The last gift of Christmas came late on Dec. 25, stealing in like the ghost of Jacob Marley to rule the remains of the holiday season.
It was my good friend the chest cold, which graciously waited until the last stocking was hung, the last cookie baked, to gift me with the cough of a barking reindeer, the wheeze of a whistling chimney and the energy of a sloth.
The timing was impeccable: I needed to rally once more that December night for the annual yule potluck at the neighbors'. And then I fell like the Christmas tree in 2004 when we forgot to anchor it to the wall. Down, down, down onto the couch I went, curled into my holiday jammies with their snowflakes and holiday trees, unmovable, unmoving, except to sip the soup that was brought me and to drive myself to the nurse practitioner who gave me warning.
"It's important to rest," she said, watching my face to make sure I understood:
She was giving me permission.
Not only me, but all us Hooksters, all busy, bustling, hustling, 2017-bound automatons, with our jobs and college classes, our workouts and friend bases, our TED talk bucket lists and social media causes.
The five of us off from college and jobs into the second week of January, we'd made plans to spend the remaining 11 days of Christmas together, going to the museum, the restaurant, the botanical gardens and hikes in the national park.
Instead, in deference to my lungs, we did not even have fires in the fireplace, nor pine-scented candles burning brightly. Instead, we folded in like a pack of house cats in winter. We kept the soup and the Christmas classical music station going and games on at the kitchen table and a jigsaw puzzle in the living room. We ventured out once or twice _ or OK, I admit it, three times _ to see the happy Golden-Globe runaway musical, "La La Land," which had the whole family dancing around the house.
But mostly, we settled into a rare stillness, or at least a slow hum, and for this matriarch, a mood of self-reflection as I thought about the last time I rested, really rested, open-ended, without a laptop, a to-do list or an alarm clock.
Gifts come in unusual packages sometimes, like the iPhone I once gave my son in a shoe box.
This last gift of Christmas 2016 came wrapped in congestion and fatigue to remind me there is a parallel universe, one that includes rest, even for the queen of Christmas and all things family.
I said as much to the clerk who sold me echinacea cough drops at the natural food store, who told me she went to bed for three days in the middle of Christmas, who agreed with me that female objects not in motion in particular should seize the opportunity to stay thus.
Which is especially easy to justify to oneself after the energy output of Christmas. Which is especially well-timed, coming as it does at the beginning of a fresh, open calendar that invites us to reinvent ourselves yet again. Which is especially seamless for me to pull off in the middle of the bleak midwinter, already a slow time for my seasonal photography work.
Here we are now headed into mid-January, practically spring, and I am trying to figure out what else I can cancel.
GENERI
I look around me at the piles of Christmas wrapping paper that yet need to be recycled, folded and placed carefully into the red bins waiting in the garage to go back into the storage shed. I need to balance my checkbook, my refrigerator, my life.
And well, first things first, I tell myself.
And I settle back into the overstuffed chair for a second nap of the day with the cat.
