Illustration by Bailey Meyers
On Christmas Eve, 1998, I wasn’t eagerly anticipating presents in the morning like most of my nine-year-old fellows. I wasn’t hanging stockings up next to a fire place, or putting final ornaments up on a tree.
In fact, I wasn’t even near a Christmas tree – or a Solstice tree, as it was known in our household – anticipating presents to come at all. No, I was sitting in a bathtub full of Epsom salts and lukewarm water, absolutely miserable, and about to embark on one of the worst holidays of my young life.
You see, somewhere along the line I seemed to have picked up some bad karma. Maybe it was that time at the elementary school lunch table when I switched my regular milk for the chocolate milk of that girl I didn’t like when she wasn’t looking.
Or maybe I accrued my karmic debt when I got my one and only referral for kicking the kid who tried to tackle me and steal my basketball. Though to this day I maintain that I was totally justified in my retaliatory kicking, I understand the Fates don’t necessarily see it that way, especially the way I was shamed for my actions by the principal, who clearly had a direct line up to those ethereal powers.
Either way, my ill deeds had come back to haunt me in the form of a severe case of chicken pox that had chosen to manifest just a handful of days before Christmas, the best holiday in almost every nine-year-old’s mind.
In hindsight, it was actually sort of a blessing in disguise. Normally, by Christmas Eve I was over a thousand miles away from my usual home of Florence, Oregon, visiting my dad and stepmother in Pinetop-Lakeside, in the White Mountains of Arizona. This time, though, it was a chance to spend the holiday with my mom, something that I almost never did.
But that’s hindsight now, and future hindsight did little to comfort a pox-afflicted kid in a bathtub, with a mom who hadn’t expected to still have me at home and thus didn’t have much in the way of presents. Or a particularly impressive tree.
The Epsom salts seemed to do the trick, though, because I got better a few days later, and still managed to fly off to Arizona to visit my dad, get my presents that they had saved for me, and go skiing at the nearby ski area. I still got to visit my friends and eat entirely too much Christmas candy, too.
More importantly, I got to participate in some of the holiday rituals that my mom, being the rather non-traditional person that she was, usually performed alone. In a lot of ways, staying home with her helped me develop a connection with her that had been missing before, and to this day, I value the memories with her I gained by being forced to stay at home.
It was still a truly rotten way to spend a Christmas Eve.

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A Pox Upon Christmas!