The emotions we experience during the holiday season sometimes feel eerily similar to how we experience a full moon. We’re erratic, sleep-deprived, on the verge of howling, and suddenly driven to make our holiday table look like something Martha Stewart might have orchestrated.
Though I miss my late mother — especially during the holidays — overall I’m fairly calm. I don’t care all that much what my table looks like. As long as the cat stays off it while we’re eating, and everyone has utensils, I figure we’re good to go.
Past holidays weren’t always calm, however. Like many kids at Christmastime, I was the Tasmanian Devil, spinning around the house in a tizzy. My brothers would wake me up at 3 am, and our parents would beg us to go back to sleep until at least 5 am — which, as any parent knows, is a lost cause. We’d play records, dance, throw things at each other, and use our beds as trampolines until Mom and Dad surrendered and got up.
One Christmas Eve, when I was about 12, I experienced a new kind of holiday excitement. The police raided our house. At the time, we were living in a small rural town in upstate New York. Our tired blue colonial house sat on Main Street next to a bar, the barber shop, the barber’s eight hunting dogs who lived in doghouses and barked relentlessly, and a moody and unpredictable creek. If I looked out our front window, I could spy on the people going in and out of the liquor store across the street, and occasionally come face to face with the town drunk/peeping Tom, who sometimes slept under our porch.
At around 7 pm that Christmas Eve, I opened the back door to let our dogs out, and was greeted by a police officer pointing a gun at me. “Turn around and go back inside,” he said. I momentarily froze. Was this real or an episode of “Starsky and Hutch”? Eventually, I did as he asked, as did Bareka, our Russian wolfhound, and Harley, our Welsh corgi.
As the dogs and I headed toward the living room I blurted, “Mom, there’s a cop …” I was stunned into silence when I saw two additional policemen standing not four feet from our Christmas tree. My brothers stood next to our mother, while I hovered in the living room doorway.
“They’re just bamboo plants,” Mom was saying, “but you can go look.”
Mom loved plants. She had a spectacular glossy jade, a few spider ferns, an aloe plant, and several three- to four-foot potted bamboos that lived in our enclosed side porch facing the road. The police pulled open the side porch door and meticulously inspected each plant. One held a small flashlight; one bent down and sniffed a leaf. Mumbling, and with a little less fervor than they came in with, they walked back into the living room.
“OK … well … you’re all set,” one of them said, staring at the floor. “Have a good night.”
“OK,” Mom said. “You too.”
They nodded curtly. On their way out the door, Bareka happily trotted over, and with great enthusiasm, stuck her long nose deeply into one of the policemen’s rear ends, nearly lifting him off the ground. He yelped a bit, and I saw Mom bite her lip. “Merry Christmas!” she said. Once the door closed, we roared with laughter.