White (and spotted) Christmas

This year's Christmas is my last one before I get married. That lends everything an air of even-more-than-usual significance, as I wonder when I will next be among my family at Christmastime.

However, this Christmas has so far refused to cooperate with the sentimentalism I'm attaching to it. It will be a white Christmas for sure -- the first one in my memory (here, I mean) since I was five. When I woke up this morning it was snowing hard, but I wasn't surprised: we have been pretty much snowed in since last Wednesday. My dad has managed to make it out for church, to pick me up from the airport, and to get groceries, but now the roads look even worse. Apparently the Department of Transportation refuses to salt the roads because it is bad for the environment, and they are using rubber-edged plows so as not to damage the roads, but these pack the snow rather than scooping it away. Downtown, police officers are covering their beat on foot, because of the very real danger that they will slide down the steep hills and into the bay.

I always wanted a white Christmas as a child, but the state of the roads never occurred to me. This year, there is no way we could get to midnight Mass like I wanted to, and I am only hoping that daytime Mass won't be impossible too. Getting a Christmas tree, something that my mom has finally agreed to without any fuss, is also not going to happen.

The other trouble of the snow is that we have not been able to get Joseph to the doctor. He was recovering from an ear infection when suddenly he got a fever again -- and spots. The most likely diagnosis is the measles, though we are not sure. On the phone, the doctor said there was no point in trying to get to her office, since there's not much you can do for a virus. All we can do is try to keep the germs away from the baby -- a mammoth task. Luckily we older ones are either vaccinated or have had the measles. But all the younger four are still at risk.

>sigh< Yes, this will definitely be a Christmas to remember. But don't think I'm complaining. I remember some of our nicest Christmases involving unexpected problems. There was the Christmas we couldn't afford a Christmas tree, and put all our presents under a potted plant. And the year the roads were icy, and we had to leave our car at the bottom of the hill, with the Christmas tree tied on top, while we walked home. The year I was at boarding school for Christmas, coming home for only three days once Christmas was over -- and during those three days Joseph was born. And other holidays too -- like the Thanksgiving I had the flu and got some unexpected bonding time with my dad when we both stayed home from the feast and watched football together. My seventeenth birthday, when my brother and I got lost downtown trying to get to my party, and it was 100 degrees inside our non-air-conditioned car, but we played the Kitaro album and made up fantasy stories to go with the songs.

No, I can see that a few years from now, we'll pull out the pictures of Joseph looking like a leopard and us decorating the windows and the banisters, and we will smile, saying, "Wasn't that a Christmas to remember?"