Journal: 12/24/06—Christmas Eve 2006

This is the fourth holiday season that Bill and I have shared together and it is shaping up to be no less glorious than the last three, except for the absence of Joann. All of the constants are there—grand intentions, miniscule money and a good dose of the Holiday Spirit(s). Even with the little cash we had and what remained on my Food Stamp card, Bill’s great ability to shop managed to land us the makings of an incomparable Christmas dinner. This year, we have a full kitchen with which to cook our dinner instead of going to the fairgrounds for the free one, and I take that as an omen for the New Year.

I work today and Christmas Day, so Bill decided to make dinner for this evening (late), when I get home. Christmas Day didn’t make sense because I wouldn’t be home until late anyway. I guess its up to family tradition and circumstance to decide which day the dinner works for everyone. At least there will be a couple of presents under the tree when we get together in the morning before I go to work.

The two weeks since we spread Joann at the Bixby Bridge were hairy. At the beginning of this week, I went a little manic (or a lot, as there really isn’t any middle ground there) and almost committed economic suicide by quitting my job for a couple of months. However, sanity quickly returned and I realized that what I really needed was to get more money into my hands and break this cycle of poverty. I’m doing that by moving Bill into my apartment so I don’t have to pay his rent. Neither of us sees any real problem with that, as we spend all of our time together when I’m not working anyway. That move should give me an additional $125.00 a week that I can forward to buying things I need, like a couple of new shirts, expanded medications my doctor wants me to start taking and maybe a feeling of actually getting somewhere in life instead of being trapped with nowhere to go.

The holidays have been good to me in other ways as well. The owners and the property managers both gave me $100.00 bonuses this year and the extra money will help get us through the end of the month (always a crisis-fest) and the end of the year. I was able—thanks to the cash—to buy Bill an actual Christmas gift he wanted, instead of merely good wishes. There was a certain amount of guilt around the present he bought for me (see below).

With all this in mind, and looking forward to a great ham dinner in the making, I bid all of you, my consistent and inconsistent, readers, a very merry Christmas and a good night.

Christmas Started Early

Bill, it turns out, has been planning for the Holidays for months, while I hadn’t had a thought in my head about it at the beginning of the month. After some discussion about what I wanted for Christmas, he offered to buy me a new color printer, albeit, not an expensive one. Apparently, he had been saving his nickels and dimes for six months and had a hundred dollars he could put toward it. My own color printer of three years bit the dust six months ago and I have not had the wherewithal to replace it.

On December 1, Bill drove me to Office Depot in Edgewater Plaza at Sand City where the printers he had looked over were on sale. Originally, I was simply going to look at the low-end printers, the ones that would print color sufficiently well to make business cards and our holiday cards. It turned out that Office Depot was having a clearance sale on medium- to high-end printers that would also print lab-quality photos. I found a nice Canon Pixima for $150.00 reduced to $80.00, and that left over enough of Bill’s hundred dollars to purchase an extended, three-year replacement warranty. Given that my last printer died out-of-warranty and it wasn’t worth fixing (could have bought a new printer for that price), nor could I have afforded to replace it, three years of replacement security on a color printer seemed like a very good deal.

Bill really knew how to cheer me up, considering the impending (December 9) releasing of Joann into the wild at Bixby Bridge. The new printer gave me a new project to concentrate on—creating and printing our Hanukkah and Christmas cards.

Christmas Tree 2006

What would our holiday cards be without a picture of Bill and I in front of our Christmas tree? The next day (December 2) we went to Cardinalli’s tree lot, a block from my apartment at the back of the fairgrounds. Bill found a nice four-foot fir at a reasonable price, $22.00 including the base with watering bowl attached. The way Bill told it, he convinced the owner that it was really a three-foot tree of the same price and the owner never caught wise to it. Thanks Bill, we are poor as church mice this season and every bit helps.

We were at the lot assisting the motel property managers in finding their own tree for the lobby and they had brought their pickup truck. After they finished locating a tree, both trees went into the bed of the truck and we unloaded them at their respective places—my apartment and the front lobby.

I went to work and Bill got busy with decorating the tree. He does better when no one is around and he can take his time. We used Joann’s ornaments, same as we had on all the trees before, but the lights turned out to be a disappointment, as they didn’t light up this year. Bill bought a new set of lights; lights that had sixteen twinkle variations, and he used those to great effect.

By the time I came home, the tree was up and twinkling, laden with Joann’s ornaments from her past with many more left in the box. All the trees we had before were five feet and a lot bushier, but try as Bill did, there simply wasn’t space on our smaller fir to place them all. The only thing I didn’t really like were the new lights—the twinkle was nice, but there were only red, green and blue bulbs. The non-functional set also contained yellow bulbs that I thought brightened up the tree more. In a couple of days though, I would salvage some of the yellow bulbs from the "dead" string and swap them, in equal amount, with some of the red, green and blue bulbs to get that brighter effect.

Memories of the First Snug Harbor Christmas

With Christmas Eve upon us and I sitting at work on an uneventful night, there was time to reflect on Christmas’s past. Joann’s not being here makes it lonely for me, but Bill’s presence mitigates the loneliness some. I miss her laughter, the energy she put into trimming the tree with Bill, the "almost as good as a fireplace" moments where we would sit on the couch bathed in the light reflected off her Christmas ornaments.

Our first Christmas the three of us spent together in the greatness of Snug Harbor was magical. None of us had had an actual tree in years, and our first year in Snug Harbor gave us that, as well as many presents, most not materialistic. We were friends, allies against personal poverty and homelessness, feeling a non-alcoholic warmth that only those who stand together can sustain.

This year, we have a tree again, and there is a present or two under it. This year though, it’s just Bill and I. No feminine laughter, only the memory of Christmas’s past. I know the dinner will be wonderful; I sniffed at it every time I went back to the apartment and the time memorable. Just not as memorable as those in the past when there were three.