"But that sound wasn't sad--why, this sound sounded merry!

[mrissa]

It couldn't be so, but it was merry--very!"

Last year I wrote on Christmas, "I hope that those of you who are having any kind of Christmas at all are having as good a Christmas as mine. Perfect Christmases are not built out of perfect people having perfect days. Perfect Christmases are built out of sleep-deprived people, people with colds, people with allergies or ear infections or sudden bouts of random baby crankiness, and yes, vertiginous people, spending time together because they love each other, or because they love people in common with each other." And that is the kind of perfect Christmas I have had this year, too.

Last year I also wrote, "I know some of you were hoping that the vertigo would take yesterday and today off. I was, too. It didn't. But it didn't ruin my Christmas Eve, it didn't ruin Christmas Day, and there is celebratory time with loved ones yet to come, some of it yet to schedule. And all of that is wonderful even when the loved ones seem to tilt and spin a little."

And that's still true, too.

If you'd told me last Christmas that I would be writing this even wobblier than usual after my third Christmas Day PT session, through a nosebleed that just won't seem to quite stop, after more than a year of wobbliness and nosebleeds and nausea and everything else, I would have recoiled in horror. It would have sounded miserable, just awful, the sort of Christmas I would wish on nobody. The sort of Thursday, after over a year of debilitating vertigo and over ten months of PT, that I would wish on nobody.

But here we are singing without capdabblers and smendlers, and while I want very much to just feel well again, and while I want very much for all the little and big things that have gone wrong with my loved ones to go right again, I spent the day surrounded by people who love me, some of whom also love each other, some of whom had just met, and that, folks, is the kind of Christmas I would wish on anybody who's keeping any kind of Christmas at all.

Comments

[mamapduck.livejournal.com]

Welcome, welcome fa who ramus. :)

Heart to heart and hand in hand. That's how I spent my Christmas and it's the best way.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

You are often on my candle list.

Thank you for the lovely card!

[marydell.livejournal.com]

My Christmas was similar - I was mostly having to stay on the couch because of ye pain, Charlie was teething and having an eczema flare-up, the nephews and most of the other adults were fighting a sinus infection, but we all had a nice time just being together. Glad you had a good one in spite of the badness.

[one-undone.livejournal.com]

You have such a lovely attitude about this, and you're so very right. I think we tend to over-idealize Christmas and it's hard to live up to when we think it must be so very perfect in order to be worth anything. Thanks for reminding us that the reality is that many perfect days are made of imperfect people celebrating imperfect things.

[one-undone.livejournal.com]

Oh, by the way, I don't know if you have them often enough for this to be useful, but this is what our hematologist told me to get for Dylan's nosebleeds:

http://www.amazon.com/Nosebleed-Powder-Effective-Bleeding-Nosebleeds/dp/B000GG61NI

She said it stops it right away.

Happy New Year. :)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I don't think it's to that point yet, but if it gets there, I'll keep this in mind.