Before I met my husband, The Daver, I loved the holidays. When I say loved, I mean LOVED, the kind of love that implies that I would be happiest in my life if I could stay home, make babies with Christmas, hump the leg of Easter every night, and make sweet (yet spooky!) love to Halloween. It was a time of year that I revered: from the sparkling lights to the tacky blow-up house decorations, I loved it all. In my mind, they could have played Christmas music twenty-four/seven by 365 and I would have said nothing aside from, “CRANK THAT PUPPY TO 11!”
And while I use my chance meeting of The Daver as a marker for “When Good Holidays Go Bad,” it’s not really his fault (somewhere, perhaps on a train, he is sitting in shock, mouth agape that I would NOT blame him for something). But with the addition of my Plus One meant a whole extra set of people with a whole extra set of restrictions as to when and where holidays could be celebrated.
For years our holiday schedule went something like this: drive three hours into Wisconsin for breakfast at precisely 9 a.m. at specific diner where we all had to eat pancakes and sausage, sit for exactly and hour and fifteen minutes with two bathroom breaks. Then loop through the upper peninsula of Michigan to climb the warthog infested mountain of snow in order to secure the holy grail of rare beer for XX family member. Stop for gas and bathroom break on way to Arizona to drop of package for other family member who’d forgotten to mail it. At 11 p.m., on the way home, finally have lunch at an oasis McDonald’s.
We came back from that first holiday, “The Holiday of the Ghost of Our Future,” and I wept openly for several hours while Dave chewed his nails and paced the floors. We were both just tapped out and exhausted, and as for Ben, he was so overwrought and inconsolable that this expenditure undid about three months worth of previous therapy.
