Opinions

Without much effort, I think I could become a hermit. It's January...and there are days when I would like to vanish from the landscape, lay on the couch until dark envelopes the house, and gain 45 pounds eating chocolate.

“It’s not what you eat between Christmas and New Year’s that counts, it’s what you eat between New Year’s and Christmas.” I’ve had this mantra in my head because my husband, Peter, and I have been trying to keep our weight in check. Peter is doing it for sensible reasons. His cholesterol and blood pressure have been high. He worries he might be at risk for a stroke. Peter was a skinny kid, a skinny teenager and a skinny adult. Discovering in his 60s that he was, in fact, capable of gaining weight came as a great surprise -- and disappointment.

The author of this story is unknown and it has been told by many people throughout the years. The gentleman to whom I’m going to introduce was not a Scrooge, but a kind, generous man who loved his family and was upright in his dealings with other people. He could not understand how or why Jesus came to earth to save us from our sins. It did not make sense and he was too honest to pretend otherwise. “I’m truly sorry to distress you,” he told his wife, “but I’m not going with you and the kids to church this Christmas Eve.” He went on to say, he would feel like a hypocrite and this year he would much rather stay home. He would just wait up and read until they returned. And so, he stayed behind as the family went to the candlelight service.

After the boxes and wrapping paper from Christmas Past had been discarded or recycled, I assumed a horizontal position on my favorite sofa, pulled the blanket up to my chin and grabbed the clicker, listening to all the television banter about the year coming to a close.

I once would ride just about anything. It probably started when I put that first quarter in a kiddie ride. It bucked and I held on. The phrase, “tall enough to ride rides,” was my license to carnivals and amusement parks, which meant Ferris wheels, rollercoasters and then, loop-the-loops.

As the full moon rose in the east, black-eyed peas soaked in a bowl on the kitchen countertop and turnips, picked at their peak, thawed in the sink. The sky was filled with stars; the temperature was cool; the night was bright.

I will be home in time for Christmas. It’s always a little hard to leave Mexico, and leaving right before the holidays is perhaps the hardest. The giant Christmas tree just went up in front of the church last night. Thousands of handmade tin stars hang over the streets, embedded with colored glass beads and lit from within. The poinsettias (or “nochebuenas”) decorate the windowsills. There is a concert every night of the week. It is hard to leave, in the middle of all this celebration, to return to our own Christmas up north, where the weather is so very different.

“He’s on vigil,” my husband, Peter, said, watching our cat, Felix. Peter, who never had a cat before Felix, has become the resident cat expert. Of course, he has a sample size of one, so all his generalizations about cats are based on Felix. I had quite a few cats before Felix, so I feel in a better position to say what kind of cat Felix is. Felix is a lively cat -- he is the most playful adult cat I’ve ever had. He is not a lap cat and does not like to be carried around. And he is a fussy eater. The first two make sense, since he spent his early life on the streets. The fussy eating is just Felix. He seems to think that, since he was scooped up off the streets into the lap of luxury (not the literal lap, you understand, because laps are much too confining), he deserves nothing but the best.

In the past, just the mention of UFOs would elicit a myriad of comments and humor; Santa’s sleigh on a test run, Mork from Ork, a mortar shot off the bat of Barry Bonds or Mark Mc-Gwire, or some movie.