How to Survive the Holidays and Even Enjoy Them as a Singleton (part I)

One of my favorite films, Jodie Foster’s “Home for the Holidays,” was filmed in my own hometown of Charm City and there is a quote in that movie that seems especially applicable to the plight of the singleton during the holiday season. The line was delivered by the late, great Anne Bancroft when describing what she was thankful for during her family’s Thanksgiving celebration: “I’m giving thanks that we don’t have to go through this for another year. Except we do, because those bastards went and put Christmas right in the middle, just to punish us.”

Now let me state for the record, particularly to any of my wonderful family members who may be reading this post, the above quote and this post in general are not reflective of our recent celebration of Thanksgiving which was wonderful and remarkably free from conflict. Not to say that all of our holidays have been similarly fun and non-combative, but this past one was pretty swell.

But in the hustle and bustle of preparing for the holidays, I am unavoidably exposed to scenes of parental bliss as my friends’ kids start being extra good in case Santa is taking notes. That sometimes gets to me as do the scenes of yuletide romances largely from holiday movies and commercials. You know the type, like a commercial for a jewelry store with a couple snowshoeing to a picturesque cabin in the woods and they happen upon a Saint Bernard and tied to his collar is a spectacular diamond ring. Or one of the standard plot lines of cheesy made for television holiday movies that I can’t seem to stop watching, where inevitably the plucky and yet confused single gal snags a man over the course of a few days in December.

In that spirit, I thought it might behoove me to think up some helpful hints for singletons attempting to enjoy the holidays (as I did with singletons attempting to enjoy weddings, parts 1 and 2). First of all, as with the weddings, don’t think of the holidays as something to survive. Although the hellish sprint for the finish line can have you cursing at random strangers in the mall as you attempt to grab the one remaining present that doesn’t suck, the holidays aren’t supposed to be about that. The period from Thanksgiving through Christmas (I’ll save New Year’s for later) can be a wonderful time. Gatherings with friends and family, the crackle of leaves underfoot, the smell of a fireplace, hot cocoa, and those songs that everyone can sing along to – these are things to be treasured.

Secondly, don’t think that just because your friends are not of the singleton variety that their holidays are like a series of festive Christmas cards, complete with carolers, cookies, and cherubic children. Sadly the holidays can be stressful for almost everyone. Children aren’t always on their best behavior, even when you assure them that Santa is trained like a heat-seeking missile on their every move, waiting to put them on the naughty list. Spouses aren’t always thoughtful or romantic and with the wrong spouse or partner, it’s far better to be the one singleton at the Christmas party. While I once found short-lived romance at a Christmas party, I always find that if I manage to get over being alone at holiday soirees, I can have enough fun to laugh myself silly.

Third, do something kind for someone else. In fact, do that as much as you can and not just during the holidays. It sounds hokey but it’s true—volunteering your time and talents in the service of others can be as wonderful for you as it is for them. My role model in this, and in so many other things, is my sister. I don’t think a day goes by when she doesn’t help at least one person. In addition to keeping yours truly sane, she volunteers at her church garden, the food pantry for the hungry, the children’s hospital, and does so much for all of our family that it’s a wonder she has time to do anything else. While I can’t compete with her record of service, I find that when I volunteer at the nursing home or go see the children at the hospital, it makes it easier to see the miracles in life and much more difficult to complain about my own troubles.

Fourth, spend actual quality time with your family and friends. I don’t mean the obligatory dinners where you grimace your way through the meal, exchange a few pleasantries, and go on about your lives.  I mean, hop in the car with a few of them and check out Christmas lights. Grab some of them and bake some cookies. Go to your little cousin’s holiday play, check out a concert, do whatever, but take some time from the running around and craziness, and savor the company of family and friends.

My favorite festive traditions past and present include:

• Christmas shopping, kettle corn munching, and Cracker Barrel visiting with my sister, cousins, and niece at the Maryland Christmas festival
• Willingly and joyfully locking myself in the car with a sibling or two or more and careening through the decorated streets, caroling tone deafly into the night
• Making excessive amounts of peanut brittle with my sister and niece, to the point where, much to our dogs’ joy, we are covered in a fine layer of peanut dust and sugar
• Going to mass Christmas Eve with my parents, aunt, brother, sister-in-law, and nephew. I used to play the flute at these masses when my grandfather was still with us, and now I still sit in wonder at the harpist or violinist or the seniors’ bell choir, and how we started the service in darkness with only candles lighting the way.
• Riding in a Honda civic driven by a clown (sister), with Santa (brother) in the passenger seat, and surrounded by fellow elves (niece and friend) through the streets of Baltimore to visit the wonderful children at the hospital and seeing people’s faces when they see the menagerie of characters smushed in the car
• Decorating the church where my parents were married and us kids were baptized, with siblings, nieces, nephews, and my dad hanging holly, arranging rows of poinsettias, and setting up the Nativity scene. Especially the time when we couldn’t find the angel and had to check every confessional, nook, and cranny, and run through the church basement exploring the mysteries of the parish. And changing the dress of the Infant of Prague statue, sometimes with the clothes that were made by our grandmother
• The annual Christmas brunch with my three best friends from high school, complete with pictures, presents, and a little bit of the bubbly. Husbands and kids get added into the preview but the main event is still sitting and chatting with these girls who have known me forever
• Decorating the tree with my parents, when both were in healthy body and spirit, and how they always got me a new ornament each year. One year it was a tiny basket of plums –those were my favorite fruit at the time—and another year it was a mini grand piano
• Seeing my beloved canine happily tearing into his presents, fluff everywhere, while simultaneously attempting to shake the Santa hat off his head
• Breakfast Christmas morning with my neighbors as we fortify ourselves for family gatherings and running hither and yon, and my neighbor usually makes an extra pancake for the dogs
• Watching “White Christmas” for the hundredth time with a couple of the wackiest gals this side of Pine Tree, Vermont. This tradition includes multiple holiday beverages, a 2 foot tall animated Bing Crosby doll purchased for me by those same ladies, and focusing on/ridiculing selected movie cast members.

With this in mind, I must call it a night as I have to be at the airport at an ungodly hour tomorrow (driven of course by my wondrous sister). Hopefully by the time I get back from this rather poorly timed work trip, I’ll think up a few ways to survive New Year’s, but if you have any tips to offer, please do as I’ll take all the help I can get.

Cheater, Cheater, Pumpkin Eater

During this time of sappy holiday movies, I had to arm myself with a healthy dose of cynicism or I won’t make it through Thanksgiving let alone through New Year’s. Yes, the holidays can be an especially rough time of year for all types of people, not just singletons, but as a chronic singleton, I must say that a lot of the holidays seem designed to have a person’s non-plus-one status make that person rock back and forth in the fetal position, shotgunning whipped cream straight from the aerosol can.

In order to combat the idea that being with anyone is better than being alone, I will touch upon one of the many--nay, metric buttloads—of examples of why this is patently untrue. Sadly enough, one of these comes from my own hometown of Charm City. A native son of Baltimore developed an app that helps people cheat. Sadly, when searching for the details on this cheating app, I found even more examples of infidelity being glamorized in the form of websites where customers can meet plenty of cheating wives, husbands, etc. But let’s get back to that app – it lets users hide texts, phone calls, and voicemails from specified numbers in your contact list. The developer of the app says that not all people that download it use it to cheat and that it can actually facilitate communications that can help save a relationship. Seriously.

In keeping with the theme, a friend said I could relay some of her recent encounters with gentlemen who probably could have benefited from using the app. First off, a guy who was a friend with benefits (FWB) type that she had reconnected with via email and was planning to meet up and maybe go on a trip together. The FWB swore that he wasn't seeing anyone else, but my friend was more than a little doubtful that this was the case. Now, FWB was either a complete moron or was trying to break off a relationship, as when he emailed my friend to plan for their trip he sent the email to both my friend and his girlfriend. Oops! The girlfriend quickly responded back to both my friend and FWB saying that she guessed she wasn’t supposed to see that.

Then the next day, the girlfriend sent one of the classiest and iciest emails I’ve ever seen. My bumbling attempt to recreate it will in no way convey how cool this email was. Basically, the girlfriend addressed the FWB (and cc’d my friend) and indicated that she was happy to inform him that his schedule would be free to take the planned trip with my friend, as the girlfriend would no longer be available to travel with him. But she did it in such a manner, where all the etiquette advice columnists would have found favor with the professional and cordial nature of the wording, at the same time so completely decimating the FWB. I pictured her typing out the words, perhaps wearing elbow length gloves and smoking a cigarette from one of those fancy holder thingies, and maybe wearing a hat that partially obscured her eyes. Then she clicked send and went on about her life.

Not too long after this incident, my friend had started chatting with this guy from her gym. Like most singletons, she checked to see that his ring finger was bare, and then they started emailing. They were just about to meet up for coffee and non-gym interaction, when instead of receiving an email from him confirming the time and location, she received an email from his wife saying that if she wanted to go out for coffee, it would have to be with the wife and his child. My friend was shocked and guessed that his wife must have been checking his email. What is even more ridiculous is that a few weeks later, the guy actually had the nerve to email my friend again to see how she was doing.

Now I’ve been approached by guys that I thought might actually have been married before (see Is a Picture Still Worth 1000 Words IfTaken with a Cell Phone Camera?) but I’ve never been confronted with actual proof in the form of a living, breathing, and raging spouse. That’s why my policy is never to contact or respond to a message from guys on dating websites who don’t post their picture because they are likely not posting pictures to prevent their spouses and significant others from finding them on said dating sites, but sadly there’s no way to be sure.

Enter a fantastic, and probably highly impossible/illegal, idea that was thought up by yours truly and one of my best friends from high school. We wanted some way that married men would find it impossible to remove their wedding rings. I don’t think there’s an app for that yet, but here were the following options we brainstormed:

1. When the guy tries to remove his ring, there’s an effect like when you try to steal money from a bank –namely, an exploding dye packet permanently marks his entire ring finger purple.
2. When the guy tries to remove his ring, sirens wail and maybe some sort of flashing light – kind of like the sound that British cop cars and ambulances make.
3. When the guy tries to remove his ring, there is some sort of chemical that is injected into his bloodstream that either makes him unconscious, writhe in pain, or impotent.

Unlike our other idea (the “I-Heard-You-Got-Knocked-Up Bucket,” complete with candy, hair ties to hold your hair back, and the bucket receptacle for when you’re feeling nauseated), we never did build a prototype for the Cheat the Cheater app. This is probably not a bad thing, as we would probably be involved in multiple lawsuits by permanently disfigured cheaters.

With the sounds of a sappy holiday movie playing in the background and with my full intentions to subject myself to the latest installment of the Twilight saga if I can get past the screaming hordes of teenagers, I must bring this post to a close. For try as I may to focus on the dukes of douchebaggery that seem to number in the millions, this is one of those times when I’m feeling more like a mushy, (emphasis) hopeless romantic than a cynic. I think it’s best to be somewhere in the middle: not so naïve that you are unaware of signs of potential sliminess, but not so doubting that you’re skeptical of the extracurricular activities of every happy couple you see.

The Secret Life of Old People

When I heard that Andy Rooney had passed away yesterday, it made me think: most of my friends and acquaintances are up to their eyeballs in babies and children. They’ve got doctor’s appointments and playdates, dance classes and soccer games, carpools and story time. I, on the other hand, am awash in senior citizens. It makes sense I guess, since I’m the youngest of six and my parents were in their 40’s when I was born, that my parents, aunts, uncles, and other relatives would just be older.

I think that makes me notice older people more. Like the older guy I wrote about who walked back and forth on the same stretch of sidewalk or the residents Charlie and I visit at the nursing home (see My Latestand Greatest Fear and For Better orWorse). But like most young-ish people pondering the lives of older people, I usually get it wrong. Like that same guy walking on the sidewalk—I thought that he just walked back and forth for like 20 minutes and then called it a day. But in later weeks I saw him a bit earlier than normal time and discovered that he also does this warm up marching with knees high in the air. And then when I was out driving by a little later one morning, I saw him jogging farther down the street at a pretty good clip.

And one of the residents at the nursing home who always seemed like a somewhat sad and quiet lady who likes to sit outside in the sunshine when it’s not too cold, I just assumed she had been a housewife who outlived her husband. I had no idea that she had been the first female editor of the newspaper in her hometown in Arkansas and had traveled all throughout Asia.

Then there’s the guy who’s about in his mid-50’s that I usually see walking around the condos about a block from my house. He is always walking with this older Japanese lady who I’m guessing is his mother– they walk about the same time every afternoon. They love Charlie – except when he’s encountering one of his sworn canine enemies and his barking a little too loudly. But normally, she loves to stop and pet him. After we make a little conversation, the man always thanks me for stopping and chatting with them. I think it’s wonderful that he walks with his mother, helping her to get exercise and spending time with her. But I really don’t know anything about them and I think that whatever I guessed would probably be the wrong story.

I won’t even get started on the secret life of my parents or I will have to gouge out my own eyes and run screaming from the room. It’s enough to say that sometimes when my siblings and I get upset because our folks haven’t left the house or gotten dressed for days, well, sometimes they might not be sleeping the day away. There are six of us kids so I guess we should have realized that sort of thing could still be going on, but you just don’t think about it when your father has Alzheimer’s and your mother is composed largely of bionic parts.  Gah. Must stop thinking about this now. GAH!!!

Anyway, I’ve just been thinking that my life is on a different track than most of my friends. The only person, aside from my sister, that I’ve really been able to talk about how things are with my folks –like really talk and know that she gets it because she’s going through the same things—is my friend Gigi, who is actually the mother of my best friend from high school. We had dinner the other week and it was really great to be able to talk about what was going on with my parents (not the stuff from above), the way things veer wildly from the difficult to the hilarious. Like how my mom sometimes calls me at work with assorted emergencies, such as that she and my father have run out of hominy or the television isn’t working right.  Or last week when my mom was so enchanted by a video of a friend’s baby on Facebook that she tried to hug the screen. This was after she had shouted that I was trying to kill her by making her look at too many choices of curtains during our online shopping adventure –my mom is a bit of an Internet novice. Or the crazy hard times like trying to walk with my dad only to have him almost fall over repeatedly, he was so unbalanced.

I’ve been thinking so much about all of this lately that I haven’t really kept up with my writing. And I haven’t really given much thought to getting “back out there” and giving online dating another try. Even here, the senior have me beat as I just heard this week of an online dating service exclusively for older adults. I wish them luck and hopefully less crazy dating stories than I experienced. Then again, even though none of the matches worked out, I will say that almost all of them were wildly entertaining so maybe it wasn’t such a loss after all.

So the next time you see a senior citizen, pause for a moment in your hectic daily life. Maybe even stop for a chat. If we’re lucky, some day that will be us –as they say, old age sure beats the alternative. And while I’m getting ready to be a curmudgeon even now, muttering angrily about those kids in front of my house with their loud music, I hope that when I’m truly a curmudgeon, some crazy 30-something nut will take the time to talk with me and find out a little about my life. I’m going to sign off now so that I can finish cleaning and maybe even work a little on my book. I will try mightily to resist the temptations of the 24/7 holiday movies currently featured on the Hallmark Channel (see Hapless Holidays for more of my weakness in that area).