The weariness, the fever, and the fret

It seems I had misremembered Christmas. It's not surprising, really. I did so well with my sombre Yom Kippur wishes for my more Hebraically-minded friends that I was bound to mess something up.

Anyway, Christmas is always a bit of a conundrum for me. There are so many options, and all are slightly discomfiting. When I had roommates, or lived at boarding school, Christmas was always a time to savor a brief bit of solitude and quiet. I remember at college in Southern California, KPFK would play a reading of The Alexandria Quartet all day and all night for days over Christmas. If I were staying in the dorm over vacation, I could sit alone in my dorm room for hours at a time and listen. I could stay up all night and listen -- and who cared? it was Christmas break!

Now, however, I usually fulfill my RDA of quiet, solitude, and contemplation without needing a state-imposed religious holiday to do so. This leaves me in a bit of a bind when I do find myself confronted with one. Most things are closed -- not just (all but eleven, according to Open Table) restaurants and supermarkets, but gas stations, convenience stores, tire stores, nurseries, book stores...almost everything. Probably even Wal-Mart, too. Well, maybe only in largely Christian markets.

Thus normally the activity choices outside of churchgoing are fairly circumscribed: some kind of Christmassy thing at someone's Christmassy house, or Chinese food and a foreign film with the Jewish population of whatever city I'm living in, since Larry Durrell can no longer be relied upon for succor. In the first case, not only is there no species of traditional North American or British holiday food that I enjoy (although I love getting the good charms in a pudding!), I also dislike feeling trapped in someone's house as people get drunker and stupider and the dread board games are resorted to one after the other in an attempt, presumably, to stave off the Holiday Melancholia from which the revelers would otherwise be suffering. If I should find myself overtaken with suicidal impulses and existential angst, God help me if I for one second believe Boggle to be the cure.

The problem with Christmas dinner for the single person who is not overwhelmingly inclined to celebrate Jesus' birth with drunkenness or ironic renderings of 80s metal ballads is that Jews and Chinese seem to be the only religious or ethnic minorities who want things to proceed with as much semblance of normalcy as possible amidst all the gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And since, outside of Florida and big Eastern cities, the Jewish community in North America tend to leave the restauranteuring to other groups, while non-Chinese non-Christians in the business gladly leap upon their one opportunity a year to take a day off, that leaves the Christmas trinity of Hunan, Mandarin, and Szechuan, with the odd offering of late-night dim sum (not available in all areas). There are also, of course, 24-hour/365-days places and nicer hotel restaurants open on Christmas, if your Yuletide tastes run toward chicken-fried steak with eggs or eating amidst lonely, stranded business travelers and recent divorcés who haven't yet found the courage to cook for just one.

I hadn't misremembered that. It is hard to forget the limited culinary offerings when the same thing happens every year and I get sufficiently frustrated, once more, around 8PM so as to relent and find myself again numbly picking at a plank of ghastly tinned ham over a Monopoly board, with people potty on boozy curdled cream with nutmeg scum to the accompaniment of a whiskey-fueled rendition of My Way streaming from the den-turned-karaoke-studio.

This year, however, I had an alternative. My Australian friend was going to be in Denver on Christmas Eve prior to flying out for skiing on Christmas Day. The snow would lend a festive yet nonsectarian air, and the crack addicts outside the window would serve as handy stand-ins for more traditional holiday revelers. And since I'd already be in a hotel, it would make sense to eat in it. Or I could just have some nuts and Toblerone from the minibar. In either case, not a single incongruous eggroll would need pass my lips.

That is the part I misremembered. I had about 80 to 1 on it being Christmas Eve/Christmas with a hedge of 2 to 1 on New Year's Eve/New Year's. I lost out on both, because it was squarely in the middle, the 27th, which doesn't help me at all, since by then I could be eating Hakka or Lebanese again if I wanted to. My only wish is that, whatever transpires, however many rounds of cribbage or Pictionary and however many murdered Rat Pack songs and show tunes I have to sit through, however many people cry, or break up, or end up in the ER, and no matter how many bowls of punch are gone through, there be no Tofurkey at any time, anywhere. That would kill my Christmas cheer completely, and quite possibly permanently.