Holidays Anonymous

I've thought for years that there should be an organization called Holidays Anonymous for people who go into tailspins on certain days on the calendar.  They could meet at a preordained spot and grouse about whatever went wrong that day.  

There are holidays I love.  Christmas depressions are not for me, I am giddy from the first carol I hear through the entire season.

The giddiness doesn't extend to New Year's Eve, which I've ignored since the early 1970s, when I saw Cher at a Chicago Gold Coast nightclub trying to sing to drunks.  She wasn't having a good time and neither was I.   From that day on, I stayed home on December 31, putting the photos for the year in an album and organizing the new year.

I love my birthday (St. Patrick's Day).  I am ambivalent about Easter which is OK, I guess, but I have memories of eating traditional sweet rolls, hard boiled eggs, jelly beans, and chocolate, finishing with a ham dinner then getting violently ill.  That combination of foods makes no sense at all.

So here's Mother's Day.  Even its founder, Anna Jarvis, wound up fighting against its commercialization.  It was definitely not the favorite day of this divorced single mother of a son.  A mother-son combination didn't work well.  Mother-daughter banquets were out, father-son banquets as well.

The worst Mother's Day was when Chris, then about eight, tried to do something for me by buying me a hamburger at Hardee's with his savings.   We got to the restaurant, had our meal, then he joined some other children in front of a big television set to watch cartoons. I looked down the row of booths and in each one there was a single woman, sitting alone, looking miserable, and there I was, one of them.  We were all pathetic.

Afterwards, I asked Chris, who had just spent all he had on this outing:   "Do you really want to celebrate Mother's Day?"   We agreed right then and there to forget it and so it was until he married Tisha who thought they ought to give me something or celebrate in some way.  It's taken years but I think she finally understands.

Today Gary grilled us hamburgers for lunch.  The rest of the day we worked in the gardens in the warm sunshine with occasional breaks on the deck reading books.  I did absolutely nothing that was in any way motherly.

I liked this day.  Maybe I won't need Holidays Anonymous after all.