An apprehensive toast

The topic for the cocktail hour a few evenings ago was our apprehension over the upcoming holiday season -- five weeks of relentless good cheer, starting with Thanksgiving and running to the football bowl games on New Year’s Day.

If this state of mind sounds a bit on the jaundiced side, it was. A fair amount of guilt went along with it -- as if we were denigrating Santa Claus or putting down the warm memories of Thanksgivings past.

Staring into our martinis (Sherry is learning to handle this connection with my world admirably), we found ourselves suddenly and uncomfortably awash in plans. And questions.

Whose house, when, what time, who will be cooking what, what gifts will be exchanged and when will we shop for them, will we be doing Christmas cards, can we get away with a small tree, could we possibly have something besides turkey for Thanksgiving dinner, why are these worries beginning to start right after Halloween, is all of this holiday stress out of control and, if so, what should we do about it?

That sort of thing.

And the mantra for our apprehensions was guilt that we were feeling them at all. Most Americans are indoctrinated from birth with certain behavior patterns. And one of the most deeply entrenched is the required level of enthusiasm for the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. Exhaustion -- or even modest cynicism at the commercialism -- is not acceptable as an excuse for retreat.

Now I don’t want to be told that there are many millions of Americans who don’t have the economic or family resources to enjoy these year-end festivities and would offer up any sacrifice to change places with us. Of course there are -- probably many thousands who were living in New Orleans last Christmas. And that if we find the holidays burdensome, we might get a new and joyous perspective by sharing our good fortune with some who have very little instead of bellyaching about exhaustion. Of course we might. Thus the guilt.

So our cocktail conversation was a kind of warm-up to the inevitable, a conditioning talk to work ourselves into a proper frame of mind. And we don’t want to be moralized in that process. We know the drill. This holiday malaise has come on us gradually over the years until it finally moved us to do something about it. We learn the hard way. So for two years, we actually did cut out.

I once got a passel of free cruises for Sherry and me in exchange for giving talks to incipient authors about how to write their memoirs, jazzed up with tales of movie stars I had sort-of known. So when I was offered this gig over the Christmas holidays a few years ago, we jumped at it. Free at last.

The cruise was through the Panama Canal and lasted 10 days. We spent Christmas and New Year’s on shipboard, and it suggests our state of mind that by our last stop at the island of Aruba, we gratefully followed a tide of our fellow travelers ashore to gorge on Dunkin’ Donuts.

We ate our Christmas dinner -- by choice -- at a table for two, and I don’t remember much about it. The high spot of the trip was getting the Rose Bowl game on our stateroom TV.

Two years later we had to learn the same lesson about Thanksgiving. We booked the Thanksgiving weekend at a tennis club in Palm Desert that we thoroughly enjoyed during the summer season when we could afford it.

We should have saved our money when we tried it for Thanksgiving. That dinner, I do remember. Another table for two. A buffet that was decent enough, but we were surrounded by people we didn’t know and didn’t care to reach out to. We didn’t linger over coffee. I think there was a football game on TV that afternoon too. Sherry had a book.

And so at the cocktail hour a few nights ago, we reminded ourselves of those two defections from the holiday path long laid out for us -- and then got down to the serious business at hand.

Thanksgiving dinner, first. It is being hosted in Los Angeles by Sherry’s brother, and we will be responsible for the drinks. Many people will be there -- several extended families, including boyfriends and girlfriends and small children. Some of them I probably won’t know -- or remember from the last such occasion.

There will be astonishing amounts of food, a cacophony of voices, a lot of milling about and animated conversation -- and possibly even a football game on TV. There will also be an undercurrent of thanksgiving for this largesse and for the people we love who shared our table, in a troubled world, on this day.

And when the post-Thanksgiving schedule picks up in the weeks that follow, we will make our annual Christmas pilgrimage to visit my daughter in Boulder, Colo.

When we return, my neighbors will have strung lights all over their homes, leaving our house as a blob of gloom, a traitor to the incandescent spirit on display. So I will mount my ladder, while Sherry fusses, and bring down the cardboard cartons marked “Christmas.”

Since the kid is with us this year, he will probably insist that the Christmas scene be unpacked and displayed in counterpoint to my modest string of lights over the garage door. He might even help.

There will be a tree, and we will host one leg of the neighborhood Christmas party, at which Sherry is the official piano player.

We will fuss about Christmas cards not written and gifts we would like to personalize, but aren’t sure how, and with plans for Christmas dinner, which are now as fuzzy as the identity of the football teams that will play on New Year’s Day, when I will pack up all these artifacts until it all happens again.

And there will be a sigh of enormous relief at the first cocktail hour after the holidays, but also a sigh of well-being that it mostly felt good, and it won’t really matter if we don’t get the Christmas cards out until Easter -- it’s the thought that counts. And that maybe next year we won’t have to deal with the apprehension -- although we know we probably will.

But that’s a long way off. So meanwhile, happy Thanksgiving.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights.

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