The 2024 holidays were pretty much cancelled for me, so if you didn’t get a Christmas card — and it’s 99.99% likely you didn’t — I promise it’s nothing personal.
1) Christmas is going to change regardless. The beautiful, boisterous, cousin-crowded Christmases of my childhood are never coming back, and I really should have adapted myself to that a long time ago. That said, since Mother died in 2019, I love my snug little holidays for one in my own little house.
2) My karma got back at me for all that previous resistance to change last month, because you just haven’t lived until you’ve spent Christmas Day in the emergency room. That is definitely a change! Allow me to explain . . .
2a) I spent a lovely candlelit Christmas Eve at home, and was very much looking forward to two Christmas Day events: lunch at the home of an acquaintance (for which I had made a pear salsa) and Christmas dinner starting in the late afternoon at Dahling’s. But I noticed my eyes were feeling a bit puffy and sensitive . . .
2b) . . . and when I got up on Christmas morning my right eye was nearly sealed shut, never a good sign. Rheumy was the word, unattractive the appearance. Could I possibly go out looking and feeling like this? I made my excuses for lunch (challenging as the only way we had to communicate was IG), and texted Dahling with my uncertainty.
2c) And his response was “My husband is going to call you.” H is both knowledgeable and no nonsense, and he more or less ordered me to the emergency room at Mass. Eye and Ear. So I washed and dressed, grabbed my bag of Christmas gifts (for I still clung to the hope I could go to dinner), and into town I went.
2d) Mass. General I know reasonably, but I’d not yet been around the corner on Charles Street to Mass. Eye and Ear. I checked in, sat underneath a TV screen (so I didn’t have to watch it), and felt both my eyes get steadily harder and rheumier while I waited (and waited and waited).
2e) When I was finally called, the first thing I heard entering the emergency room was a screaming infant. I was escorted to a small dark exam room in the back, where I was seated in an exam chair that sort of really didn’t recline. With little to see, I concentrated on what I could hear, which was more than that screaming infant. (Because it was Christmas, I inevitably thought of “Little Lord Jesus, no crying He made” and “Suffer the children to come unto me.”)
2f) The resident had me position my head so he could examine my eyes by resting my chin at the base of a contraption to stablilize the head. He proceeded to look at my eyeballs with tiny bright flashlights, and rolled my eyelids down to collect some membranes. I realized that I was occasionally rearing my head back and had to keep reminding myself to stay steady.
2f.i) While this was going on I could also hear another patient, an adult woman, in another exam room. “Is she laughing or screaming?” I asked the resident — sometimes you just can’t tell. Before long she said something desperate (I can no longer remember what) along the lines of “You have to stop this,” and I said “OK, she was screaming.”
2g) You have probably already figured out the diagnosis: conjunctivitis, highly contagious. The only possible solution was to go right home with the antibiotic eyedrops they gave me. There went Christmas.
2h) I felt I had been exceedingly patient through this entire process, most of which had just been sitting and waiting. So I was both amused and annoyed on my way out to hear a man in the waiting room complaining to a nurse about how long he’d been there, “and I’m a veteran . . . ” “Well, I’m sorry, Sir . . . ” And I thought, Gurrrrllll, it’s Christmas Day! Obviously they are short handed. I get that you don’t feel well, but cut ’em some slack!
3) The week between Christmas and New Year’s is usually very special; it sparkles like snow in sunlight, full of promise and gladness. When I was still traveling for the holidays I would say “Christmas for family, New Year’s for friends.” And last month I had intended to fill that week with planning for 2025 and holiday cards. Instead I mostly remember quarantining at home, warm compresses, a rasping sore throat, refilling the humidifier, Kleenex, and not really having the brain power for anything.
4) New Year’s is my favorite holiday, period. This time New Year’s Eve was the date of my followup appointment. I couldn’t be sure how contagious I might still be, and I felt exhausted anyway, so I had to postpone my annual New Year’s Day tea and tarot to later in January, which made me sad. At the appointment the doctor gave me different drops to use for the next seven days. And that was that.
4a) So, this was my first New Year’s Eve alone in decades. I made the best of it by making myself a beautiful little dinner: cream of tomato soup, broiled herbed shrimp, roast beef with mushrooms (I forgot the potatoes), green salad, and Aunt M.F.’s pear cake for dessert. I had the last of the Madeira I brought back from Portugal with the soup, and a birthday-gift bottle of Champagne with everything else.
4b) Craig asked me “Are you going to stay up until midnight?” Later he described my FB response to this question as “indignant,” and I really don’t blame him. The entire point of New Year’s Eve is to stay up until midnight to See In the New Year. Not wanting to do this is close to heresy in my book, and yet that makes heretics out of many of the people I love most. I have always, always wanted to stay up until midnight on New Year’s Eve, and I hope I never change.
4c) While I was cooking I put on Sunset Boulevard, which includes one of the very best New Year’s Eve sequences ever. And a little post-prandial research revealed to me the loveliest gift: the musicians at Norma Desmond’s party playing “Auld Lang Syne” without any of the dialogue. [Insert Vigorous Tears of Appreciation Here.]
4d) This led me to dig out the Fireside Book of Folk Songs from the piano bench. “Auld Lang Syne” (pages 76-77) includes all four verses in what, because of this book, I will always consider its proper key, E flat major. (F major is the incorrect standard arrangement, but it’s hard to fight Guy Lombardo, the Musical Establishment, etc. . . . ) It is to be sung “Staunchly,” as God and Robert Burns intended.
4e) Now you must understand that I am unique among those I love (terminally unique, some might say*) in that I do not care about what goes on in Times Square on New Year’s Eve. And this year I didn’t have to notice Dick Clark (oh wait, he’s dead now) or Anderson Cooper or that other guy. When my laptop indicated the New Year, I played Norma Desmond’s “Auld Lang Syne,” croaking along quietly (my throat was in an awful state), and then texting several friends. I was in bed by 12:45 — which is perfectly fine.
5) New Year’s Day I’m afraid I had a ferocious hangover, which only reinforced that Champagne is a pleasure, not an obligation. Next year I’ll quit when I’m ahead! Thank goodness, I thought, that tea and tarot had been postponed until later, because I simply could not have faced hosting a party with a head that aching.
*Margo: “You’re terribly tolerant, aren’t you?” Bill: “I’m trying terribly hard!”