The meaning of Christmas

Pinky (whose more respectable name is Raphael) currently despises me. He is being treated for giardia with metronidazole, which is the nastiest tasting stuff in the universe. Take it from someone who tasted it. Nasty, nasty, nasty. Pinky is a faint flame-point Siamese cross who is very very shy, and is destined for the long-term cat room once the giardia is cleared up. He won't take a capsule, which means he gets his metro in liquid form, twice a day. This is not helping the taming process at all. When I open his cage, his little ears go flat. He doesn't have a mean bone in his body, so while he'll do anything to avoid me, he never swats or bites. I feel like a torturer. I cannot begin to express what this stuff tastes like. All I did was put my tongue to it and I began to gag. He gets a cc twice a day. Poor guy.

Shopping was almost painless today, which actually was a bit frightening. There were tons of parking spaces at the mall right near the entrance. While there were lots of people there, I only had to wait a short while for a salesperson to help me at one store, and every where else there were no lines at all.

On the way home, I realized it was Christmas Eve, so if I needed anything from the grocery store, I needed to get it before 6:00 pm.

Which reminded me of the very first family Christmas that Mark and I hosted.

We had recently purchased our first house. Mark had the day off, and I was working dispatch for a police department. We both worked odd shifts and were used to shopping at the stores during the evening and sometimes even late at night. We had grown used to grocery stores that were open 24 hours a day. And we both usually had to work holidays, and just assumed others did, too.

Mark came into town to purchase Christmas dinner supplies on Christmas Eve...and discovered that the grocery stores had closed at 6:00. He came to see me at work to break the news. I refused to believe it. I got on the phone and called every store.

And indeed, they were all closed. We had my entire family coming the next day, and we hadn't even purchased a turkey. We didn't have much money, but we had saved to be able to have my family over. I was very proud to finally be grown up enough to have the family over for this yearly gathering.

Then Mark said "I can spin some pizzas..."

No way, NO WAY, was my family eating pizza on this very first Christmas!

So I picked up the phone and called my boss, who had also been my landlord in the past. I counted him and his wife Cathy as friends as well as supervisors. But he was still, well, my boss, you know.

He had once made a joke about having two turkeys in his freezer. Maybe he still had an extra one. Mark was the one who was now appalled. He couldn't believe I might beg Christmas dinner off of a variety of people. But I knew Norm and Cathy. They were the kind of people who would think that the very reason they had a second turkey was precisely to help someone out in a situation like this.

Also, I was a police dispatcher. You had two tools. A radio. And a phone. I'd learned that there were very few dilemmas that could not be solved via the use of a phone. (Now of course, add computers, video survellience, and the Internet).

When I called Norm, his extended family was visiting. I could hear the laughter in the background when they realized that Susan had called to be saved from a serious case of bad planning. It was friendly laughter, all the same.

He told me to come on over. They had not only an extra turkey, but supplies for an entire second Christmas dinner. Right down to an extra can of cranberry relish and stuffing! Maybe it wasn't stuffing. Maybe they had potatos. I think they even had a frozen apple pie that we didn't need because my mother was bringing dessert.

So Mark and I drove on over when I got off my shift at 11:00 pm that night. The party there was still in full swing, and our arrival made for more gaity. The pantry was thrown open. We went home laden with supplies and a true Christmas gift...the gift of friendship. They refused to take any money. And the next day, my family had a wonderful Christmas dinner, with all the trimmings.

Norm passed away last year from cancer. He was only 47. If ever a man deserved to live to be a hundred, it was Norm. He was the kindest, most generous person I've ever met.

In that story somewhere, is the meaning of Christmas.