Cooking with Spam

Acknowledge my mail
Sincere Proposition
My Warmest Regards
Pls assistance

You might think all these are the subject lines of spam. And you’d be right. But as I’m checking my email and cleaning out my junk mail folder tonight while I wait for my sweet potato crunch to finish cooking, these subject lines seem more indicative of the conflicted nature of the holidays than anything resembling a proposition to inherit an abandoned multimillion dollar account. I never understood how people could hate the holidays—I loved the cooking, the decorating, the visits with family, watching the kids play with the cousins (except when they were trying to kill each other). And yes, presents were good too. My only conflict with Christmas then was that my birthday also happens to be Christmas day. You really get stiffed on presents that way, let me tell you, and forget about birthday parties.

But in recent years, when I’ve often been the one responsible for a lot of the holiday planning, cooking, hosting, and cleaning, I’ve started to see why others didn’t like it. And this year, I am just plain cranky, and I’m not even sure why. But rather than looking forward to Christmas as I usually do, instead I’m struggling with this feeling that I see all these people all year long—now I have to spend my one holiday on them too?

Maybe work is getting too busy—and I do have a big paper to write over Christmas, so that doesn’t help. Maybe it’s that it’s been years since I was able to spend holidays doing the kinds of things I used to enjoy so much about the season. When we were in grad school and really broke, I made all the Christmas presents—one year I’d cross-stitch ornaments, the next I painted and molded plaster of Paris Santa Clauses, and I handsewed felt stockings one year for something like ten people. And this was on top of keeping up with my photo albums. I loved that part of my life, and it’s just gone now.

I don’t know what it is. All I do know is that it’s really late, we have to get up early to travel to Chris’s dad’s for an early Thanksgiving, I can smell my wonderful cranberry apple sauce and I want to sleep in tomorrow and send the food along with Chris and the kids—with my warmest regards.