Alone at Christmas

Stories #2 - Christmas Day can be difficult, joyful, lonely, busy, funny, crazy, happy, crappy, or... crabby

Merry Christmas! And if you’re not celebrating, Happy Holidays! And if you’re not happy, just remember that at the end of the day, 25th December is just another day. This is what I told myself when I spent a very unhappy Christmas alone and depressed a few years ago.

Fear not—this story has a happy ending.

Nowadays, more people than ever are spending Christmas Day alone. For some, this can be a relief as things tend to get heated at forced family gatherings.

If you happen to be one of them, either by choice or by circumstance, a few ideas for you to do (or not): go for a walk, go to the movies, get a massage, take a bath, listen to music or a podcast, call or Facetime people, read, write, work (if you must), work out, eat whatever you like, watch whatever you like, watch—or rewatch—Baby Reindeer, which in case you didn’t know, has nothing to do with Christmas.

Above all, try to relax and enjoy yourself. It’s your day. If you are having a hard time, be kind to yourself, and remember, it’s just another day.

Right then, moving on to a true story about Christmas in New York by my lonesome… and… crabs.

It’s just another day. I repeated the mantra as I scoured endless shelves of jars, cartons, cans and bottles, scanning the labels for something ‘special’ to cook. It’ll be over before you know it. No biggie.

So why are you shopping at Whole Foods if it’s not a big deal?

My thoughts were conflicted. There was no avoiding or escaping the fact that the next day was Christmas. Of course it was a big deal. Therefore, Whole Foods was the appropriate place to buy food.

Lost in rumination, I meandered the aisles to the tune of Jingle Bell Rock. I had no idea what I was looking for. I wanted to treat myself, try and lift my spirits—if that was even possible—but I didn’t know how to cook anything particularly special. I wasn’t up for making something from scratch. There was no fun in that. Not when you’re cooking for one.

I wondered if anyone else was shopping for Christmas Day alone. Most of the rosy-cheeked patrons were either coupled up or with kids, and a few solo stragglers I spotted had that rushed look of dashing out for last-minute forgotten ingredients so they could hurry back to finish preparing the family feast.

I focused on the task at hand to swerve the swamp of bad feelings, noting the song change. “Have a holly jolly Christmas! It’s the best time of the year!”

Not for you, and definitely not this year. Eyeing the rows of pasta sauces, I considered the failsafe option. But that was too easy; if all I could rustle up was boiled pasta and ready-made sauce, I might as well have gone to Morton Williams, that grim supermarket around the corner.

I thought of all the traditional Christmas Day meals I’d enjoyed in England, where I grew up: roast turkey and stuffing, crispy potatoes, lashings of gravy and cranberry sauce, flaming plum pudding with mounds of brandy butter. My mouth watered with longing. Not this Christmas. You’ll eat nothing of the sort.

Damn that horrible voice in my head. Whose voice was it anyway? I preferred the kind and gentle one, “the still small voice.” I needed that one to chime in more, but I could barely hear anything beyond the mean critic.

My Christmas Day food shop was turning into a pathetic endeavor. Surely I could come up with something. I gazed at the glistening cuts of raw flesh at the meat counter, inviting me to make myself a steak. That was special—and easy enough—a sprinkle of salt, a dollop of oil, a few minutes each side…

She can’t even boil an egg! My mother’s voice now. Of course I could boil an egg. She often used that line with a derisive smirk and snide tone to illustrate my ineptitude—for a laugh. I never found it funny, but the joke wasn’t meant for me.

Aimlessly circling the supermarket, I landed in the one aisle I did not want to be in. I should have paid more attention instead of being sucked down the plughole of negative thinking. Facing giant bags of puppy chow, I balked at the brutal reminder that my beautiful dog Humphrey was now buried in the dirt, beside my ex’s lake house. It felt like my ribs had been cracked open, my heart scooped out with a shovel—like the one my ex had used to dig the grave.

I couldn’t breathe. Agonizing images flashed across the screen of my mind like a grisly crime scene. Now I was spiraling into the trenches. Within weeks of that hideous day of unimaginable heartbreak, my life had descended, leading me here: my first Christmas alone.

The person I felt closest to—my younger sister, who I grew up with—refused to speak to me, my former champion and literary agent had been giving me the silent treatment for months after sending the novel I had worked on for five years out to publishers, my long-term relationship was over, and as a result, I had lost my adored surrogate son, I was stuck in a soul-destroying office job that didn’t even pay me enough to rent a studio of my own, renting a room in someone else’s apartment while staring 40 in the face. All of this would have been bearable if Humphrey was still alive. But he was gone. Forever.

Blinking, I took a deep breath and investigated my basket: blue corn chips, hummus, and a container of spring mix. You’ve been wandering around for God knows how long and all you’ve managed to find are lettuce leaves and chickpeas. This is going to be some Christmas.

It’s just another day. The tone of the mantra shifted from soothing to stoic. Chewing the insides of my cheeks to squeeze back tears, I marched towards the freezer section, yanked open the door, and flipped a cardboard box around with a picture of two succulent crab cakes: Bake in the oven at 400°F for 15 minutes.

Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. Grabbing a lemon from the produce aisle, I headed for the checkout like I was late for the Last Supper.

I silently prayed that I would never have to shop for a Christmas Day meal for one ever again.

My roommate’s cozy décor embraced me as I entered her home, softening the blow of Humphrey’s absence. I wished she was there too, but she had left for London the week before to spend Christmas with her family. Of course she did, that’s what families do at Christmas time.

Six months earlier, I had moved in with her and watched my brave soldier, my fifteen-year-old beloved boy, deteriorate until he and I could bear it no more. I glanced at the sofa where the vet had euthanized him, the permanent ceasing of his heartbeat against my palm. It was still so shocking to me that I would never look into his soulful eyes or touch his fur again. He had been a constant presence by my side since he was a puppy.

My roommate had sweetly left me a gift under the warm glow of the living room tree, which we had bundled up against the cold to pick out, carry inside, and decorate together. Next to her perfectly wrapped gift, I had placed another gift my old nanny had sent me from England. Christmas morning won’t be so bad. You have two presents to open. I realized I was thinking—talking to myself—as if I were a child, but Christmas was so intertwined with childhood, how could I not?

The strong smell of pine reminded me of the Christmas tree at Olympic Tower, the apartment building on the other side of the park where I had spent joyful, childhood Christmases a long time ago. My “first” father, my mother’s ex-husband and father of my five older siblings, the man who gave me his name and raised me like I was his, had once owned a magnificent home there. All of my best holidays had been with him, the loving, generous patriarch of our sprawling family of twelve children from various fathers and three mothers. He was inclusive and kind, making every day a happy day for everyone, especially at Christmas time.

The year before, he had died in the saddest of circumstances, and without him, the ‘family’ no longer existed. He was the glue that held the many disjointed parts of a flawed but sturdy structure together, all of us united by our love for him and buoyed by his love for life. He thrived in gathering everyone around to celebrate special occasions with an abundance of food, music, and laughter. Now we were simply a scattering of disparate and complex pieces, some of whom stuck together in cliques, and some that splintered off to form new units, leaving others behind. Others… like me.

Last Christmas, six months after our patriarch died, my ex had allowed me to invite and host seven family members to stay at his empty townhouse for four nights over the holiday. The whole experience was exhausting, but in the spirit of “Baba” and his benevolence, I wanted to bring the family together to uplift us through the shared grief of our enormous loss.

After such a gesture, I had hoped that this year, I might have been invited to one of their Christmases, especially the family members who lived on the East Coast, some even in New York. They all knew my relationship had ended and my dog had just died, but as I was soon to find out, they made exclusive plans that did not include me.

I missed my younger sister the most. We had always supported each other through the heaviness of later Christmases spent with our mother and all the difficult feelings that time of year evoked. Even as adults, she and I had a cherished tradition of spending Christmas Eve together so that we could wake up and start Christmas Day with each other.

My overwhelming despair after Humphrey’s death provoked an allergic reaction in her, as depression so often does. She decided to move on to our much older sister, who had even less patience for other people’s pain.

Oh shit. It’s here. Christmas Day. Waking up alone that morning, these were my first thoughts. Every morning without Humphrey was horrific, but I missed him more than ever on that day of all days. It’s just another day.

I sprang out of bed to make a cup of tea and whiled away the early hours of my yuletide solitude by watching mindless television. My day revolved around one event: cooking the crab cakes. At the stirrings of hunger, I turned on the oven, lined a dish with parchment paper and popped it in the oven.

From the sofa, a burning smell summoned me to the kitchen where I was met with black smoke. Through the oven window—to my absolute horror—Fire! Panicking that this would set off the alarms, I chucked the burning pan onto the floor with an oven mitt, blowing madly at the furious flames while stamping them out with my feet.

She can’t even boil an egg! Scraping the splattered, pitiful mess off the floor, I half-laughed at my self-created tragicomedy. Only I could screw up something as simple as crab cakes, but what on earth was the point of parchment paper if it does that?

It could have been worse; if I had not acted so quickly, the whole apartment might have caught fire. The whole building. My ineptitude could have killed people, burning everyone to death in a Christmas Day Disaster.

Walking away from the blackened parchment paper, I turned to a different sort of paper—the pages of my journal. That was where I found the still small voice that helped me feel less alone and restored my faith that it wouldn’t always be like this. At some point, life would get better. (It had to get much worse first, but that’s another story.)

Sure enough, just a few Christmases’ later, I was given the best crab cake I could have dreamed of—my very own forever crab—a gorgeous Cancer husband, Danny.