I was somewhat disappointed when I opened up the box labeled “Blue Balls.” What I’d had in mind was something truly blue—royal blue, I suppose you’d call it. These were more turquoise than deep blue—some shiny and some frosted. I didn’t use all the balls in the box, but I think I hung most of them. Then I filled in the blanks on the tree with dozens of white poinsettia blossoms and punctuated those with a flock of silver bows and ribbons.
I was standing there asking Sarah what she thought of my decorating job. （Yes, I do talk to my dog when no one else is around.） That’s when the doorbell rang. Sarah beat me to the door, but due to our security system’s monitor in the entryway hall, I knew without cracking the door that the person pressing the bell was Ken, our regular Roto-Rooter guy, come to present his bill.
After putting Sarah on a sit-and-stay command, I opened the door. “All done?” I asked.
“Yup,” Ken said.
“What was it,” I asked, “a tree root of some kind?”
Ken glanced at me and then sent a reproachful glare in Sarah’s direction. “I wish,” he said. “By the time I was able to scope it, it looked to me as though someone had tried to flush a gigantic dog turd down a toilet. The damned thing got hung up on an ice dam in the main sewer pipe and stopped everything cold—at this point very cold,” he added with a chuckle. “Fortunately, I finally managed to break it up. That’ll be three-fifty—card, cash, or check?”
I used my Amex and paid the $350 with a happy heart, grateful as all hell that Mel hadn’t been home to hear the cause and effect, both of which, as it turns out, were entirely my fault. Then I went back to decorating. I lined up the angels, Santas, and nutcrackers on the kitchen island in preparation to actually distributing them. Then I opened the linens box. The top layer of that was a selection of holiday-themed guest towels. I knew from past experience that those needed to be rolled up and put in the basket on the counter in the powder room. Then I sorted through the holiday tablecloths, runners, and doilies. Once I had those on various flat surfaces throughout the house, I deployed the angels, nutcrackers, and Santas, placing them in sad little groupings of three, like so many trios of mismatched carolers.
It wasn’t exactly the elegant effect Mel usually produces. My results were more ham-fisted than beautiful, but I figured Mel could do some embellishing once she got home. In the meantime, giving myself a pat on the back, I settled with a newly made cup of coffee into my favorite chair by the gas-log fireplace to survey my handiwork.
The whole process had become more or less a meditation on Christmases past, first the memory of that Christmas-tree screwup with Karen and the kids and then going all the way back to Christmases when I was a kid. My mother was a World War II–era unwed mother. She was engaged to my father and pregnant with me when he died in a motorcycle accident. Rather than give me up for adoption, she had—against her father’s wishes—chosen to keep me and raise me on her own. We lived in a small two-bedroom apartment over a bakery in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood. She supported us by working as a seamstress, making clothing on a treadle Singer sewing machine next to a worktable that took up a good third of her bedroom.
Naturally she was always busiest in November and December as clients wanted new duds for holiday events. On many of those cold winter nights, she was still up working long after I went to bed, but at some point she’d be done, and the next morning something magical would have happened. I’d come out of my bedroom and find that the living room and dining room had been transformed overnight into a Christmas wonderland. We always went to church on Christmas Eve and then hung our stockings on the mantel of our nonworking fireplace. Christmas morning both of our stockings would be filled, but it wasn’t until after I was old enough to get a job as an usher at the Bagdad Theatre that she finally opened her stocking on Christmas morning to find something she herself hadn’t put there.
I was sitting there, half drifting and half dozing, thinking about what an unsung hero my mother had been, when the doorbell rang again. Since I wasn’t expecting any visitors, I thought maybe Ken had come back to give me a revised bill of some kind, but the security screen in the hallway revealed the presence of a stranger wearing a long woolen coat—unusual in the Pacific Northwest—and carrying what appeared to be an old-fashioned satchel. He was a handsome-looking guy in his late twenties or early thirties. The distinctive white collar around his neck told me he was also most likely a priest. That made me wonder. Was the local Catholic parish dispatching priests out to pass collection plates door-to-door these days?