On the first day of Christmas, or Why I Have Neglected My Blog for a Month

December is a busy month and a difficult time for blogging, what with all the other insane holiday crap women are called upon to do, so the next time you're wondering if the glass ceiling has been well and truly broken, look around and ask yourself: Who bought the gifts? Who wrapped them? Who planned the menu, did the shopping and cooked enough food to feed an army? Who cleaned (I noted that my last post here was the one outlining instructions on how to spiff up the house in case of an unexpected guest emergency)? Oh, I'm not saying that my husband did nothing. He's actually a great help and sexily muscled in our nine-and-a-half-foot Christmas tree into the house on his shoulder, which, if it were left to me, would have still been lashed to the top of the van. I think the problem is that, when it comes to household organization, particularly holiday household organization, the women are the quarterbacks and the men are special teams.

So you know what I did in the few weeks leading up to Christmas, and I know what you did because we were all doing the same thing, right?

But you don't know what I was doing on the actual Twenty-Fifth of December, and BOY IS IT WORTH THE TELLING.

Here's a rundown, and I hope as you read it, you will see absolutely nothing in it similar to your own merry holiday.

1. Christmas Eve - presents were all wrapped, except for the $#@% stocking presents, which I always forget to wrap until about 1:30 a.m. The house was pristine, all items for Christmas dinner were set out and ready for cooking, all systems go. Mass was at 6:30 p.m. and I even remembered to set out the Baby Jesus in both nativities.

2. Christmas Morning - Up and opening gifts at 7:00; on the road to New Castle to open gifts at Mom and Dad's at 9:15. Arrival at 10:00, Mom had brunch underway, family sat down to open presents. Merriment ensued.

3. Mom put breakfast out on the beautifully-laid dining room table. Poppy said a prayer and everyone tucked in. Two minutes later, my husband said, "I don't feel well. I think I'll go lie down."

4. Everything went to hell from there. Let me take you through the next 24 hours with my husband:

barfing feverishness saltine crackers tea with honey more puking headache and....other unmentionable agony, bathroom-related, more barfing, puking, heaving, hurling and heaving

5. On Monday morning, the poor guy was better and able to sit upright, albeit remaining as white as salt, occasionally overtaken by violent shivering.

6. On Monday afternoon, I was coming down the stairs with a basket of laundry and got to the landing, stepped down too many steps, and ended up hurtling down to the foyer floor, landing in a crumpled heap and surrounded by dirty socks and underwear.

7. It hurt.

8. A lot.

9. I ached all over until very, very early on Wednesday morning, when I awoke from an uneasy slumber -- nothing like that "long winter's nap" spoken about so blithely in Clement Moore's poem -- with the certain conviction that I was getting ready to experience

barfing feverishness saltine crackers tea with honey more puking headache and....other unmentionable agony, bathroom-related, more barfing, puking, heaving, hurling and heaving

10. Which I did, worse than my husband, and up until New Year's Eve, spent my days sitting in grey-faced languor on the couch, nursing my bruised ankle, shoulder, knee and hip and occasionally twitching.

11. Meelyn and Aisling managed to avoid the horrible stomach virus, but caught a bad cold that required gallons of orange juice, Ny-Quil and hot tea to treat.

11. On New Year's Eve, the four of us went to the Outback so that we could at least say we'd done something fun. We had a good time, but were back home by 9:00, changed into our pajamas and sat back down on the couch, me still twitching and both girls coughing, sneezing and blowing their noses. My husband said that he was still feeling kind of rocky, six days after the onset of the stomach virus.

12. I concurred.

13. We went to bed rather early, bemoaning the fact that, while our entire year has been really amazing and positive, the last week of it was so awful, we all wanted to salute it with a great, big, wet raspberry and yell "GOOD RIDDANCE!" out the front door.

So! That's what I've been doing for the last month and the last week of that month.

As I said before, I hope you experienced nothing like it.

Happy New Year!

It's 12:08 a.m. as I type this first post of the new year -- my first New Year's resolution is to make my post goal for next year. The girls are swigging sparkling cider and quarreling with one another and the rain is pouring down and my husband just came into the room, kissed me on the forehead and said, "Well, babe, I'm headed up to bed."

Perhaps this is an inauspicious beginning to twelve brand-new, shiny months? I'd better fortify myself with another glass of champagne, that Barefoot Bubbly you see in the photo above which I took all by ownself. I think it's kind of a good one. The champagne is actually pretty good too.

The girls are now dancing crazily to an Enrique Iglesias video and it has set the dogs to barking. From the sounds of things, you'd think that something much more interesting was happening in here than what is actually going down. It may sound like a drunken revelry, but I'm guessing that the entire house will be shut down in the next half hour with all of us in our cozy beds, listening to the sound of rain on the windows.

Happy New Year, dear readers, and may this one be a lovely one for those of you who have struggled and likewise for those of you who haven't. Be safe, be well, be good, be happy.

New Year's Eve check in -- 11:25 p.m.

It is absolutely pouring down rain and almost sixty degrees outside, too warm for either my bathrobe or my fleecy slippers. That is an unusual occurrence in this house, which keeps to the approximate temperature of a meat locker.

Potty runs for Dobby and Zuzu so far: 2, fortunately both times before the heavens opened and water came spilling forth as if we're preparing for an all-new flood.

Movies: 1, The Sorcerer's Apprentice, as mentioned before. Just finished it and the verdict on it is that it was long on special effects and short on plot. I am still trying to figure out how Balthazar, who is typically known as one of the Magi who visited Baby Jesus and Veronica, who is believed to have offered Jesus a linen cloth upon which to wipe his face during his Passion, got messed up with Morgan Le Fay and Merlin. Because Arthurian legend, of which I am passably familiar -- or at least always thought I was -- featured no characters from the life of Christ. So I'm confused.

Tomorrow I'm cooking the final turkey dinner of this holiday season and we had an amusing contretemps earlier this evening when I was putting together the dough for the cloverleaf rolls I intend to serve with our meal. I had all my ingredients mapped out and ready to go for the recipe -- flour, yeast, butter, water, sugar, salt and eggs -- and everything was going really well until I got to the "eggs" part of my list. As it turned out, one of my darling daughters had used the last two eggs in the carton to make a protein-rich masque for her hair today, leaving me with nothing but a loud shriek: "NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

My husband, who is very fond of homemade dinner rolls, betook himself to the grocery store (Marsh is open all night and don't you feel sorry for their employees?) while Aisling, the culprit, and I ironed out a treaty which stated that she shall not use food items for her beauty treatments unless she ASKS ME FIRST.

I've been typing for eleven minutes, so it's now eleven-thirty-six and counting, so let me take this next few seconds of flying fingers to say how very, very pleased I am to be bidding 2010 goodbye. There have been some high points in this year, I know there have, although I'm hard pressed to remember them right at this particular moment. The trip to Stratford was successful, and I'm very thankful for that. We also got our new(er) van, Penny, which was a huge blessing. But you know? I am really, really sick of the recession and worrying about money all the time.

So here's for a more positive and prosperous 2011. I am ready for it.

In twenty more minutes.

New Year's Eve check in -- 9:35 p.m.

It's been a busy week since the last time I posted, which was on Christmas Eve, and you can probably guess what I've been doing: opening presents, coughing wetly, cooking festive food, coughing wetly, attempting to find someplace somewhere for all the extraneous boxes and scraps of colored paper and mashed bows that come along with Christmas time. And coughing. Wetly.

It turns out that recovery from walking pneumonia and Christmas don't make such a winsome pair. Yergh.

So anyway, our plan for tonight was to stay at home and watch movies, just something quiet and fun and family-oriented. The girls suffered a bit last New Year's Eve because of some scrambled plans and they requested that this year, we do what they wanted to do, which was fine with us. Besides, we have Dobby, who isn't old enough to be left for long periods of time: he is a frequent pee-pee'er.

I am being summoned to the living room, where The Sorcerer's Apprentice has just been started. It's a Nicholas Cage movie, and although Nick is starting to look a little old -- and aren't we all -- he is still handsome and entertaining and if he isn't, I guess I'll have to hope that the show has an absorbing plot.

New Year's Eve - And then we passed around the Tums and everyone went home

Oh, my gosh, you have never seen so much food. At first, I wasn't sure if it was the party treats spread out on the breakfast bar in Beth's kitchen or a shrine to the god of gluttony. Amy brought her bean dip and tortilla chips; I brought a bleu cheese and pecan cheeseball and crackers; Beth made Chex party mix and some peanut-butter puppy chow. Julie ordered about a thousand pizzas from the Q Avenue Pizza King, and there was never one single time in the entire evening when there wasn't someone over there grazing their way through the food in a determined manner, as if Dick Clark would stop the ball from dropping in Times Square and refuse to allow the New Year to be welcomed in unless every bag, box and dish was emptied.

When we were all kids back in the 70s, there was an Alka-Seltzer commercial featured a holiday partier looking green and vaguely terrified, saying, "I can't believe I ate the whole thing" while trying to contain a violent peristalic eruption.

Yeah. That.

New Year's Eve - The Winnah!

So every year we all get together to have this euchre tournament, right? There are twelve to sixteen of us, all with varying levels of talent and I think I've established where my level is. Those depths are truly hard to plumb

But anyway, I don't know why we even bother. Because you know who wins? Like, every single year? Grandma Bennett, that's who. Grandma Bennett is Beth's mother-in-law and Julie's mother. She will be ninety years old this coming August and she derives a great deal of joy out of beating the snot out of the lot of us. Last night she won three prizes -- most points overall, most loners, woman with most points -- and Beth yelled in exasperation, "Helen, you're HOGGING ALL THE PRIZES."

Helen, with the air of royalty dispensing largesse to the crowd of smelly peasants in the streets, said nonchalantly, "Oh, you can give one of my prizes to someone else. Whoever else managed to get close to me in points." And then she laughed really hard.

Here she is totting up her bajillion points on her tally card. And gloating.

New Year's Eve - what's the deal?

I'm not sure what cards my husband was holding because I was his partner in this round and we are not big hairy cheaters -- or big hairy anythings, for that matter -- but it really doesn't bode well, does it?

True to form, I came in dead last in the tournament with the lowest number of points -- my name was laughingly called out as a byword and a warning as everyone commented on my level of play: Incredulously, as in"When she was my partner, we got zero points in that round. ZERO! I didn't even know it was possible to get zero points!" and in a tone of deep gloom, with "Yeah, well, she had the left bower guarded and played it at the wrong time and we totally got euchred. And I had a no-lose hand."

All I can say -- with the shreds of my dignity gathered around me -- is that other people may be able to play some whizzy cards, but not everyone can be counted on for sparkling table conversation, which happens to be my forte. Right, everybody?

Right?

Everybody?

New Year's Eve - Getting the party started

When my husband and I got married, we told each other that we would be the kind of people who always had a kid-friendly New Year's Eve. Neither one of us was the kind of person who enjoyed drunken hijinks, especially since the hijinks tend to come with the headache, the vomiting and the sense of nameless dread the following day. We prefer to digest all our party snacks the old-fashioned way.

This is where Beth and Julie come in. Beth is in the green and Julie is to her left. I, of course, am in the foreground of the photo, a place where I do not like to be, although I am somehow mercifully hidden by a large and festive pillar candle.

Beth is one of my oldest friends. We have known each other since grade school, but became particularly close when we were in college and she was studying to be a nurse and I was studying to be a teacher. Julie is her sister-in-law and we all went to the same high school, although Julie was a cheerleader and of stellar popularity and I hung out with the smart kids and sat home on Saturday nights embroidering my monogram on damask napkins for my hope chest.

Every New Year's Eve for the past thousand years, Beth and her husband, Jim (Julie's older brother), host a euchre tournament. If you're from Indiana, Michigan or Wisconsin, you understand the concept of "euchre," but if you aren't -- it's a card game, extraordinarily complicated and governed by a set of rules that couldn't be sorted out by the Geneva Convention. Conflicting protocols, such as whether the first jack or the person sitting to the north is the dealer are matters of quarrelsome debate. I stay out of it and try doggedly to remember not to trump my partner's ace.

My husband makes it a point to try to win the prize for the most points; I always aim for the booby prize. And you know what? I usually get it.

New Year's Day -- 12:07 check in

The four of us watched Bill and Megyn at Times Square for the last half hour of 2007, our annus horribilus in some ways, but in other ways, not so bad.

This is the seventeenth New Year my husband and I have welcomed in together.

We counted down the last ten seconds with the girls and then we held up our glasses -- two with sparkling cider and two with fruity Asti. My husband intoned with an ironic grimace: "To a better 2008!"

"To a better 2008," the girls and I choruses, raising our glasses.

I went out on the front porch, which is thankfully protected from the worst of the wind and rain. "HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!" I shouted into the wind.

Our neighbor across the street stepped from the shadows of her front porch and waved wildly. "HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!" she shrieked.

"FROM YOUR LIPS TO GOD'S EARS!!!!" I screeched back, and went inside, shivering.

I went out to the kitchen and found my husband staring into the depths of the wine bottle. "That sure went fast," he commented, turning it upside down. A single drop plopped into his glass.

"What? The year or the wine?" I asked, leaning my head on his chest as he put his arms around me -- a long reach.

"The wine," he said, grinning. "That was one lo-o-ong year."

"Yep," I said, and hugged him very tightly.

I have to post this: we're getting ready to play a game of Sorry! before we turn in. Oh, and I have to make the French toast -- we liked it so much on Christmas Eve that we've decided to do it again, only with an Italian loaf this time.

Happy New Year! See you in the morning!

New Year's Eve - 10:04 check in

We ate all we could hold while watching Fred MacMurray and Annette Funicello (she's such a doll) in The Shaggy Dog. The actual dog was adorable and so funny when driving the little roadster in pursuit of the spies. I have to say, for 1959, those were some pretty good special effects.

The girls and I played a game of Pounce at the dining room table while my husband switched the television back and forth between football and -- get this -- country music videos. Yes, that's my husband, a sworn foe of country music, who is watching and enjoying these videos. He's laughing his head off at some song about a guy driving his International Harvester combine. Hoo-boy.

I opened up the bottle of bubbly a few minutes ago for a sneak preview. The little tag at the store identified it as a "light and fruity Asti, with overtones of peach and apple." That sounds pretty good, actually. However, the $3.99 price tag concerned me somewhat. But $3.99 is what the ol' budget allowed for, even though I looked longingly at the roadside sign of the local swanky wine emporium that was advertizing Dom Perignon for the holidays. Maybe next year.

I took the precaution of dropping about a quarter of a teaspoonful of sugar into my champagne flute before pouring. (I love that scene in Moonstruck where Cher is celebrating with her dad and drops a sugar cube into each glass of champagne.) The cork popped agreeably, making the girls shriek with pleasure; they were in the kitchen with me, opening their own bottle of sparkling apple cider.) I handed them each a flute and they poured their cider, with Meelyn looking wistfully at me as I poured my Asti.

"I wish I were old enough to drink champagne," she said.

"Well, think of Leisl in The Sound of Music," I said comfortingly. "She wanted champagne at the Captain's engagement party with the Baroness and he told her no and she was sixteen."

"It's a long time until I'm twenty-one," she said. "Can I smell it?"

"Sure," I said, holding out my flute.

She sniffed. "Ewwwwww!!! That smells like a dirty foot!"

I smelled my flute indignantly. It smelled apple-ish and peachy. "It does not! It smells very nice!"

"Yuck!" she said, rubbing her nose violently. Aisling giggled.

"Mommy's drinking foot juice," she taunted.

I took a sip. It was very tasty. "More for me," I said with dignity.

The girls trooped off upstairs to play video games for a while. My husband and I are getting ready to tune into FoxNews's Bill Hemmer and Megyn Kelly -- they are so adorable -- in Times Square.

It's raining really hard and the wind is howling. We are very cozy here, though.

New Year's Eve -- 6:51 check in

We just got home from church -- we went to the Vigil Mass for the holy day of obligation that falls on January 1, the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God -- and it is 6:51 p.m.

The girls are upstairs putting on their pajamas.

I just came in from the kitchen, where I unwrapped the cheese ball, started pre-heating the oven for our special hors d'oeuvres I'm serving, and turned down the slow-cooker on the spicy nacho cheese dip (I plan to serve shooters of prune juice tomorrow to help us with beaucoup de fromage....) We also have some Monte Cristo sandwiches on deck, just in case anyone gets peckish later in the evening. And don't forget the (extremely cheap and probably tasting like vinegar, but oh well) "champagne" that's in the fridge!

My husband just got back from taking their dogs on their final walk of the evening. It is raining outside, getting ready to snow. He just went upstairs to change into comfy clothes.

We have about five old movies on the DVR and Sorry!, Clue and four decks of cards are sitting on the dining room table.

The four of us have been planning this night for a month and we're glad it's finally here. The girls get their next Christmas present at midnight!

Happy New Year to you all!