christmas steve

Last year I thought to designate the day after a thing as its steve to complement its eve the day before. Today is Christmas Steve, which marks both Boxing Day and the start of Kwanzaa in various British territories and former colonies. Those in the US do their shopping on Thanksgiving Steve and call out sick from work on Super Bowl Steve. I spent my day walking the dogs, cleaning house, and battling customer support hot lines, a tirade for another day. I went to friends' for Christmas Proper yesterday. They gifted me a cookbook, SpongeBob trivia, lottery tickets, and snacks for me and the dogs. I also received an IOU for coal because king of capitalism Santa would rather track Coal Payable than constrain himself to commodity judgment since selling coal futures raises cash for toy production throughout the year. What if there's a mine collapse or the freight operators go on strike and all the naughty kids receive contracts instead of present moral condemnation? That's a problem for Christmas Steve.

I spent most of last week on the couch in the dog pile. I finished Breath of the Wild again and watched The Return of the King, Spirited Away, I Dream of Jeannie, Bewitched, That Girl, Too Close for Comfort, Welcome Back, Kotter, The Jeffersons, Barney Miller, Maude, Three's Company, One Day at a Time, Archie Bunker's Place, and Alice. Mr. Kotter's Christmas message was that homelessness is the result of personal moral failing and that the Noble Homeless chooses his position and denies social support in favor of expressing shame as a gift to the rest of us. George Jefferson's message was to reach back to your roots to lift up others once you've made it up the ladder. I took a break from TV to watch the backyard birds Friday while I made black beans and rice. Later that afternoon my friend told me his bird Lola had just passed away.

I went to a party at friends' that evening. We started the night reflecting on sickness and loss and trips to cemeteries then drinking a toast to the current company we did have. Beneath the new moon the gravity of the situation rose so high that two in attendance fell to the ground. I caught one on his descent and held him until a medic arrived. I found his pulse while we waited and thought about mine. Our other friend landed back on his feet and all turned out well for all, and despite the freezing backdrop of a wind chill below zero our time together was warm. I hailed a ride home around midnight. The driver told me about his family back home in Ethiopia, his movement across the US from Idaho to Philly, the former of which has been his favorite place to live in the country so far, and his work driving.

Last week at my party I set out a small shrine with a beer and a candle to which a neighbor added offerings of incense and heart-shaped stones. On Saturday I lit the incense and poured the beer into the hops bed to clear the air and forward the offering to the garden. I spelled Lola's name in seeds for the other birds to trace then had a quiet moment to think about her and Leo and the shape of the year. The wind was still biting so I moved inside back to the dog pile and thought about the War on Christmas, for which the children named Marley as their champion, and the parents, denying guilt in this trial by combat, King Santa. I thought about Gay Man absent from the battlefield frolicking in the forest, missing his brothers, growing lonely, and blaming his condition on the war itself. I imagined him allying with his siblings and at last arriving mounted atop the wolf that nursed them to fire an arrow emblazoned with the seal of the Freedmen's Bureau through the heart of Santa, to don his robe and crown, and to assert new identity and cause for Claus.