The weeks leading up to the holidays were more frenzied than usual for me, but even so, I should’ve known better than to repeatedly say the only thing I wanted for Christmas was a break.  

A break is very nearly just what I got.  

Imagine asking for a pony and actually getting a pony, except the pony is served over rice with fava beans and a nice Chianti.  

You see, normal people get a Christmas break.  I got a Christmas dislocation. 

I was having trouble sleeping in the waning hours before dawn Christmas morning, so I decided to put some finishing touches on the bench I’d made for my parents. I’d built the bench using scrap lumber and an old wooden headboard I’d salvaged from the curb, and decided to add some color by attaching a pair of primitive looking bluebirds to the back. All I needed to finish the birds was some black paint for the eyes.  

I went to our basement to get the paint, and when I didn’t find it in the first box I looked in, I lifted the box and put it behind me so I could look through the next. Almost immediately, I found the paint I needed, so I grabbed the bottle and turned to head back upstairs-completely forgetting that first box I’d placed on the floor.  

To protect my already soft noggin from our cement floor, I stuck out my arm to break my fall. The resulting sound was horrific.  The visual was worse.  

I tried to stand, but my loose and wobbly arm threatened to stay on the floor if I did, so I started to yell. Other than our garage, there’s no place in our house I could’ve fallen that would’ve put me further from my sleeping husband and daughter than where I was so gracelessly sprawled. I managed to reach a broom and began banging on our furnace as hard as I could, expecting I could at least trigger some alarm-type barking from our dogs, thus waking the humans. 

Wham! Wham! Wham! 

Nothing. 

Wham! Wham! Wham! 

Silence. 

What’s the point in having three dogs if not one of them is capable of saving little Timmy from the well? Apparently they don’t clock in for duty before 9 am. 

After about 10 minutes of banging, Geoff awakened and found me. I missed my chance to use the “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” line, but with my history, I expect there will be other opportunities. 

He hurried me to Thomas Hospital, where I learned mine was the kind of injury that made most people wince before looking away. Although I normally love getting two-for-one deals, this time I was grateful to have just a bad dislocation rather than the break-dislocation combo that most, at first glance, thought I had.  

Hours later, staggering from the lovely medley of medications I’d been served at the hospital, we stopped at home just long enough to pick up the Christmas presents and head up to my parent’s house. But with me incapacitated, there was one gift we couldn’t take with us. 

The bench I’d gotten up early to tweak.   

The next few days are a bit of a blur, with Geoff and Celeste waiting on me hand and foot. (Lest you believe them to be saints, one is responsible for the Pierre mustache I found drawn on my upper lip after awakening from a nap, while the other collected video footage of me answering bizarre questions while loopy on pain meds.) 

On Monday, I returned to work with my heavily padded arm in a sling, and as those who have endured an obvious injury have experienced, I found myself being questioned about what happened at every turn. It wasn’t long before what actually happened began to feel far too dull, so I began mixing it up just a bit. 

When asked, What happened to your arm? 

Bar fight. 

How’d you get hurt? 

Arm-wrestling. After I’m better, I’m making Grandma give me a rematch. 

What on earth did you do? 

This is what happens when you tell Selby that something isn’t in your job description.

My once impressive swelling has receded, so my hand no longer resembles an inflated surgical glove. And a few days after Christmas, a neighbor helped us load my parent’s bench into our car. Even though it was late, it was still a big hit.  

The chief motivation for making presents this year was so we could save money. I just didn’t realize at the outset that it was so we could send it to Thomas Hospital instead.  

I caught the look of amusement on my husband’s face as he overheard me telling a neighbor about our foster dog, Roo.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

“That you’re still calling Roo a foster dog,” Geoff said. “Like she’s ever going to be placed in a home other than ours.”

“It could happen,” I said.

“It could,” said Geoff, “but only if she outlives both of us.”

Roo was one of those well-intentioned experiments in insanity I find myself conducting every now and again. It’s this compulsion I have to try to fix broken things. I’ve written about it before - how I’m attracted to old furniture buried under layers of paint, drawn to houses in need of remodeling, charmed by animals that routinely draw blood.

When I first met my husband, he was a mess, suffering terribly from the trappings of longtime bachelorhood. I relieved him of that. And when I first laid eyes on my daughter, she couldn’t walk, talk or feed herself, yet I was thoroughly smitten. When she soiled herself, I knew she was meant to be mine.

And when I learned about Roo, I wasn’t looking for a dog at all, not even a foster. We had two dogs already (plus three cats, two rats and a turtle). I heard Roo’s sad story - rescued from animal hoarders (53 dogs in a single-wide trailer) and saw her cowering in the corner of the pen, sad-eyed and trembling.

She was quite effectively defective.

Enough so that we agreed to foster the 3-year-old, 13-pound dog that looked a bit like what might result from a romance between a German shepherd and a raccoon.

That was August. Here we are, at the tail end of December.

On Roo’s collar is an engraved tag with her name and our address. The word “foster” does not precede her name on the tag, but for some reason, I still catch myself referring to her as our foster dog.

“You did that with Sully, too,” Geoff was quick to point out. “You called him the ‘neighborhood cat’ for a couple years before admitting he was ours.”

To give myself credit, I did make an honest attempt to find new homes for both Sully and Roo, even arranging for their prospective new owners to take them home for test runs. Neither trial took. (And Sully’s trial resulted in considerable blood loss to the human half of the test.)

Neither Sully nor Roo were to blame for the personality quirks that limited placement possibilities to just those fascinated with all things broken or warped. People made them that way. It seemed only fair that a person try to repair it.

It took a few years to undo Sully’s damage, but he’s become a truly great cat. He’s still a bit more opinionated than I’d like, especially considering we’re at opposite ends of the political spectrum, but he’s coming around.

Roo might take a bit longer.

The first three years of her life were spent without any exposure to men, so she’s terrified of males. Apparently, those first three years were also spent without car horns, sirens, loud coughs, whistles, vacuum cleaners, ice makers, lawn mowers, leaf blowers or clumsy people who occasionally bump into walls. The pooch has some issues.

Fortunately, though, we’re seeing enough good qualities that we have little doubt the effort will be worthwhile. Roo trusts my daughter and me completely, and Geoff when he’s horizontal. Standing, he’s scary. Flat on his back, he’s adored.

She fits in well with our two other dogs, and I love to watch the three of them play. The cats, however, are another matter completely.

Rumor has it Sully’s circulating a petition to have Roo removed.

I have something I’d love to wrap up and re-gift this Christmas. It requires no batteries, takes up no space, and possesses powers so great they border on the magical. The problem is that even if there were actually a way to pass it along to someone else, I’d probably feel too guilty to follow through.

What is this thing? It’s my own personal abyss, my single-serving-size mini black hole. It’s my most constant companion, doggedly following me wherever I go, gobbling up keys, paperwork and coupons. It swallows early-purchased Christmas gifts I naively believed I’d tucked away somewhere safe.

Its gravitational pull is strong, capable of consuming everything from socks to small appliances.

Seldom can searching produce something that’s fallen into this hole. Instead, I must wait until the ever-hungry abyss tires of whatever it was and spits it back out. It never fails to land in one of the places I’m absolutely certain I’ve looked.

A recent example: Shortly before heading to the mall to do some Christmas shopping, I clipped several coupons from the newspaper and put them in the small zippered pocket on the front of my purse, noting that the only other item in that pocket was my insurance card. While in the checkout line at Macy’s, I unzipped my purse. The insurance card was present, but not a coupon in sight. I dug through every pocket. Nothing.

Having grown somewhat accustomed to life with the hole, I keep my purse contents sparse, to limit the enjoyment it apparently derives from watching me dig. I carefully checked every pocket, but those coupons had vanished. Frustrated, I returned my items to the rack and left empty-handed. A few hours later, I opened my purse and there were the coupons — regurgitated intact, courtesy of the black hole.

There are times I suspect the abyss has my best interests in mind. When an important document gets sucked in at work, I’m forced to file and organize my office until the lost paper is found. If not for my abyss, my desk would hardly ever get cleaned.

The abyss is playful, routinely swiping single socks and holding on to them until I finally give up and discard the mate. Once it feels confident that trash day has passed, it returns the now useless booty.

Lest anyone think me unbalanced, I kept the news about my black hole to myself until a friend was telling me about a collection of Christmas houses they put on display every year. After the holidays, they store the houses together, but this year, when they brought out their decorations, two of the houses had vanished.

She blamed their black hole.

I went online to research the phenomena and found that not only have others experienced similar happenings, but those happenings are apparently so plentiful that products are being marketed to aid in dealing with their existence. For just $16, you can get a black-hole purse light with light rays that are resistant to the gravitational pull of the hole. For $5, there’s a black-hole time-warp fractal 2.25-inch purse pocket mirror.

After a good deal more searching, I decided to go ahead and order the light, since I could find no instructions on transferring ownership of my black hole to someone else. 

Part of my write-a-book-in-a-month project involved sorting through 11 years worth of columns, some of which I’m working into my book. I ran across a number that were Christmas related, and as I was reading, realized there’s a recurring holiday happening at our house so predictable it almost a tradition.

The first time was in 1997, when Celeste was just a few months old. I’d assembled our artificial tree and carefully decorated it, placing every ornament and light just so, intending to get the perfect picture of my new baby under the tree. 

Except the tree decided it preferred to be horizontal. Didn’t just prefer it–insisted upon it. Over and over again. We finally gave in and placed our gifts around our prone tree.

Another year, when it was just Celeste and me, we spent ages dragging our artificial tree up from the basement a few branches at a time because the box had disintegrated. With Christmas music playing and brownies cooling on the stove, my girl and I sorted and reshaped the branches and carefully constructed our oversized tree. 

And just as soon as I slid that last branch into the slot, the tree came tumbling down. I put it back up. It came back down. After contemplating drilling a trunk-circumference-sized hole directly into the floor, I did what any independent grown woman would do. I called Dad.

I expected the tumbling tree tradition might come to an end after Geoff and I married and he kicked my fake tree to the curb, but while his fresh cut trees haven’t been as passionately anti-vertical as mine, there’s a famous Tower of Pisa that they often resemble.

Geoff was responsible for starting a completely different tradition, one that’s turned a somewhat ordinary decoration-a set of wooden blocks that spells out “Merry Christmas”-into our family’s favorite decoration of all time. 

In the years before Geoff, I’d usually arrange the block letters on top of the entertainment center, and there they’d stay until it was time to return to their box.

But not with Geoff in the house. Instead of being wished a Merry Christmas, he rearranged the blocks so we were greeted with, “MY RAMS RETCH,” or after turning one M upside-down, “IRS WAR CHEST” or “SIR RAW CHEST.”

Celeste joined the game, making “MY RICH RAMS” and “MARCH MISS TERRY.”

The country might have been up in arms about the whole Happy Holidays deal, but in our house, nothing said Merry Christmas quite like “MY ARMS ITCH.”

It’s been fun having so many years of stories to sort through, and often, I’ll run across one I’d almost forgotten. Like the year of the head. 

When Celeste was 4 years old, she caught Barbie fever, and her passion for collecting them was fervent. So for Christmas that year, her grandparents thought she would be thrilled with one of those big Barbie heads, even though Celeste had never seen one before.

On Christmas Eve, with the family all gathered around, Celeste excitedly ripped the paper from the top of the package, lifted the lid, grabbed a fistful of synthetic blonde hair and pulled it up out of the box.

And saw that it was just Barbie’s head.

She dropped it and screamed, “Someone cut off Barbie’s head!”

Nothing we could say could convince her that the bodiless head was supposed to be that way, that it wasn’t evidence of grisly revenge taken against Barbie by a wronged mafia lord (or Ken). The head went back to the store. 

And I went to the computer and wrote it all down.