Holiday Disasters

As I type the title of this post, I realize that I do not yet want to talk about what I think of as the true disasters that have with some regularity marked the Christmas season for me and for my family. I am saving those for another post, another time—perhaps for January when all but my most enthusiastic neighbors have taken down their Christmas lights and the world has settled into darkness. Today, disasters appear not as tragedy but as farce.

It all has to do, once again, with hosting. It starts, as the holiday season does or should do, with Thanksgiving, and with the new post-Harvey house, to which we moved to escape not only the dramatic vulnerabilities of flooding, but also the small and accretive domestic challenges of living in an older home. The brand-new house, finished days before we moved in, would, we thought, change our relationship to homing entirely: we would, for an unspecified number of years inhabit a space with grace and dignity. My husband would not have to lay pipe in the torrid humidity of a Houston August; we would not constantly be looking at cracks in the plaster of our walls for evidence that the foundation of our house had moved; we would not constantly be calling repair people after hours; we would not have a list of homing to-dos so long that it lived with us like a ghost, like another household member.

In our new home and our new world, if we called a plumber, it would be for what we vaguely thought of as improvements. We may even have considered using the phrase “value-added.”  Instead of scrambling on the internet for a plumber who advertised in bold font for “emergency services,” or who asked, in even bigger font, if our toilet had overflowed, we would do our research, perhaps even compare bids for changing out a faucet or installing the water line for a pool. Electricians, with whom we would, of course, make appointments weeks in advance, might add outlets for Christmas lights and wish us a happy holiday. Most importantly, we would live in a house that was both beautiful and functionally invisible; we would need know nothing about what (was or was not) in the walls, under the floorboards, or even up in the attic, a space I have never seen, in part because it requires the rhythmic swinging of a 12-foot hooked pole to open. Our new appliances would be not so much invisible as inaudible, carrying out their business of producing sparkling dishes and delicious meals without crying out for help. If there were beeps—and we knew there would be with these new high-tech devices—those sounds would register the comforting assurance that the dishwasher, the stove, the fridge, were working as they should.

I don’t remember when this form of homing was first exposed as fantasy, but I do know that, for the last three holiday seasons, days, hours, and once minutes before we were to host a big dinner, something absolutely necessary to the creation and delivery of that dinner broke, acted up, put the party at risk. Two years ago, it was the fancy oven that came with the house and with a thick book of instructions in Italian. Admittedly, there were some things the oven, even at its peak function, did not deign to do, the most annoying being letting us know when it had preheated. I translated the cheerful preheating instructions in this way: “the timing of the oven heating is of great variety, but a thermometer can be used to insure information.” A few days before our annual Christmas party, the preheating issue became academic as the oven ceased to warm up at all. It probably did not help that a member of the household not to be named here dropped a hot pan on the oven door smashing through two impressively thick layers of glass. It turns out that the stove was so niche that replacement doors, forged in a town in northern Italy that was to become the epicenter of COVID, would have taken months to get to us and would have been as expensive as another stove, which we quickly ran out to buy in those pre-Covid days when you could pay for an appliance and it would be delivered in the next few days. Christmas dinner was largely unaffected as accurate preheating in the new, albeit less niche, oven made for crisper puff pastry.

Last year it was the fridge that died the day before Thanksgiving, just as we were going out for a frigid pandemic birthday dinner. The weather turned hot the next day, threatening the Thanksgiving ingredients we had set out on the back porch like pioneers or people who live north of Dallas. We bought a dorm fridge and put it on the porch, stuffing it with turkey. Undaunted—or rather, daunted but stubborn—we hosted a dinner with, including offerings from others, twenty main-course dishes and six desserts.

This year was a double holiday whammy. On Thanksgiving, our disposal broke and minutes before my son and I were putting the final touches on our novelty charcuterie board, with meat, cheese, and veggies arranged in the shape of a giant turkey. The plumber, who told us over the phone that he routinely had to skip his own Thanksgiving to rescue inexperienced cooks stuffing inappropriate things down the disposal, was actually on his way when we managed to dislodge a no-doubt inappropriate clump of potato peels with a giant plunger. Water sprayed everywhere, but not on the cheese-and-veggies (or indeed the actual turkey). We put off our guests for an hour, Thanksgiving was saved (again) and we were once more (somewhat disheveled) hosts.

This Christmas, during what will apparently be known nationally as the Big Freeze of 2022 and what will be known more locally as the Freeze When We Think Nobody Died in Houston, our electricity went out the day of our annual Christmas party. When I say “went out” I do not mean this in the ordinary way for Houston in cold weather. Part of our new homing dignity had been the purchase of a generator, in anticipation of hurricanes, but even more useful in the Fatal Freeze of 2020. As far as I know, our recent troubles were not a function of power to the house being cut off by fallen power lines, or by the whims of the Texas grid and the Texas legislature.

This Christmas power outage was different—and in an undignified way. The day before the party, before the temperature dropped 40 degrees, the breaker for one of the kitchen electrical circuits went out—fortunately not the one that included the stove and the fridge. At first, this seemed like an easy fix; even I, the least handy person in my family, know how to flip breakers, although I sometimes have issues with actually opening the box. After the breaker tripped three times, however, the situation became more ominous: the kitchen breaker, like perfectly proofed dough, sprung back into the off position. Then the lights went out in my son’s bedroom in an entirely different part of the house. The stove was still on, and half the kitchen lights, so I kept cooking while we called the inevitable repairman, skipping over the recorded message about emergency pricing. He came extraordinarily quickly and left almost as rapidly after proposing what seemed to me to be a strange solution: that there were two problematic light fixtures under the kitchen counter were causing all the trouble. Minutes after he left, the lights went out again.

The next day, the day of the party, my husband woke me with the news that we had no downstairs heat. The light problem metastasized, as one area of the house after another flickered then went dark: the pantry, the dining room, my son’s bedroom, the “master” closet and bathroom, and finally the master bedroom itself. One of us would flip a switch somewhere and call out the news to the others; on a dark and uniquely cold Houston day, we chased darkness around the house. We began to experience the house as a giant electrical circuit, moving nervously from one “zone” to another. It was frighteningly easy to slip into holiday emergency mode: by 8 am, despite the disappearance of contacts on my phone, we had arranged for another electrician’s visit and for one with our HVAC company. The HVAC person came first, and declared, oddly. But with great conviction, that nothing was wrong with the heat. It felt like a Christmas miracle when I saw the thermostat glow orange and felt the stirring of warmth in the hallway. Perhaps, I thought, we simply could not get through hosting without calling a repair service. Perhaps this was a new form of the psychosomatic that got circuited (so to speak) through a house to the body.

But, of course, the psychosomatic is also the real. We still had an intractable and mysterious electrical problem. If these were metaphorical circuits, they still had the power to stop the party. Our second electrician, who came at the beginning of the allotted time window, was baffled and apologetic, half-heartedly blaming the cold. After he left, two zones went with him. We asked ourselves the same question we had asked so many times over the past few years: could we actually have the party? What should we do with the five different kinds of appetizers my son and I had made and frozen over the past week: the shrimp cakes; the miniature tamales (pumpkin and chicken); the chicken bastilla triangles in filo dough; and (these were my special pride) the gluten-free gougères that had actually puffed like their glutinous relatives? What would happen if the garage freezer where all these tiny, lovingly wrapped and molded things were sitting snuggly in their marked containers, were suddenly to switch off? Would the scallop mousse, already scooped into individual small glasses, hold for another day if we postponed the party? Would we be able to freeze the huge chunk of beef that had already been rubbed with porcini and spices? The meringues for the pavlova would hold, but what about the buche de noel with its marzipan squirrels huddled in a hollow in the log? If the fridge and the freezer both went out, would we pile everything into a car and go to the house of one erstwhile guests? If the stove went out, could we plug the toaster oven in an operational zone, say my son’s bedroom, and heat the appetizers a few at a time? Should I bother setting the Christmas table, one of my favorite tasks of this party and of the whole year?

Oddly, faithfully, deludedly, we seem to have decided to proceed with the party. I set the table with the lightened glass trees and the frosted mirror and decided that this year the ornaments scattered on the table and gathered in bowls would be fruits and not the usual birds. This decision was inspired by a new silk runner I had bought in the fall; printed with  gold pomegranates for Rosh Hashanah. As I piled glass pomegranate ornaments on the cloth, I was praying less for a Christmas miracle than a Hanukah one, willing the lights to stay on despite all odds.

And they did stay on. Up until five minutes before the party, the master bedroom was unpowered. I dressed in the dark, with an inadequate camping lantern, proud of myself for being able to clasp the necklace my husband had given to me many Christmases before. I did not notice, was not able to see, it turned out, that I was still wearing a pair of large wooden earrings that classed horribly with the delicate seed pearls of my necklace, but I went forth from my closet determined to be festive, to see it through.

What would it take for us not to have the party, to stop it in its tracks, to rise above sunk costs? We have given this party under much more difficult circumstances, in part because for me, it is about what all solstice holidays are about—crying out against the darkness, chasing, in whatever undignified way, the light.