It’s the holiday gathering itself that is so appealing
- Scott Daniels: We Ate Well and Cheaply
- November 26, 2020
- 777
“The Sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal.” — C.S. Lewis.
There is a standard trope that appears in movies — mostly horror movies — where some particularly ghoulish scene is followed immediately by another in which we find the same characters at a dining table sawing away at an oversized, overly rare cut of beef. We’ve hacked the head off a vampire and now we are gathered at this tavern sharing a prime rib from which we must hack our own dinner. I think it’s meant to elicit a groan and probably kill off audience appetites, but it always makes me hungry, probably because I’ve never had to actually dispatch a vampire.
I think it’s the gathering itself that is so appealing, no matter the circumstances. My own fantasy holidays involve either oak-beamed ancient hostelries with red-cheeked innkeepers bringing bottomless tankards of ale or smarty pants cocktail parties with too many slick dishes made of chicken liver and plenty of gin and lipstick-stained cigarettes. Obviously, neither is practical so there’s nothing to do but soldier on through cheese balls and Pfaltzgraff.
When I ran across the C.S. Lewis quote above, I took a screen shot and saved it. I thought it perfectly expressed, by omission, our absolutely ruined year of 2020.
Last New Year’s Eve saw me at the first such party I’ve attended in ages, happily smooching in the brand-new year with friends thoughtful enough to offer pork and kraut. What if we’d all known what lay ahead?
Just a few short weeks ago, I mentioned in passing the number of COVID-19 dead in the U.S. was pushing toward a quarter-million, never expecting my prediction would come to pass in such a shockingly short time and making a half-million entirely conceivable.
I now know at least a dozen people, personally, who are sick with this dreadful thing, people I care very much about, and that makes my anger verge on rage at the unnecessary outcomes we are seeing as the year draws to a close.
I want my year back. I insist, like a Karen at the complaint counter, my destroyed year be compensated for with another happy one tacked on somewhere else, and I’m not signing any release forms, either.
Will there be office Christmas parties in 2020? I remember some humdingers and am grateful I can’t remember them too specifically. Even if we mask up, that one guy who always has one drink too many will shed his mask to sing naughty carols and infect everyone, along with the sadder but wiser people sneaking off to the bedroom coat pile to make mischief.
But it is my nature to be cheerful and look for a way out when cheerfulness is in short supply. What can we do to please the sun looking down on our laughter? If we can’t get together for a meal, let’s find new things to make and eat and share the results so that others can have the same experience. Maybe office Christmas parties will have to be bundled-up outdoor affairs around a fire pit with plenty of room to stay away from people.
What if we plotted out the dinner we’d like to have with family or friends and had the stuff all sent to their house as a gift? It sounds hard to pull off but certainly superior to a dinner via Zoom.
Barring the nick-of-time arrival of the newly promising vaccines, maybe we will have to spread Christmas out through the whole of December this year, with extra effort to connect with family in different ways across distances too frightening to cross safely in person.
I’m going to stake my plague vampires and cut to the roast beef somehow.