

The next morning, they had appeared on the top of my dresser, innocently folded, as if they had been there all along and I was the crazy one, not them.

See what I mean—it was the sock fairy all along.

Swimming with Kurt Russell

What are dreams? Random electrical discharges across the brain? Distant memories mixed with recent events? Or are they our way of processing the day’s events? Do they signify anything, if so, what?

Kathy sometimes cries out in her sleep. Someone is after her. She is mad at someone. Once she had won the lottery. She talks a lot in her sleep. It was every night in the year after her mom died. She constantly visited the old house, at first without seeing the new owners and then sometimes getting caught by the people who had moved into her childhood house. All this in her dreams.

The other night Kurt Russell and I were swimming underwater. He was showing me how to stay under for a while without surfacing, as he would when a script called for it, but I already knew how to do that, so we came up laughing together. There was some other actor sitting on the edge of the pool, but who it was has faded now.

Now mind you, I’ve never dreamt of Kurt Russell before. I’ve always like him as an actor, way back when he was in those Mickey Mouse Club movies. Sure, he’s taken some really dumb roles sometimes (“Overboard”, “Escape from New York”), but hey—he’s married to Goldie Hawn who, btw, is finally starting to show her age. Have you seen those “Family Table” ads? So how did he pop into my dreams? Swimming, I understand, since I swim every day at work, but I don’t usually dream about actors. Not even Mariska Hargitay. Darn.

Maybe I want to be Kurt Russell. He sure seems to have a lot of fun.

Ever wake up and try to write down your dreams? Can you even read what you scribbled at 2 a.m.? It never worked for me. Absolutely unintelligible gibberish.

Like my dreams.

So, is this bad?

This is something I’ve been thinking about lately: A couple of weeks ago, there was a reading at Mass about the widow who met Jeremiah who asked her to make him something to eat. You may remember the story: she only had a little oil and flour left, and planned to cook something for her and he son, and then that would be it for them. Nothing left to do but die.

So here comes this guy asking for something from someone so poor she was near death. And darned if she didn’t go and do it anyway.

Coupled with this reading was a gospel about the widow who put only a few pennies into the collection basket at the temple, while the fat cats were dropping in some big coin. Jesus pointed out that she gave more than the rich people, since she gave from her need rather than her surplus, as the well to do people were doing.

This has been bothering me for a while. What kind of faith did these people have that they were able to do these things without hesitation? Would I use my last resources to feed some stranger who had just wandered into town? Do I do anything that’s not from my surplus of money or time?

Give till it hurts? I don’t think so. We are pretty comfortable. It’s kind of nice. We are able to help our kids, our grandchild. We have a secret savings account for him. Fourteen years from now, when he is looking at college, we’ll have a little something for him. A church secretary says we give more than most to the parish, and I feel we don’t give enough. I’m up at church a lot lately, doing things that need to be done for some group or other I belong to, but it’s not a big deal. If I weren’t there, I’d just be sitting in my chair reading or at the computer blogging or working.

So where does this leave me? Feeling uncomfortable about being comfortable.