There’s One Key Way to Keep Holiday Stress at Bay—Here’s How I Figured It Out

11/26/2009

Ah, the holidays are here: Cosy fires. Candles in the window. Roasting turkeys. Towers of presents. Outrageous desserts. Family togetherness.

And tension, discord, and stress.

So how to minimize the misery and maximize the fun? I have an answer of sorts, but before I reveal it, let’s, Scrooge-style, take a tour of several holidays past:

Thanksgiving 1996
I’m not sure why, but it was decided that I and my then-boyfriend would host my sister and her new husband, my mother, his mother, and his brother and her girlfriend in our tiny Arlington, Va., apartment.

My sister and husband showed up with a surprise guest— their rambunctious lab puppy—and it immediately became clear that the dog had no use for floors. It leapt from one piece of furniture to the next, sending lamps, vases, purses, tchotchkes, whatever, flying in every direction. My boyfriend demanded that the dog be taken to my sister’s hotel (where it wasn’t allowed to be, but oh well), leaving my sister grumpy for the rest of the holiday.

My boyfriend’s mother (who I’ll now refer to as MBM) had insisted on bringing a turkey, despite the fact that my boyfriend was a vegetarian who ate seafood—"no land animals, nothing with feet!"

So for dinner, I had prepared a bean dish for me and my boyfried, while the others tucked into MBM’s turkey. She eyed me, smirking, “Well, just look at her salivating over that turkey.”

After dinner, my sister decided it was time to try bonding with MBM,  so she hauled out her wedding album. As my sister thumbed through it, MBM glanced over suspiciously, taking in the lacey dress, the long curled blonde hair.

“Well,” she said, “Weren’t WE the Southern belle!”

That was the last time I ever hosted a holiday.
 

Christmas  1997
My parents had rented a place right on the beach at North Carolina’s Outer Banks, Cape Hatteras. The evening I arrived with my ex (we were newly married), everything was going swimmingly – tree-decorating, cake-eating, drinks before bed – and then my sister and her husband arrived.

My ex, never a fan of my sister, refused to get out of bed to greet them.

“I’m not dealing with your West Virginia diva sister and her brain-damaged, spasmodic dog. This is ridiculous. I’m staying HERE.”

Things progressed from there: My ex commented that my brother-in-law’s peanut soup vaguely resembled puke and ended up having cake for dinner.

And then, to top everything off, my sister announced that she was knocked up—by way of a positive-pregnancy test placed on the tree. My ex stormed out the room, raging that "This is just a typical drama-queen move on the part of your sister!" Reflecting back, I could have noted that his response was a typical drama-king move. Ah, hindsight.

Thanksgiving 1999
My parents were planning to spend the holiday with my sister’s in-laws four hours away, and my mother was obsessing over what to bring. Then, scanning the paper one day, she saw it: German chocolate sauerkraut cake! Perfect.

Only problem was, she somehow quadrupled the amount of sauerkraut called for in the recipe—putting in something like four cups of it instead of ¾ cups.

When it came time to cut the cake, the knife got stuck. The way my father tells it, they had to put the cake down on the floor and have someone step on it while another person sawed it into pieces.

Christmas 2008
My mother had gathered together my husband and me, our three-year-old  twins, my sister and her husband and their seven- and eleven-year-olds—at the West Virginia homestead for a tranquil Christmas Eve.

She was hell-bent on getting us all to sing carols by the tree before Christmas dinner, but the plan kept going awry.  For example, Punk, not yet potty-trained, peed on the floor. T-Rex slammed his fingers in the sliding door. And my nephew hit his sister on the head during a wrestling match.

Meanwhile four dogs—my mother’s Yorkshire terrier, my sister’s golden retriever, our miniature dachshund and our pound mutt—chased each other around the house, leaving their own deposits throughout. My father it seemed, was always the one to step in these deposits, yelling, “For God’s sake! Not another bloody pile of dog[expletive]!?”

Throughout all this, the adults took generous hits from the punchbowl. And then the doorbell rang.

Assuming it was the kids’ pizza, my mother ran for the door, and shoved a couple of $20s at the man standing there.

“I’m sorry, m’am….I don’t think you think I’m….”

“You’re not the pizza guy?”

“No. Uh. Sorry, but my mother just backed into your car.”

Yep. The neighbor's 90-year-old mother, after one too many eggnogs, had wrecked my sister’s car. That definitely put the kibosh on the Christmas carols.

Later that evening—I guess we hadn’t yet had enough—it was decided we would open some presents. It was the usual mayhem, with the kids shrieking, shredding wrapping paper, grabbing, and throwing presents. And then my sister and I were handed two identical gifts from my mother.

Simultaneously, we unwrapped nondescript brown boxes, stuffed with foam. I pulled out a long metal thing. Then another longer metal thing. And then a rounded black rubber hose thing.

“Good God,” said my father. “What have you given them? They’ve both got husbands you know!”

Turned out that they were self-standing hairdryers—they were attached to a movable stalk so that you could blow-dry your hair without having to hold the dryer.

“I saw it on an infomercial,” explained my mother, somewhat defensively. “I thought it looked, well, useful.”

I burst out laughing and couldn’t stop. I just laughed and laughed and laughed. I had finally discovered the one and only true key to de-stressing the holidays—realize that it’s all theater of the absurd and laugh ’til it hurts.

Our House is a Very, Very, Very Crooked House

08/13/2009

My father had a name for the house I grew up in. He called it The Dog’s Breakfast.

I guess that was flattering compared with The Pimple—his name for the house we almost bought instead. The Pimple was, as my father described one of my boyfriends, "a long tall slab of misery." Picture the teetering shack of Aunts Spiker and Sponge from "James and the Giant Peach."

So we went with The Dog’s Breakfast, which was plunked down in something of a holler, this being West Virginia. I suspect my parents chose it because the back yard was flat-ish. No chance of me and my sister sledding, smack, into a monster truck, or, as teenagers, forgetting the handbrake and letting her roll. My parents thought ahead.

Not to keep you in suspense, though. The Dog's Breakfast was so named because it wasn’t exactly what you would call…..symmetrical. It was a hodgepodge of five levels, each one slightly askew and with no more than two rooms. You'd no sooner descended one slippery, carpeted set of steps than you found yourself going down another, often on your butt.

Each room was decorated in a ghastly color scheme. The living room, for example, sported a flame orange shag carpet and strawberry pink walls. The kitchen was painted that ’70s smooshed-peas color (chartreuse?) with mustard-yellow trim.

And, well, a lot of stuff didn’t really work. Like the air conditioning. If you wanted to cool down, you had to sit on one of the vents, which was usually occupied by a cat. My parents, on the slanting top level, had it worst.  It was like Manila up there in the summer. They had two attic fans wedged between facing windows, but still.

I suspect they put up with this funhouse warren because at least it meant the pets could be on one level,  the kids on another, and them on their own (I have kids now, so I get this). And like I said, they thought ahead.

But I remember things getting a bit…tense…one winter evening. I was doing homework in the Mary Kay-themed living room while my dad made bird-watching plans by phone in the adjoining kitchen.

"Uh, listen Larry, don’t mean to cut you off," I remember him saying all of a sudden. "But could I call you back? There appears to be a torrent of water gushing out of my dining-room lamp."

I looked up from my algebra and, sure enough, there was a waterfall plunging from the shade over the dinner table.

It wasn’t something you see every day, but I wasn’t super surprised. A frozen pipe must have burst again, I figured. A different room in The Dog’s Breakfast had flooded just about every winter. And my dad caught this one early, so we wouldn’t need to dredge four feet of freezing water with mixing bowls this time.

But, post-lamp incident, my father’s patience with the house was wearing thin. We knew The Dog's Breakfast's days were numbered when a note appeared over the laundry-room sink. It went something like this:

How to Keep the Lousy Pipes from Bursting if Bloody Husband is Not Bloody Here

1. If temperature drops below 32 degrees, keep thermostat at 65 degrees or higher.
2. Close faucet to cut water supply to upstairs bathroom.
3. Locate and pull plug on ceiling pipe above sink.
4. Drain water from ceiling pipe into sink.
5. Replace plug.
6. Move into a new bloody house that isn’t falling down around our bloody ears and has properly insulated pipes. Bloody.

My family is from South Africa, so my father says bloody a lot. Coming from him, a note like this is not unusual. This is, after all, the man who taped the label “For Husband Only” to the dog’s leash.

In case you’re wondering where I’m going with all this, here’s the thing: I now get my dad’s frustration. I have officially reached the same pinnacle of impatience with our own house. Aside from the major differences—it’s plopped in a hood in Washington, DC, as opposed to a holler in West Virginia, it’s quarter the size, and has no carpeting whatsoever—it has some eerie similarities.

For one thing, the air conditioning is useless, except for between 4 and 5 a.m.; we’d be toast without our 10-plus fans. The stairs are also treacherous (definitely something you want when you have three-year-old boys). The house, due to lopsided sinking, is also completely crooked: if you drop a marble in the only bathroom, which doubles as a walk-in closet, it barrels downhill to the front bedroom. And yes, believe it or not, water also cascades from our ceiling when the temperature drops below zero.

The house has some other special “quirks”:

 

• Every window and door has bars on it. This means that if you accidentally auto-lock the door behind you but forget the barred-gate key, you are totally screwed. You’ll be standing in the vestibule getting chewed by mosquitoes, indefinitely awaiting rescue by the cops or your husband.

• We have no dinner table, not even a kitchen table. When we have guests over, they wander around aimlessly with their plates, looking confused, until we explain that our coffee table is our kitchen table, and the sofa pillows are our chairs. (The kids have their own table and chairs, though.)

• Nothing in the yard survives, not even the rats. Well that’s not strictly true. The ghetto palm thrives, no matter how many times I pull it up. But the rats living under the deck are getting annihilated by our dog. We keep tripping over…her handiwork… when we take the garbage out.

 

Given all this, The Dog’s Breakfast sounds more than appealing right now. Big, flower-filled, dead-rat-free yard for the kids.  Kitchen and dining-room table. And best of all, no bars on the doors or windows—a key factor for kids, who, as they get older will be hell-bent on sneaking out of the house. Not that I’d know anything about that. But, like my parents, I’m thinking ahead.

I haven’t seen any desperate notes pinned to the wall yet. But I’m expecting to see one any day. Maybe from my husband. Maybe from one of the kids. Maybe even from my father. The only trouble is, after reading this, I’m not sure anyone will want to buy the place.