I need to Think of Christmas Today...

It would be easy to sit here and talk about the massacre in Newtown, on the other end of my state. I won't do that, however.  Sometimes I think it is important to focus on the wealth of people I have in my life right now. These women of whom I have spoken for so long.

Many of them will be with me this Christmas Eve, in little more than a week. One of them will be picking me up to go out to breakfast on Monday. I've written to or spoken with others since yesterday afternoon.

Regardless, did I ever talk about Jean Ellen's and my tradition of Christmas Eve Eve? These women have all been a part of that, too, back when my sister was alive. It began in 1976, I believe, when I was 24 and unmarried myself. Jean Ellen was 32. We had many friends who were married and frantic that time, or who would be off to family elsewhere for Christmas Eve and/or Christmas Day.

Along around the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend, Jean Ellen and I were talking one morning about how relieved we both were to be free of Thanksgiving. We lived together at the time and took turns cookie baking for the excess of the coming season. I would start. You see, you can make Russian teacakes and Spritz cookies a month before Christmas, seal them tightly, and they taste fresh whenever you open the container. They have no leavening, and it turns out that this is the crucial ingredient that makes most cookies have a shelf life of a week, and only then if they are sealed very tightly. We also knew that we could freeze doughs ahead and the cookies would be fine, but we were picky; we never froze baked cookies themselves. They change texture.

I hope you all have written that down; it's terribly important.

I started talking about how I felt bad for Andrea, Solange, and Carol because they had all three SO much to do and so little time to actually enjoy Christmas as we did.

Jean Ellen agreed and then pointed out how we so seldom got to enjoy other single friends at Christmas because they went to relatives.

I said, "There should be a Christmas Eve Eve just for women who never get their own time."

Jean Ellen said, "Let's DO IT. Let's bake cookies enough to give to all of them because they say they never get to bake... and have our own Christmas for our friends."

"Yeah, and we can make them wear hats and white gloves, like a Victorian ladies night," I said, kidding. But I saw the evil glint in my sister's eyes. "I can get the gloves..."

"We can leave out the hats, but I will make invitations."

And so it was born. That first night we lined the chairs along the walls and Jean Ellen made the most hideous cake I have ever seen. It would taste perfect, but it was a hideous swirl of green, yellow, purple, and GRAY buttercream frosting. We baked thirteen types of cookies, storing them in their separate tins. Another reason our cookies reigned supreme in the season. We NEVER made up the mixed plates until  no more than two hours before the event. Even then, we separately wrapped the spice and ginger cookies, and the more cake-like cookies. The flavors and textures remained true for longer that way. It took an HOUR to prepare the ten plates of cookies.

We also offered liqueurs. Our friends told us it was the first Christmas they had had in at least five to ten years where they felt like kids again. The white gloves came off when we served the grotesque cake. It was fun; we play-acted our Victorian roles for at least fifteen minutes until ANDREA got the giggles and blew the whole deal.

For the next thirty-two years unbroken we did this. When I got married, it remained at Jean Ellen's apartment, but when my folks passed away, Christmas Eve moved to my place.  Somewhere along the line they ongoing saga of "Kangarella" was born. A stick Gumby-like bendy kangaroo was given to me, and the most revolting handbag to my sister. Hers was a picnic basket that looked like the victim of a mad child's camp project. Straw that was sprayed with gilt, festooned with equally gilded vines and rosettes. It had a gilded wooden top, and the handle was made of frayed intertwined vines, guilted so that even the frayed threads were solid prickers.  My present had been wrapped in bubble gum pink grass paper wall paper with pink gauze for ribbon. Why? Because I LOATHE bubblegum pink.

The true Christmas spirit always prevailed. My sister was an artist, and her pocketbook was an assault on the senses. If the present turns up this Christmas Eve, I shall photograph it... AND include... Oops. I'm ahead of myself.

I immediately wrapped Kangarella, as I named her, in the gauze and Jean Ellen shouted, "She has a home!" And we popped K. into the pocketbook, and thus a tradition was born. I wrote an involved tale about the dear creature, and found a tiny Barbie handbag as hideous as her home. I believe I had a small picture of Paris, too, and wrote of her trip to that city in the year that followed, and gave the whole thing to another friend--the giver of the bag, with love from Jean Ellen and me. Mary gave it to someone else, with additions to Kangarella and her home, as well as an addition to the story. From then on, it's been given from one woman to another in our group, complete with the story. When Gail was married in the 1990s, she no longer came for Christmas Eve Eve, just on the Eve itself. So she did  not know the story. But when my sister passed away, we who remained could not cope with doing the Eve Eve.

I asked whether everyone would come to Christmas Eve instead, and they did. And on that Christmas Eve, we gave Kangarella to Gail. She and her daughter continued the tradition together, adding to it all. The story is four pages long now, in the various handwriting, all in its original form. I don't know who has her. I don't care. It will pop up again when whoever has it is so moved.

Some of the women are gone: Solange, Mary, Andrea, Carol, and others. Andrea is the only one of those four who remains extremely close. But there are new women now, and we join together here for Christmas Eve. And my tree is full of other silly ornaments--a hooker flamingo, Santa on a Chicken, a blown glass blue hippo given to Jean Ellen, A wooden flamingo with legs that were hung backwards. When Gail found this on vacation, the clerk said to her, "Oh, dear! This seems to be made wrong! Shall I get you another?"

"Oh, no, it's PERFECT. It's for my best friend," said Gail, gleefully, as she tells it.

The clerk looked at her horrified. "You say this is for someone you like?"

"I LOVE HER!"And she laughed maniacally, as only Gail can.

"I see," said the clerk and Gail said the woman could not look her in the eye.

"I DO get her other things, really. Lovely things. She'll love this."

But the woman wouldn't look at her.

At my house, Christmas Eve is mostly about laughing with each other. It's about being together after another year of whatever troubles we've had to endure. My son comes for a while, to laugh AT us, to be with Adam and Claire, and to hug me before he runs off to be with his dad. But mostly, for the main part of the afternoon and evening, it is a group of women–and my nephew Adam, who simply need to be together. I feel for Adam sometimes, but he says he wouldn't be anywhere else. He and Claire often go to the "family room" (my studio room) to be away from us, but they float back. And Paige is married now and Don's a good sport to come, too. In fact, he WANTS to come. He is Jewish, and he hated Christmas with his first wife. It just felt like greed to him. But he feels that he understands more about the joy of it all because of our Christmas Eves.

That makes me remember that my family did some things very, very right. And I miss them around now, but I bring them back in the season. I bring them back at their best to cope with the tragedies, or the poverty I've had at times, or the pain. I bring them back at their best for the good times, the Christmas Eves when none of us have had to endure some calamity or other.

I need those memories this year all the more. And I need to love all these wonderful women--those who are near, those who are not--out loud and with excess.  As I need to love those few men in my life as well. I wish that I had more male friends.  I have my son, I have Adam, I have my nephew Justin.  I have David, my scientist-drummer who introduced me to the Jersey shore. I never see him, but we remain connected. And I have Jeffrey, who was my sister's dear friend, who gave me two years of a personal trainer and saved my back and legs. Jeffrey, who, after my sister died, discovered that he and I could become closer friends than he and my sister were. She was more like a mother to him, he said. But he and I? He is the little brother I never had, and I the big sister he wished he'd had.

One day financial poverty will return. I know this. For now, however, all is well economically. How can I NOT be grateful. And one thing I know, as I look at my tree and finish this: I am a multimillionaire  in the friendships I have been given.  In the friends who are now family to me in all the good things that that word SHOULD conjure for us: unconditional love, loyalty, generosity, comfort, and joy.

What happened yesterday is horrifying. Yet I MUST keep my heart and my eye on the beauty that is all around me. I can keep that community in my heart and my thoughts/prayers. But I need to remember what is good, what is joyous, what is sweet beyond reason in this life.

I hope all of you--you who for whatever reason keep visiting me when I post, have reason to find joy through the sadness, too. That, whether or not you celebrate or like Christmas, you have people you love and who love you.

I know I never seem to blog on a regular basis. I'll never have a blog that breaks records for anything but wordiness! But I think I have a life that breaks LOTS of records for wealth that has nothing to do with money, and beauty that has nothing to do with mirrors or what we can see.

Til next time...