01.06.06 - 2:20 p.m.

I did nothing to memorialize the holidays during the holidays, and I feel out of sorts about that. Christmas was more than a list of presents and a half-dozen cookie recipes thrown together around the rest of the business of life, and it was more than a pair of afternoons spent listening to every ringtone on the Cingular website, until the musical snippets ran together in a weird, badly edited amalgam of noise and lyrics taken out of context. [If you care to know, I chose O Mio Babbino Caro from Gianni Schicchi, Puccini's great one-act opera. The aria is everywhere, absolutely gorgeous, lyrical, delicate - all of the popera (hee) peeps record it somewhere. It's impossible to resist. I also picked out a snippet
from Mozart's Symphony No. 25. Cingular has very little from which to chose by way of classical ringtones, and my brother picked out the absolute best pop/rock ringtone (the beginning of Franz Ferdinand's Take Me Out).]

And - and, what then?

Christmas: more than cookies, more than ringtones, less than perfect, but still perfectly fine. My mom got (uncharacteristically) drunk on Friday the 23rd. She had too much red wine while waiting for me to show up for Friday pizza dinner, and then I didn't volunteer to help out drinking the wine at dinner because I didn't want it to interfere with the antibiotic shot I had the day before. Is there some interaction between alcohol and antibiotics? I have this personal convinction that alcohol cancels antibiotics out, after drinking to excess at a wedding with an open bar and a shuttle back to the hotel some years ago while on antibiotics for one of my interminable ear infections, and waking up with a raging reassertion of ear pain in lieu of a hangover.

No wine for me, but plenty for mom, who isn't used to drinking so much and tends to get tipsy from a glass or two. She got drunk and cried, because she misses her sister. She cried at the end of almost every family dinner we had in December, for much the same reason. After Thanksgiving, she declared that we could each pick one kind of cookie, and that was all she would make. A week later at dinner, she told Dad and I that she would make other cookies - scotchies and jellies, would David pick jellies? Linzer tortes - and biscotti. Susie always made biscotti. She started crying.

Susie did always make biscotti, and when she flew down (instead of driving) she shipped the biscotti, which arrived in plastic containers full of broken cookie pieces. An absence is a different sort of presence, but still a presence.

In the end, mom made none of the "extra" cookies. She baked one (new) kind of cookie for a cookie exchange at work, and my Dad, who also made the family fruitcakes, made the rest of the cookies: scotchies at mom's request, mexican chocolate cookies at my request, and thumbprint jellies (with red currant jelly, as my grandmother's recipe calls for) at David's request. I threw together three kinds of cookies from a master dough (orange-almond, chocolate-walnut, and chocolate-ginger) and made pecan balls using hazelnuts in place of pecans and frangelico in place of rum. I purchased a $25 bottle of frangelico to make 1 batch of cookies. I suppose I'll use it next year, too.

Two years ago, when mom was undergoing chemotherapy, Susie refused to attend Christmas Eve mass with us because she thought my mother was being foolish, exposing herself to all the germs in the air at church. Last year, we all piled in to Charleston to attend the 5:00 p.m. mass at Sacred Heart, the co-cathedral, and sat in the sacristy because the church was full. We watched Father Sadie on close-circuit TV and shuffled uncomfortably as more people piled into the church, dressed in finery, tucked into an odd corner. Father Sadie wants a new diocese for southern West Virginia and encouraged everyone to "register" with the Church. He knows there are 500 unregistered Catholics in Charleston alone. - Someone should have made Father Sadie bishop, I suppose, but then I wouldn't get to listen to him hustle for Catholics at Christmas Eve mass.

This year, we went to Sacred Heart for Christmas Eve mass. I'm Catholic-lite - a deist (more or less, sometimes more, sometimes less), who dislikes the Church's stance on "social" issues like gay marriage and gay priests and women priests - which seem to me to be so far removed from the the spirit of the New Testament - of the core of the New Testament (to be fair, I'm not a fan of SaulPaul) - and who prefers the Church's stance on peace and social justice issues - poverty, equality, the dignity of living, breathing human beings. I've said this before, but I feel the need to repeat it everytime I try to explain myself: I'm a buffet Catholic. I'm not one of those nuts. But here's why the Church is necessary: the discipline to be less self-involved, the grace to leave the weird little circle of one's spiraling thoughts, the - except most priests are pretty bad, and Church is terribly boring, and I don't like kneeling. I keep resolving to attend, and then never go. I like Father Sadie, though, and his homilies - his discussion of the different treatments of the birth of Christ in the gospels, for example.

Ah, so: this year, we went early, and we managed to scoop up some good seats in the Sanctuary. The lights were dim, so I couldn't read my book during the hour we waited for mass to begin. Instead, I eavesdropped on the woman+daughter behind us, who were being catty about other people's clothes. "I can't believe she wore that. That looks like something dead crawled - " Et cetera. The organist was excellent, the music was fine (although I prefer to end Christmas Eve mass with Joy to the World rather than - whatever they chose. It's such a great carol, and it suits the end of mass well), the church was lovely. Like last year, mom fell asleep during mass. Although - last year, both Susie and Mom fell asleep during mass, and Susie started snoring.

And then after mass - the world is dark, and all the stores are closed. The streets are rivers of moving headlights, veins and arteries; with the leaves off the trees, you can see the guts of things, especially at night, illuminated. The best part about Christmas: the stillness, the fact that Wal-Mart closes and all the employees go home for one darn night. There we were, one little bullet of togetherness in a dark car, illuminated by the dashboard lights and the flashing shadows of passing headlights, singing Christmas carols as we always do, although Susie wasn't there to warble off key, struggling through her ruined voice and her cigarette cough to be (as always) better than everyone else. I always hated that in the past, but I missed it this year.

I don't believe in the persistence of souls - I don't think I believe in the persistence of a stunted, limited, endless and transcendent souls (who would want to be this self-conscious for eternity?), but if there is such a thing, I hope Susie's found an afterlife where she's better than everyone else, and everyone knows it.