So this has been a rather complicated holiday season in the White House.  Our beloved twelve year old golden retriever Deedee was diagnosed with metastatic cancer two weeks before Christmas and had to be put to sleep on the 22nd.  While that was going on we all(except for spouse) got the seasonal flu for the first time ever.  I had to deal with the dying dog, the familial flu which prevented any organized Christmas shopping and telling my kids that the dog could not be fixed, that parents were not superhuman and that life, even of those you love deeply, comes to an end.  Fuck.  Merry Christmas to all and to Deedee “goodnight”.  Because I was so dismayed at losing both our dog and my “Superhero who can solve ANYTHING” status with my children, I opened the flu door to bacteria and spent Christmas morning trying to pretend to be present for presents while battling pneumonia.  

Now on my second round of increasingly strong antibiotics and longing for an island in the sun, I actually wanted to write one more thing before the year ends.  This is partially a reflection of something my spouse said to me as I lay feverishly in bed wondering if Deedee had misinterpreted my true devotion and was actually trying to take me with her to the great doggie park in the sky.  “Deedee…no can do, please, I gotta raise the boys.” I muttered in my fever dream state.  Rich, possibly hearing my mutters, came up stairs to report on having cleaned Luke’s bedroom.  Luke’s bedroom is always something of a challenge.  He’s eight.  He has several generations of hand me down legos in giant bins and every broken piece of every plastic toy he’s ever owned.  He’s paranoid about throwing anything out, he has not a clue how to actually keep up with the chaos and I am not good at enforcing room cleaning as a chore.   Frankly, for me, it doesn’t seem worth it.  Spend hours co-cleaning a room I don’t spend ANY time in other than “goodnights”?  And cleaning with whiny complaining not really doing any cleaning children who, instead of cleaning, find long lost toys and play while YOU clean a space only THEY use and by the next day, or, if you’re lucky, the day after, have made it unrecognizable from the pre-cleaned version of a few days before? Setting the table, clearing the table, loading the dishwasher, feeding the pets.  Now THOSE are chores that help me with MY life.  Their rooms, eh, not so much.  If they want to live like pigs…  As long as I can keep one spot on the rug for him to engage in activities when other kids come over, who gives a shit whether the perimeter is clean.  Well, Rich, apparently does.  And Rich spent several hours on the 28th making the perimeter spotless.  Fine by me.  I’ve always been quite clear, in my book, personal hygiene is very important and house cleanliness is, well, NOT.  Unless someone else wants to do it.  And, in this case, that someone was Rich.  So Rich comes upstairs, while I’m lying in bed gasping and gagging, my nose bleeding from blowing, my skin pasty white, my hair slicked to my head from night sweats…and Rich reports that he cleaned Luke’s room.   “Oh, great, thank you, sweetheart.”, I murmer from under the quilt and I smile weakly.  As he heads back downstairs, clearly having not gotten enough of a back pat he says, “Imagine how clean this house would be if I stayed home with the kids and you worked.”

I am sure you can imagine how happy that comment made me.  It was almost as good as the one, oh, roughly a month earlier that he made about why, when he arrived home early from work (at 3pm instead of the expected 7pm)  why the breakfast dishes were still in the sink and what, in fact, and I quote “did I DO all day”?  I don’t want to share the details because not only would that be boring but you might even be familiar with this theme.  Let’s just say that comment required two days of fighting to exorcise it and the many things that I actually do were enumerated OVER AND FUCKING OVER.  The “how clean the house would be if you worked” comment, aside from blowing out my sinus’s and my backed up lungs for at least a five minute period, did not elicit a fight because that would have literally killed me but it got me thinking.  Yes, thinking which was all that was left for me on December 28th since moving and breathing were out of the question.  Among the other exciting parts of my holiday (whoa, you say, can one woman possibly be that lucky…not just a dead dog and seasonal flu and pneumonia in the last two weeks before Christmas…)yes, another exciting part and one of the many obligations they don’t tell you about when you are making the complicated decision to run for local office, is that for one Saturday afternoon,needless to say, the only holiday season Saturday this year that I didn’t yet have a dying dog or pneumonia, I was supposed to dress up as Mrs. Claus, give up my shopping and family afternoon and sit in Village Hall to take local kids requests for Santa.  The Mayor was my Mr. Claus, if you will. So we sat in Village Hall, looking like weird Hieironymous Bosch-ian versions of the Kris Kringle story in itchy polyester wigs and bad artificial velvet outfits.  Small children came in, glanced in utter horror at the dissolution of their dreams, took a candy cane and ran for their lives.  The few small enough to buy our Jewish Mayor as Santa were quickly cured of that notion when Santa removed his beard and announced, “Damn this thing itches”.  Christ may have been Jewish, Santa was definitely not.  The high point for me was when trying to coax three tiny people to come a little closer by telling them that they didn’t have to sit on Santa’s lap but simply could whisper one present request in our direction their twenty year old mom added to the cajoling by saying “C’mon kids…doesn’t nice Mrs. Claus look just like Nana?”.  Really?  Just like NANA.  Really, bitch?  I quickly marked the entire family down for coal on behalf of their idiot mother.  But it got me thinking.  Mrs. Claus.  Mrs. Claus.  A life living in the North Pole catering to Santa and five hundred elves.  Cooking, cleaning, wearing floor length red velvet and an apron for chrissakes in a place where the snow never melts and no one comes to visit.  A place you live forever but you can never leave.  Let alone wear a different outfit?  Mrs. Claus.  An interesting and underexplored character in history.  Typical. Eh.  Without the Mrs. I don’t think Christmas would happen.  But do we ever hear that?  Does anyone ever talk about her…the woman behind the myth?  Are there ANY books devoted to Mrs. Claus in her bad outfit and her sensible shoes.  I can’t think of one.  So I had an idea, while sitting in my lesser throne next to my Jewish Santa in Village Hall.  An interesting idea.  Let’s call it “Mrs. Claus: A Christmas Story”

MRS. CLAUS: A CHRISTMAS STORY.

What if this Christmas, say somewhere around December 28th, Mrs. Claus took a look around the fucking freezing North Pole, gazed out over the miles and miles of snow between her and civilization, gazed back at the five hundred pairs of dirty elf underpants and one giant red velvet suit covered with twenty four hours of present delivery sweat, cookie crumbs, reindeer snot and soot heaped in a pile on the floor waiting for the laundry.  What if she peered at the workroom full of discarded wrapping paper that someone, and she knew who that was, was going to have to clean up.  She could only imagine Santa’s Workshop and the cleaning in store for her there.  Mrs. Claus stared silently out the window at the eight perfect but hungry reindeer clawing at the door.  Yeah, Mrs. Claus knew that not one of the five hundred snoring elves and their farting in his sleep fearless leader were going to wake up long enough to actually take care of the pets they claim to love so much.  Too tuckered out by their round the world exploits, that’s what they always said when, each year they felt fine about sleeping until New Years Eve?  Fucking New Years Eve?  And expecting to wake up to a clean house, a warm meal and some happy reindeer?  Yeah, all well and fine when they were flying around the earth doing tricks with their reindeer but what about the day to day reindeer love.  The reindeer kibble?  The reindeer walks?  And forget the reindeer…what about the post Christmas laundry that takes five full days to actually finish, forget fold?  What about Mrs. Claus who’s spent the last 365 days running the goddamned North Pole so that everyone could spend all their time getting ready for other peoples Christmas?  Does Mrs. Claus take so much as a nap?  Does it even occur to her to try to catch up on some sleep?  And the few times she’s actually dared, snuck off for fifteen minutes of shut eye, the attitude from Mr. Ho Ho Ho and his merry band would make you think they caught her smoking crack.  What if, on this crazy December 28th, Mrs. Claus, who used to have an identity all her own before she got taken in by his rosy cheeks, his droll little mouth and and his twinkly eyes,  looked in the mirror and realized that, Christ, the velvet gown and the apron made her ass look huge and wasn’t even her color.  Who can wear that red and look good?   She imagined something in a light blue, square neckline revealing just the teeniest touch of her still good neck instead of swaddling it in endless white fur.  That, my god, her hair made her look, well, just like NANA.  No one can pull off pure white hair.   No one.  Something in an ash blonde with a few low lights, maybe?  Loose the bun, cut off about a foot of hair and some feathering around the face?  Now we’re talking.  Mrs. Claus turns this way and that appraising all in the mirror, a slight smile playing at her pink lips.  She’d always had good bone structure but living with the pig has put on some pounds.  Not as many as him, thank god. No future “Greatest Loser” for her.  He was another story.  With a little pilates and more salads, she thinks she could still turn a few heads like she did in her day.  She remembers how that one elf who got fired used to give her the ole up and down.  Which, since he was an elf, was short but still sweet.   She sucks in her tummy and curses the red velvet.  Squinting in the mirror, Mrs. Claus pauses and realizes that her skin is in pretty good shape especially considering she hasn’t had a facial in at least four hundred years.  It’s smooth enough and she has good color.  All those years of no drinking and smoking.  Yeah, dull as hell never having one naughty day, and it’s not like being on the nice list ever got HER a present from her fat husband, but possibly worth it, in the long run, given the general texture of her thousand year old skin.  Perhaps a teeny bit of filler and some Botox at the brow to iron out the one sneaky sign that Mrs. Claus isn’t always jolly, that sometimes, every now and then, Mrs. Claus dares to think that she is fucking sick to death of “Ho, Ho, Ho” and Santa’s enormous belly not to mention the appetite that goes with it.  And all the goddamned singing and cheeriness not to mention the sound of hammers and whatever else they use to make all the shit they make, day and night trying to get ready for next Christmas.  And can we talk about cooking dinner for five hundred every  night of the week?  Yeah, sure, they’re small but they can eat.  And its all well and fine that they clear their little elf places but with their work ethic, how bout helping a bit with the dishes.  But, noooo, they have to get back to making toys.  And she has to do the goddamned dishes.  Sure, the Mrs Claus deal came with eternal life but what good is eternal life if you have to spend it wearing a red velvet mumu, white hair and cooking for five hundred elves and an enormously overweight husband who often has chocolate in his beard and who’s only response to any complaint is “Ho, ho, ho”.  “You know” thinks Mrs. Claus, “I need a break”.  And with that, she takes off her snowy white apron, she undoes the damn bun from her hair and she heads to the barn where she saddles up a very confused but obliging Rudolph making sure to give him some kibble so he has strength for the trip.  “Rudolph, my friend, take me somewhere warm.  Can we stop at a drugstore for some “Nice n’Easy” on the way?”