"I just need to catch my breath
Christmas by myself this year"
~ "Christmas Wrapping", The Waitresses
December 1992
Sally Jackson is nearly broke. She is now precariously balancing three jobs, has already been written up twice for arriving late to her morning shifts, and can't help the exhaustion she feels even when she does manage a full night of sleep. The last month has taken a toll on her, and she is terrified and worried. Her lover left her like this, in her most vulnerable moment. Sally has every right to be angry and bitter, or, to give up.
But Sally can't find it in herself to be anything less than joyful as the year wraps up.
Even on this Christmas day as she spends it by herself— especially on this Christmas day because she isn't alone. Or, she won't be. Not any longer.
As has rather quickly become habit, she instinctively brushes a hand against her stomach, smiling to herself. She's making herself breakfast for dinner if only because she can't rationalize buying even half a ham from the grocery store when she isn't sharing it. Leftovers are good, but she knows she won't want the ham when she still has it in her fridge a month from now. So, eggs and sausages and french toast it is for this Christmas. She doesn't mind. So far, none of the items on her dinner menu have sent her running to the bathroom, and she calls that a success.
She's having a baby— that being the source of all her problems: her morning sickness, her draining bank account, her exhaustion. Whatever night it was with Poseidon that resulted in this, Sally doesn't regret it. She can't.
She has every reason to be angry with the universe, with the Fates, the gods. But she can't. It's this lonely Christmas day that it hits her; this is her last Christmas by herself. Even this one, she supposes, she isn't alone any longer.
She has faint memories of her last Christmas with her parents, of sitting at the dinner table in her new green, velvet frock, sitting on her knees, grinning as her father piles up mashed potatoes and green beans and juicy ham onto her plate.
Her last Christmas with a family.
She's spent many long nights praying and wishing and praying for a family, for not another Christmas alone. As she caresses her still-flat abdomen, she muses this isn't exactly what she'd had in mind. But she is sure she wouldn't trade this for anything. She isn't alone anymore. She's a mother now, a little one on the way. And by this time next year, she'll have another person to celebrate the holidays with.
This Christmas, her apartment is empty and lonely, and all she has to fill it with is her record player— her mother's— as she switches between Bing Crosby and Dean Martin and Nat King Cole just so it isn't so silent.
But she can imagine a little boy or girl sitting in that second chair at the table, half a ham fresh from the oven, laughter floating across the small shoebox home. A couple presents under the decked out Christmas tree.
She's going to give this child Christmases to remember for all the joy and hope they've already given her.
Next Christmas will be one to remember. The thought brings Sally such joy that tears prick at her eyes, and she laughs over her pan of sizzling sausages.
Just a year, and her life will be so different. No, less than a year. By the middle of August, if her OB GYN is to be trusted.
She's already bought a stocking for the baby— a fuzzy blue one. She'll get it embroidered next year, when she knows if it's a little boy or girl and she has a name picked out. It's still in the shopping bag on the table, and she stares at it while eating her dinner to Bing Crosby's "White Christmas" playing in the living room.
She finally takes the stocking from the bag, cuts the tag with nail clippers, brushes it off. She has a pair of bronze-painted sleigh bell hooks hanging on the edge of the TV stand, one carrying her childhood Christmas stocking. The second is only empty for a moment before Sally hangs the little blue stocking on it, right next to hers. She straightens it and smoothes it out, nose crinkling as she tries to hold back the tears because it's so silly, she thinks. Except, it isn't. This little baby growing inside of her has no idea. They have no idea how lonely she used to be, or how joyful she is now.
But now she's looking at two Christmas stockings adorning the TV stand, and it's the purest happiness she's felt in far too long. Her father used to whisper on late nights that holidays mean nothing without family, and now she finally has one.
Her stocking finally is no longer lonely. Now, there are two. Sally muses that, maybe, one day there could be more. In another house, another life. But she's looking at two stockings now, and it's the only Christmas present she needs.