The True Christmas Dinner
By: Julia E Hubbel
Tags: Gifts, Love, Friendship, Christmas, Life

The True Christmas Dinner

On what breaking bread really means this time of year

Shit. I don’t have plates. They’re packed.

Melissa and I guffawed.

I had asked her over to have Christmas dinner with me, the one and only time I’ve ever had a guest for a meal at my house (other than a few aborted times with the ex).

She was checking on me. It’s my first solo holiday in twenty years, the result of the ending of a long friendship.

As is her habit, she was making sure I was okay (very much so) and that we were still on for dinner. Such as I could provide, that is.

This is what real friends do. They make sure you’re good during emotional holidays.

However, I am leaving in spring, and right now is staging time. I have been so good at packing away everything I don’t use that I managed to spirit off every damned dish in the house but for a few cracked cake plates.

Right when I invited Melissa over for dinner.

As usual, my timing is impeccable.

I did have a few pots, in which I had created Julia’s Famous Turkey Whatever, which is combination of summer squash, Portabello mushrooms, ground turkey (all cooked in olive oil) and Rao Marinara Sauce.

Just no plates, bowls, or spaghetti.

I have spaghetti. And I’ll bring plates, she offered.

I also packed all my napkins, napkin rings, placemats.

Paper towels?

We giggled.

Sounds like college, when we used to use concrete bricks and wooden planks to make shelves.

Mature grownups in their sixties don’t do this shit for Christmas.

Do they?

Yah. We do. Of course we do. That’s the whole point.

Those of us who are untethered from family for whatever reason, who find themselves solo during silly season, whether we celebrate Kwanzaa or Christ, all can use a little love around the dinner table.

That is, if i haven’t broken down and packed the damned thing away by the time she gets here.

To say nothing of those who are homeless, or hearthless, or otherwise badly inconvenienced by life. By comparison, I am monumentally lucky.

I still have a table, a roof over my head, and options.

Even if said dinner table is the last remaining place in the house where I can get work done. Everything else is sold, donated, packed away or currently covered with bubble wrap.

Photo by Mel Poole on Unsplash

What do real friends do?

Yesterday one of my dearest, longest-standing friends and I had Christmas lunch. We laughed at the absurdity of our lives after sixty, said goodbye to several sports that we have had to curtail (in her case, forever) due to injuries or changes in our bodies, and found beauty in each other’s aging faces. For Lisa’s eyes sparkle with good humor more brightly than any Christmas star, and her laughter is the kind of music that in so many ways is sweeter to me than just about any other sound. Lisa has, as have we all at this age, her share of pain and heartache. Yet that laugh, and those merry eyes.

Last week, one of my other longest-standing friends and I had Christmas dinner, and Friday we are going to a matinee. She has stood by me through so many exes, and has laughed uncontrollably with me when she lived as my roommate for two wonderful years in this house. I stood with her through the funeral for her mother this past year, and was one of the few at her wedding. Passages have made us the best co-passengers in life.

Today my best male buddy, Dave the fireman, dropped by with his aging dog. Chaco vomited on my floor (that will bring friends together), as she has a throat infection. My scrambled eggs went down and stayed down. Dave and I shared stories and sadness about his aging parents, who, as they near 90, are declining fast. In the early 2000s Dave sat out a terrible half year in jail for multiple DUIs. I stood by him. Years later, he is today the best leader at his local fire department. Clean and sober, funny and capable, a success story if there ever was one. An ornament on my tree, and I am one of his.

Tomorrow I have a riding lesson with my trainer, my Christmas gift to myself. Time in the saddle and extra time for the local furballs, with apple biscuits in hand. I will celebrate the Big Day doing what I love the very, very best. I will come home filthy, fingernails broken, smelling of horse, horse shit in my shoe tread, and deeply satisfied.

Photo by Wout Vanacker on Unsplash

What interests me is that all these people were very concerned that the ending of my long-standing connection which had provided a place to be for the holidays would leave me bereft.

No. In fact, if anything, having the two weeks to myself, not spending the sometimes too-much money on gifts and travel to be there, not being tempted to buy even more stuff I don’t need in the local stores, all offered me some critical down time.

To contemplate the end of my life in this house after fourteen years. The end of my life in Colorado after nearly fifty. Those are Very Big Goodbyes.

To consider the importance of a quiet, candle-lit house warming in a wholly different sense of the word. To warm my house one last time for me, and to prepare it for a warm welcome for who comes next, like the family before me did for me with such incredible grace. Pay it forward.

To focus on the coming year, its promises and portents, and the leaving behind of a great many things that did not, and never would, work out. Proximity to the ex is one of them; he moved back and is living very close by. His brother’s even closer, so for Christmas, he will be quite literally just down the street.

I don’t need it. I need to finally, finally forgive myself for what happened in this house, to love myself for what I learned in this house, and celebrate the safety and joy that this house gave me.

Which is why I wanted Melissa to join me for dinner.

I didn’t expect, but got, far more than that. A perfect parade of friends who care deeply, who don’t shower me with gifts I neither want nor need, but who give of their time and laughter, which I do.

Photo by Tyler Nix on Unsplash

I didn’t realize that so many people had a stake in whether my holiday was happy. I was usually so invested in whether other folks were happy that I never noticed. Until of course, it really mattered this time. Holy cow did people show up.

Not only did this uplift my spirits, it reminded me that I’m loved, often in ways I don’t always know or understand, and in all ways loved far more than I think I am.

So on Boxing Day, at 4 pm, my Thai masseuse buddy Melissa is going to schlep over some plates and a coconut cake (my request, hey, it’s Christmas, dammit). We’ll put nicely smoothed-out cheap Costco paper towels on my table (after I have cleared off the computers, the piles of paperwork, the notes, the project lists….). Put borrowed plates with (with any luck) delicious food on them.

The banging and stirring and kitchen noises will echo off my empty walls. Our footsteps will echo off the bare walls. It’s a shell of a house.

But there will be candles, thanks to my friend Sonja.

There will be plates.

There will be good food.

There will be coconut cake for dessert.

But above all, the only thing that matters, is that there will be love. And because of that, I will have a very full house indeed.

A house and life that is full of the love of friends, a heart full of memories, lots of excuses to come back and visit, and a final Christmas to remember.