Our Christmas tree started to drop needles the afternoon we brought it home. Jeff and I usually pride ourselves on a beautiful tree that we cut down at a picturesque tree farm in New Hampshire, but with Jeff’s back surgery in October and my L1 compression fracture the week before Thanksgiving, we were in no shape to play lumberjack. So we bought a pre-cut tree at a local farm, a tree that grew sadder by the day. And yes, we watered it. A lot. Seemed par for the course; it’s been a hard year with back surgeries, moving my parents to assisted living and general malaise. Friends lost their parents and pets. Our country lost its mind. The tree and I drooped.
Our Christmas day started pleasantly enough. We picked names this year, and everyone was content with their gifts……….because they got what they wanted! We ate our traditional Christmas buttery breakfast casserole that takes an entire year to recover from, drank mimosas, visited our neighbors, read and relaxed. An exciting day? No, but restful.
For Christmas, my parents sent us beautiful bacon-wrapped filet mignons, and I busily roasted vegetables, baked the famous cheesy potato casserole, set the table and heated up my cast iron skillets for the final step. The filets sizzled, but almost immediately the kitchen filled with smoke. Just as I asked the boys, “Is it smoky out there?” the @#$%^ fire alarms went off. Now I know that smoke alarms were going off across America yesterday, but most homes aren’t hard-wired to the local fire department like ours is. A special kind of panic ensues that only boarding school dorm parents understand. Alarms are blaring, lights are flashing. No waving a newspaper at the beeping smoke alarm here, folks. We must face the inevitable.
We evacuated the smoking cast iron pans to the patio, grabbed the bewildered dog and headed out to the cold, dark parking lot. We waited.
Within a few minutes, not one, not two but three fire trucks and a police car pulled up. I knew that they left their Christmas tables, healthy Christmas trees and loving families to come to my non-existent fire. Jeff and I worried that they’d see our tree and declare it a fire hazard. Mortified. I was mortified, but they cheerfully shut off the alarm box, toured the dorm and my post-Christmas messy house. One thoughtfully removed the cheesy potatoes and roasted vegetables from my oven, suggesting that perhaps they were the culprits. He missed the now cooling filets on the patio. As I thanked them and apologized over and over, my sons posted the merriment to their social media accounts. We waved goodbye to the three fire trucks.
Cold and hungry, we straggled back in; Andrew carried the filet filled pans in and set them on the counter. Ready to regroup, I heard a suspicious rattle and my mortification turned to panic. “NO, OLIVE, NO!” Our counter-surfing one-year-old lab had an entire barely cooked filet mignon in her mouth. When she saw me, she defiantly bolted for the living room, and I watched her swallow a barely cooked bacon-wrapped filet mignon whole! At this point, exhausted and defeated, I would have let it go except for the fact that each little filet had a metal pin in it to hold it together, and yes, she swallowed it all. Olive’s life flashed before my eyes. I envisioned emergency surgery and an enormous vet bill. Again, panic ensued.
Who doesn’t want to Google, “How to make a dog throw up” on Christmas night? I won’t go into all of the gruesome details, but suffice it to say the process involved hydrogen peroxide and Nick getting the surprisingly strong and very resistant pup into a headlock as I pried her stubborn jaws open……I .poured. She retreated to her crate.
And yes, readers, it worked. Within minutes, poor Olive was under the dining room table, vomiting. I donned latex gloves, and lo and behold, there was a fully intact filet……...held together by the shiny pin. I will now pursue a plant-based diet.
I retired to the den. My family seemed to get that Mama needed “some alone time” after the Christmas dinner debacle. Olive snoozed fitfully, waking occasionally to suspiciously eye me and the hydrogen peroxide sitting on the coffee table. She sighed sadly. I watched the beautiful but heartbreaking “A Marriage Story” about the disintegration of a marriage. I cried a little.
When I returned to the living room, alas! The Christmas tree, the shedding, dried up from day one Christmas tree, was gone. When I asked my son what had happened, he barely looked up from his laptop, “Oh, Dad threw it out the window.” And so he had.