The Current Day

 I spent time on Christmas Eve attending to last minute things for Christmas, like bringing the tree out of the garage, looking for onaments in the basement, shopping for milk so my friend could have a regular cup of coffee on my porch when she came over to exchange presents and giving out holiday cards to local friends.  Christmas day arrived bitterly cold with occasional snow flurries, and I righted the tree on the porch which had blown over during the night, set out a few ornaments to put on it (it was too cold to hang very many on it), wrapped a few presents and called all my sisters to wish them a happy holiday (one called me first).  (Giving my main man a holiday card at his street corner.)

The Turkish cafe and grocery outlet we discovered recently, Borek G. Turkish Mom's Cooking, was open and at 1 pm I met my friend there and we ate a hot lunch alone in the spacious dining area (it was too cold to eat at the tables outside); I had a delicious gyro on rice and she had an eggplant dish over rice which looked sumptuous, and turkish coffee, and we both enjoyed a pastry dessert and then we went to my house to trim the tree on the porch and exchange a present or two.  Post Office backlog created this past year by Trump's calculated machinations to steal the election having prevented any packages my sisters mailed to me mid-month from arriving yet if ever, the two of us enjoyed each other's company and opened our gifts in a biting wind.  (A delicious Christmas meal.)

It was by pure chance a bacchanalian theme for the gifts, my friend gave me chocolate, a bottled salsa concoction and one hundred proof bourbon, and I gave her chocolate, a jar of pickled herring in cream cheese and vodka infused with cherries and ginger distilled at the local distillery a mile from my house.  She was anxious to try the bourbon she had carefully selected for me after much research into various bourbon aficionados foodie sites, which talked of the smells and tastes and hints of fruits and such in the bourbon, which needed to be "smashed" in any case; and I poured her, and myself, an ounce of the amber elixir into two glasses neat and we took a taste.  (A cold Christmas.)

It burned in my mouth and was strong but good, but I drank my share of Jack Daniels back when it was 90 proof and I like bourbon and it went down easy; her expression however was one of alarm as she held the small bit of straight bourbon in her mouth for a very long time with increasingly narrowing eyes--she's not much of a drinker--and she obviously couldn't discern the fruit hues in it or the hints of chocolate or whatever past the fiery effect of a mouthful of strong bourbon, and I asked her if she wanted to spit it out over the railing of the porch into the sleeping flower bed, 'it might wake the perennials up," but she swallowed it and conspicuously didn't finish the swallow of bourbon that remained in her glass.  She seemed crushed that after all her research it was terrible, but I reassured her that I liked it.  (The cornucopia of Christmas.)

We took a short walk in the increasing cold and deepening gloom of the late afternoon, and after a few more pleasantries and a very short and standoffish holiday hug (the pandemic you know) she drove home. The muted and truncated celebration of Christmas being over in The Year That Wasn't, I policed up my porch, returned my tree to the garage and the few ornaments to the house, and contemplated the coming year, which just has to be better than the year just past.  (This year's tree.)