Wednesday, December 24, 2008

The Annual Telling of the Christmas Story

I look forward to it every year.

Picture this: My family is sitting around in a state of deep satiation. Our bellies are full of egg nog, banket (a Dutch almond pastry), and Santa Cookies. Looking around, I see shreds of Christmas wrap and ribbon everywhere I look. The gift opening orgy is over for another year, the kids all got what they wanted from the jolly fat guy, and the rushing around is finally over. Time for the adults to pour a glass of champagne, take a deep breath, and reflect on another year gone by.

Inevitably, this reflection leads my sister and I to remember a past Christmas when we were also engaged in the act of charging our flute glasses with a bit of the holiday bubbly. This was a Christmas held in her previous house where the bathroom was located just off the dining room. The dining room buffet was fitted out nicely with the makings for mimosas and true to our natures, we gravitated toward that location.

So, we're standing near the buffet, talking of this and that, when out of the corner of my eye, I sort of notice that our Grandmother is ducking into the restroom to take care of a little business. I only register this on the periphery of my consciousness, my focus being on conversing with my sister. A couple minutes later, I see my husband of the time (now my ex and a dear friend) heading toward the bathroom. You sort of have to know my ex to get the full measure of the moment. He's very, shall we say, "socially conscious". What I mean by that is he'll do just about anything to avoid a potentially embarrassing situation, stick out in a crowd, etc. Are you with me so far? Good.

My sister and I both see my ex heading toward the bathroom. In retrospect, our champagne fuzzed brains combined with the horror of what we were seeing must have affected our reaction time. Personally, I experienced the moment in a series of mental snapshots; "Hey, Grandma's in there! *click*, I've got to prevent this! *click*, if he goes in there, he's not going to see anything good *click*, in fact, it could be really really bad *click*, he'll be scarred for life! *click*, Grandma will die of embarrassment! *click*, I have to stop this! *click*

And yet, my feet remained rooted to the floor in horror and I couldn't make my mouth work. In my head, I'm shouting "Nooooooooooooooo!" but no sound is coming out. Time seems to expand, warp, and then snap back into real time again. My ex opens the door..................Grandma half stands up, sits back down, looks both ways, starts to stand up again but realizes her position and sits back down. My ex stammers Oh, sorry! and shuts the door immediately. The worst, the absolutely unthinkable has happened while my sister and I just stood there and watched it unfold.

And what do we do? We start to laugh. We laugh and laugh and laugh until our stomach muscles hurt and then we laugh some more. Over subsequent years, we've never stopped laughing. This is one of those family stories that has taken on the quality of legend and we retell it every year, laughing just as hard as ever. OK, so maybe that makes us not very nice people but it can't be helped. Like my ex likes to say, "It is what it is". Dude, whatever lets you sleep at night.

Merry Christmas everybody!