A Dickens of a Christmas

Since I was, oh, about 18 my mother has not celebrated Christmas. No tree, no festive music, no stockings hung by the chimney with care. In fact, you can’t even find her fireplace anymore with all the boxes and what-not piled in front of it. I wouldn’t call my mother a Grinch. She just, well, she’s just not a big fan of Christmas. She’s not making lists of people she hates (alphabetically) or prank-calling the townspeople or anything. She would rather be left alone, which would be fine except this small little detail: I’m her daughter and I kinda love Christmas. It’s my thing.

A couple of years ago I forced my mother (by means that are best left secret) to cook Christmas breakfast, which she was happy to do. And I’m happy to report it is something she’s done every year since. It’s nothing fancy: eggs, gravy, biscuits, sausage, bacon, and muffins. Pretty yummy stuff.

Now, normally Christmas morning goes a little like this: Lauren and I get up, she opens her gifts, we throw on jackets and head to Mom’s for breakfast. We hang out there all day, being lazy and drinking coffee. Well, I drink coffee and am lazy. Come to think of it, so is Mom. This is the only meal that is both served in proper dishes and eaten at the kitchen table (the rest of the meals are left in pots and pans on the stove and eaten from atop T.V. trays in the living room). So while Pansy, that’s my mother, isn’t one to put on the dog for a guest, this simple act of requiring that we eat around the same table, at the same time, is the only thing she does that remotely resembles a sense of reverence for the holiday.

This might be the best place to insert a bit of more recent back story. My mother is unofficially retired. How’s that possible? The woman accumulated enough sick days and paid time off that she’s on state payroll until the day after the end of the world, that's how. Anyhow, Mom decided that she needed a pistol, what with her retiring and all, and that made sense to me (not really). But her logic was simple, “I’ve always wanted a pistol and I feel safer, now that I’m retired, having one around the house.” Because coming home at 5:00 to an dark, empty house was perfectly acceptable, but staying in a well-lit house with the doors locked is just not something retired people should do lest they are armed to the hilt with a weapon that would make Clint Eastwood drool and hollow point shells to match. Yes, my mother of retirement age, is now the proud owner of a 357 or .357 or however you type out the type of gun one owns. I think you get my point.

Back to Christmas Breakfast 2010…

My friend, Matt, is not married and has no children. Often his in-town relatives are traveling on Christmas, so I invited him to come enjoy a home-cooked, country breakfast with me and mine. He has known my mother for years and has commented (many times) that nothing she could do would surprise him.

You should have seen the look on his face when Mom pulled out her WMD and began passing it around the table for my older and younger brothers to examine.