Happy New Year, but a Pox on Enforced Holiday Cheer

I’m so very glad it’s over.

Jan. 2 promised a return to business as usual. I got up early and went to my friendly neighborhood McDonald’s for coffee. I read The Times’ sports section. Then I came home and stripped our Christmas tree, enjoying every delicious moment of it.

When I dragged it outside, leaving a trail of dead and spent pine needles on the carpet, I noted that ours was the last tree in the neighborhood to come down--just as it had probably been the last to go up. All up and down the block, several dozen tired Christmas trees were propped up against trash cans, dead warriors in the never-ending battle to make Christmas cheerful at all costs.

Although it may sound that way, I’m not in a bah, humbug mood, and I don’t mean this cynically at all. On balance, we had a warm and pleasant Christmas. Family affairs went off with a minimum of stress, gifts were appropriately modest, feasting was more or less under control--and we had a lovely, quiet Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve.

If it began and ended there, I wouldn’t be feeling this enormous sense of relief. But it didn’t. It began--so it seems now--right after Halloween and ended Wednesday, the day after New Year’s Day. That’s a fair chunk of the year to be charged with feeling cheerful, no matter what. Because the Christmas holidays last too long and demand too much of us, they magnify everything that happens. Especially the stress.

We had a fair amount of it, mostly beyond our control.

Our family gift was a new, big screen (at least for us) TV set; all of the ancient models we owned previously combined don’t equal the square footage of this baby. But in order to surprise my stepson, I had to set it up on Christmas Eve while he was absent from the house. That entailed drafting a pair of neighbors to help me carry it in, along with requiring technical skills beyond my reach--especially since I was working against a time deadline.

Simply plugging the set in was all that was required to make it work. But I tried to wire our VCR through it so my stepson could watch a movie I knew he was getting for Christmas (I also had in mind taping a couple of football games), and I ran into connections totally different from our previous 1980 model. So I couldn’t get the damned VCR to play and finally ended up plugging the new set directly into the outlet while I sought help.

My neighbor, Mary Jane, who usually advises me on technical matters, wasn’t available, but Chris next door left his Christmas festivities to hook it up for me. But there was a lot of stress while all this was going on.

Then on Christmas morning, my stepson turned up with a bevy of spots all over his body. Since he had already had chickenpox, we considered it a biological impossibility for him to have them again, so we dismissed the spots as flea bites, brought to his bed by our dachshund who sleeps with him. By evening, there were a lot more spots--and no doubt about their nature.

My wife called the doctor assigned Christmas duty at our HMO to find out if this might be some exotic new disease that looked like chickenpox. He listened to the symptoms, told her it was indeed chickenpox, and then advised her cheerfully that if there were any adults in the household who hadn’t had the disease, such exposure could possibly kill them. I presume he then went back to his Christmas dinner, while I spent the rest of the day trying to remember--unsuccessfully--whether or not I’d ever had chickenpox as a child. More stress.

Then my wife contracted a cold that appeared for several days to be terminal. She lay on a couch in our living room watching a lot of movies on our new TV set, while I washed a lot of dishes and made a lot of tea and toast. The toast had to be done on our stove since our toaster burned out several weeks ago, and I refused to fight Christmas shoppers to get another one. In retrospect, I suspect the crowd stress would have been less than that occasioned by the repeated burning of toast on the stove.

And as a minor sidelight, our dachshund, Coco, was probably corrupted for life by drippings from our Christmas turkey. We have been extremely careful to feed her nothing but dog food on the presumption that she’s going to be a lot happier down on the farm if she never sees Paree. But turkey juice spilled on the floor while I was carving our Christmas bird, and Coco has spent most of her time in the week since licking the kitchen floor, apparently in the expectation that turkey drippings are a recurring phenomenon. Considering her reasoning capacity, I suspect that may continue the rest of her life.

Such are the tribulations of middle-class Americans at Christmastime. Maybe we would deal better with real tribulations--like being cold or hungry--but most of us will never be forced to find that out. Meanwhile, most of the difficulties with which we do deal would be taken in stride under ordinary circumstances. But not in the stress of the good times required of the more fortunate in our society by the holidays.

But now they’re over. I will take down the outside Christmas lights, then pack everything away in two monstrous boxes that are removed once a year from our garage. I will take the potted plant from our bedroom where I ran into it every night and put it back where the Christmas tree stood. I will put the Christmas books from 1989, making room by moving the 1988 books to a shelf beneath the table. I will then be ready to resume normal life, along with, I presume, the rest of the country.

Now, maybe we can turn our attention to less stressful things. Like getting the message to the President of the United States that just because we have the best fed and most photographed Army and Navy in the world doesn’t mean that they have to be lunged into a shooting war. Stuff like that.

Meanwhile, it’s been a week, now, and I still don’t have any spots, so I guess I did have chickenpox as a child, after all. Maybe I can put that crisis away. There’s another, however, that I can’t dismiss quite so easily: There are only 358 days until next Christmas.