ESSAY
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Creaky Joints
Attention, please. May I have your attention? I have an important announcement to make: I, Deanna Kizis, of sound mind and not very sound body, am declaring to my family and those I love that Christmas is cancelled.
There will be no – I repeat no – Christmas dinner at Casa de Kizis. I shall not be serving prime rib roast, nor crisped potatoes, nor salad bright with pomegranate seeds and homemade vinaigrette. There shall be no apple pie. Hot chocolate isn’t happening. And neither is, if I say so myself, my truly incredible egg nog.
You, my wonderful mom, father, and sisters, may not darken my door. Nor can your boyfriends. And to our closest friends, whose child and my daughter have been friends since they were “in bellies,” I have only one thing to say: Stay away.
So, no Christmas. Unless, of course, you are a child. You, o blameless one, will find your stocking hung by the chimney with care and St Nicolas – who I’m pretty sure will do the necessary social distancing to make this work –will be there.
Now that we’re all on the same page -- that there shall be no Christmas -- let’s discuss why this is the case.
Make it stand out.
First, I have both asthma and an autoimmune disease, which means I have to stay away from people I adore most during this loathsome and terrifying time. And should you attempt to remind
me, loved ones, that we live in Southern California, and therefore could technically have Christmas outside, socially distanced, I still say, NEIGH!
Sorry, that was Rudolph, who’s complaining again that he has to wear a mask. I meant nay as in, no. Forget it. Not a snowball’s chance in, well, you know.
Let’s go back to this past Thanksgiving, shall we. It was in my backyard. There was turkey. There was stuffing. There was pie. And, how do I put this nicely? It sucked. Dad was grumpy the second he walked in. Mom was trying to put a good face on it. My daughter was cold. And I was in terror as my father marched up to me, and thrust a bottle of Merlot from his unsanitized hands toward my clean ones, exclaiming, “Just take it!”
I took it and stomped into the kitchen like the child I sometimes morph into when you all are around. Cue the eyeroll from my dad, followed by me grinding my teeth, with my mom – his ex wife – wisely deciding to stay out of it. We were off to the turkey races.
Frankly, we’re all lucky to be alive.
Nevertheless, it turns out it’s a chore cooking Thanksgiving dinner for six people when you’re the only one allowed in the kitchen. It is, in fact, hard to have conversation when your dear family is scattered around a swimming pool – which acted as our watery demilitarized zone, since that was the only way to properly space us out. Meanwhile, not only was it a brisk fifty degrees outside,
there was a Santa Ana Wind Advisory with gusts going up to 70 mph and fire danger warnings in the Angeles National Forest that’s less than ten miles from my house. Oh, that. This is fine. Right?
And then there is the stress we collectively all feel. THE STRESS. The stress of worrying about our jobs, our homes, our medical insurance, the smoke we’re inhaling as the hills are ablaze. All the pumpkin pie and red wine doesn’t really help, does it?
The truth is, I’m a people pleaser by nature, so telling you you’re not invited isn’t a pleasant thing to do. As the saying goes, when you stop people pleasing, people stop being pleased. And what makes all this vigilant compliance a harder, I think, is that I suffer from an autoimmune disease you can’t see. It’s easy to write me off as a paranoid nut. It’s easy for the people I love – and who love me – to forget that I face a risk of serious complications if I were to get infected with Covid
19. Do I wish that was top of mind every time I see them? Sure. Do I blame them – knowing that they have their own stressful challenges right now? Not really.
And so, in closing I would like to propose a different sort of Christmas: Let’s have a Zoom call and toast our health and good fortune, as gratitude is always necessary in difficult times. We have food. We have homes. We have toilet paper. We can share a nog from a distance – although mine will surely be more delicious – while we watch the children opening presents sent via Amazon.
And then we can give one another the very best gift one can hope for in 2020 – some space.