Merry Christmas?

Needless to say it took awhile to get over being perhaps a little miffed about the Thanksgiving Day events.  I kept looking on the bright side of things, after all I did get to go to the Macy's parade and I did not have to cook Thanksgiving dinner.  Plus Wes and Wally had a good time. I guess after eighteen years looking on the bright side of things became my method of survival.

Even though Christmas was never the Norman Rockwell painting I still always managed to get excited about the holiday and hope for the best.  The two things I love most about the Christmas season are the Christmas cards and the decorations.  Actually I do love the shopping though most people have always thought I was a little crazy as I like to wait, carefully preparing my list of what to purchase, until a week or so before the big day.

Those were the days when I sent a hundred Christmas cards each year. Dennis always had a very long list of fellow employees that required cards and the personal list seemed to grow bigger with each year due to the moves around the country and the friends we had left behind. Living in New Jersey you did not really decorate until Christmas Eve and lights on the house could get you shunned so that event made the decorating rather quick and fun.

As for the shopping I never let on to Wes and Wally that there was no Santa.  I still, at the ages of thirteen and nine, made them do the Santa letter with the list of what they wanted.  What fun is Christmas if you don't believe in Santa?  I always told them that there had to be a Santa.
Did they really think their cheapskate parents would buy them all that stuff?  Wes would argue with me but Wally was not real sure but that kept Christmas fun.

Ah, Christmas of 1983.  Perhaps the most memorable in the worst way possible. Everything was going along very well until Christmas Eve.
Excellent actually, part of which I will get to later, but the day dawned bright and not too cold, we had gone and gotten our live tree a few days before from the tree farm and were about to put our tree up when our neighbor came and asked Dennis to help him with his.

Jim had an awesome house behind us - three stories, built at the turn of the turn of the century and it had twelve foot ceilings downstairs. Jim had gone and gotten a huge twelve foot tree for the living room.  Naturally it was heavy and ended up being about a foot too tall. They wrestled with the tree, got it to the right height and started standing it up.  Somehow Dennis got poked in the eye by a pine needle. Ever heard of that one before?  Me neither. By the time Dennis got home he was in pain and of course getting poked in the eye by the pine needle was all Jim's fault - like Jim stabbed him on purpose.  You have to remember that nothing that ever happened to Dennis was an accident or in any way his fault.

Did you ever know anyone who could not close one eye and keep the other one open?  There are those people and I guess Dennis never winked at any girl as he was one of those people.  So I, in effect. had a blind husband cursing to beat the band and I finally dashed him off to the emergency room at 7:00 on Christmas Eve.  Have you ever checked into an emergency room that wasn't busy or what are your chances of getting an emergency room doctor good at pine needle pokes in the eye?  If you guessed no for both answers you got it right.  Three hours later we were told that pine needles have a poison on the tips (?),they gave Dennis an eye patch and said he should go see an eye doctor after Christmas. Swell.

As soon as we got home I made the boys put out cookies and milk for Santa and tucked them in their beds and then convinced Dennis he should do the same.  Now I got to finish the tree, assembled the big Christmas presents and finish all the rest of the Santa stuff. That was actually very enjoyable and I finished off the evening with a beer or two and napped on the sofa.  Before I fell asleep I ate the cookies and poured out most of the milk since I didn't think it would settle well on top of the beer.

I woke up before the patter of growing feet came running down the stairs.  After all I needed to keep the myth alive that Santa had come down the chimney and me asleep on the sofa may have made them wonder. Bigger feet came slowly down the stairs with no patch, he didn't like it, both eyes closed and clutching the railing.  He laid on the sofa while the boys and I opened presents moaning.  Every so often the boys would open one of his for him as he couldn't open them and he would feel of it and say it was nice in between moans. He did manage to eat Christmas breakfast and dinner without any problem.

That evening the boys and I went to Sis and Gus' for a little get together.  All their children and grand children were there and it was the highlight of the day for me.  When I explained where Dennis was Sis didn't say anything but just rolled her eyes.  She had her own opinion of Dennis after being witness to some of his stunts like using the motor scooter for a ladder and running his arm through a broken window. That evening with her family gave me enough fortitude to keep from losing it for two more days before we could get to the eye doctor since Christmas was on a Friday that year.

We did go to an eye doctor on Monday.  He said there was no damage to the cornea and to wear the patch until it healed and it would be fine.  The patch would give the eye time to rest and heal but doctors were all very stupid and did not know anything. So, naturally he could not wear the patch.  By the time he went back to work a week or so later it was all healed. It was and probably still is all Jim's fault.

A few days before Christmas Eve I got a letter in the mail from someplace called Kaplan something or other.  I opened it up and it was a letter thanking me enrolling in their Medical School Entrance Test Class in Philadelphia in March. There was also a receipt for three hundred and seventy-five dollars.  At first could not figure out what kind of class this was or how they thought I had paid and enrolled. There had to be some mistake.  I knew it was not something Dennis would have done as he hated every minute I was at school or studying.  Then it dawned on me that it was the class Barney had suggested I take. 

Well, I broke my rule about calling him as I wasn't sure he was home. He did answer and I asked what the present was for as we did not give presents to each in the five years we had been friends. He said it wasn't a present but it was a reward for making a A in Calculus/Physics and if I worked as hard on the Kaplan course as he knew I did on the Calculus/Physics that I would ace the Medical School exam.  I told him he should not have done it but he said no that he should do more than he has. I thanked him and promised to study hard and do well.  With a laugh he said I did not need to promise as he knew me well enough to know that I would do great. He also said he would be in Philadelphia the end of January.

I guess I was totally taken back by someone being nice to me and believing in me. That didn't seem to come much from Dennis or my mother as they both acted most of the time like everything I did was wrong.  I was thinking that the New Year would be a great one.

Little did I know at Christmas what the next year would bring.  If I had known ahead of time I wonder what I would really have chosen to do.