On Friday I went to the annual Christmas Tea and Living Nativity at the county nursing home, where I am on the board. I thought about bringing my camera but didn't because of privacy concerns. So I will have to paint word pictures for you.
I arrived just as the hostess was welcoming everyone, and I slipped into a chair in the back of the activities room where about 100 people were in the audience. There were residents in wheel chairs and walkers and lots of people from the community. My first clue about how cool this was going to be was the queue of residents in wheel chairs in the hall outside the activity room.
They were dressed in quasi-Biblical robes and headdresses, and a staff person was carrying a tiny baby, who looked to be about a month old.
In the front of the activity room was the narrator with his script and microphone and a woman seated at the piano behind him. There was a small group of six residents in choir robes with songbooks. A couple more people in dark robes and headdresses stood to one side, and over the top of the audience heads I could see...
a llama.
Turned out his name was Don Juan and he has participated in this play since 2002. For the first three years his owner, an employee in the activities department, put a fake hump on his back with a blanket over it, but no one figured out that Don was supposed to be a camel so she quit that part.
The narrator began the Christmas story. Staff members wheeled in Mary and Joseph in their wheel chairs and another brought in the baby, who cried loudly. Two-thirds of the three wise men walked in, the third was pushed in his wheel chair. A little boy of about 3 walked up the aisle with his little drum while a member of the small choir sang The Little Drummer Boy. Three angels in wheel chairs were recognizable as divine by the gold garlands twined about their heads and necks.
It was all totally charming, and I plan to attend again next year. They have been doing it for 24 years and this is the first year the baby has cried. That's a pretty good run, I'd say.
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Several years ago I had a spate of gall bladder problems. Tests revealed that while mine was no poster child of gall bladder health and functionality, it was not bad enough to warrant surgery.
A few weeks ago I started having what I thought were the same symptoms again, and I trekked back to the doctor expecting that this time I might end up gall bladder-less. Lab tests and an ultrasound showed my gall bladder (and right kidney and liver) was fine but that there was "an odd contour on the side of the pancreas." Um, huh? On Monday I have a CT scan to get a better look. Let's all think positive thoughts for me, m'kay?
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Andrew will fly in at 6:30 tonight from New York and will be home for two whole weeks. Smokey has stocked the freezer accordingly with a ham and steaks and lobsters and an entire beef tenderloin. (Oink.) It will be good to have #1 Son here for awhile. Matthew and GF Alex will be here for Christmas, I think, although Smokey will work a day shift that day. I am kinda sorta planning to slip out of Christmas dinner cookery and take the kids to the Christmas dinner sponsored at a lovely north woods lodge sponsored by a local commercial club. I have done that a couple times in the past few years, and it is a lot more pleasant than slaving in the kitchen. I like to cook but not that much.
