Heave Yourself a Merry Little Christmas

Hello there. How was your Christmas (or Hannukah, or Kwanzaa, or secular solstice celebration)? Did you eat well? Did you get everything you wanted? They're saying gift-giving around the country was quite constricted this year, what with the poor economy and all. I hope that didn't keep you from enjoying the holiday(s). In fact, I hope it enhanced your enjoyment. By forcing you and yours to focus on the essentials (family, baby Jesus, candelabras, Africa, the earth's rotation on its axis, etc.) rather than the getting and giving of stuff, that is.

Me? My Christmas was lovely, thank you. I got to visit family and friends, I ate quite well (that Kentucky bourbon pecan chocolate pie I bought in Louisville was outrageous), and I actually did get some nice gifts. Mostly utilitarian things that I needed (e.g., boots), plus some great books, some pajama bottoms with penguins on them (I get at least one pair of pajama bottoms every Christmas - I now have enough to open a sizeable, if somewhat narrowly-focused, boutique), and plenty of consumables. I love consumables. In particular, I was happy to receive from my father a 1-lb bag of dark chocolate M&Ms, which was a great improvement over the 5-lb bags of regular M&Ms my brother and I have received in the past (my father belongs to an exclusive club called Sam's Club, which provides him with access to regular consumer items in large quantities - you should see the container of Kraft Parmesan Cheese in his fridge: it's the size of a nuclear warhead). 5 lbs is a lot of M&Ms - so much, in fact, that I could have made it to April last year eating nothing but M&Ms - so I was happy that this year we made a shift to quality over quantity.

But let's face it, some Christmas gifts just suck. Maybe it's a gift certificate to a store you would never shop at, maybe it's a crappy t-shirt, or maybe it's a pecan log from Stuckey's, but whatever it is, a bad gift is not just something you don't want or like - it's something that actually injures you in some way. It wounds your pride ("So this is what they think of me?"), it lends tacit support to an entity that you despise ("Hey, thanks for the Ann Coulter book!"), or it burdens you with something that you cannot discard without offending the gift-giver (think of the pink bunny pajamas in A Christmas Story). Or maybe, just maybe, it makes you vomit uncontrollably for an entire morning. That's right. This year my brother, stepsister, and stepniece all got together and gave me a stomach virus for Christmas. They gave one to my father as well, but mine was much more robust. Luckily I didn't actually unwrap it until Boxing Day (the traditional gift-giving day in Britain), so I was still able to enjoy Christmas itself - visiting family and unwittingly infecting them, eating copious amounts of Christmas food that would soon find its way back up the way it came.

Now, I know some of you have had this thing already. As with most things, Oklahoma has lagged behind the rest of the country when it comes to stomach viruses (the same could be said of hairstyles, popular music, using Craigslist to buy and sell things), and it's undoubtedly the great holiday influx of people from out-of-state that has finally brought us up to speed. So forgive me for being behind the times here, but man oh man, this thing is terrible, isn't it? It feels a bit like a giant hand is reaching inside of you and ripping out anything that's not nailed down, and a few things that are. It also feels a bit like what I imagine waterboarding must feel like, only you're afraid of drowning in fluids that are pouring out of you rather than fluids pouring over you. Am I being too graphic? Sorry.

I don't blame my relatives for getting me this crappy gift. I know they got it from someone else and they obviously didn't want it, so they did what I would do myself - they regifted. And I'm happy to report that I'm on the mend, enough that I can actually contemplate going to Ingrid's German Kitchen for brunch today. The nice thing is that I have virtually no appetite, so I'll probably not get as fat this holiday season as I was afraid I would. The other nice thing is that it's forced me to stay home and get some work done, which was something that really needed to happen. Which only goes to show you that even the worst gifts are not without their redeeming qualities. And redemption, after all, is what it's all about, innit?