Little Gifts for Wilbo This Funky Christmas

My Erstwhile Love,

My sister and her husband live near me one suburban town south of Royal Oak, and this year, their family went south to visit friends in Florida. My parents hold their Christmas celebration on the Sunday after Christmas so as not to compete with all the Christmas celebrations of the kinship. My daughter has always gone with her mother's people for Christmas because they have an exquisite Wigilia, a Polish customary celebration of Christmas Eve, with homemade Pierogi, sauerkraut and a rather interesting ritual. The only meat is in the diced ham pierogi, which is indistinguishable from the plum, cheese or sauerkraut pierogi. At midnight, everyone is given a communion wafer, an Oplatek, and they all circulate around the room, snapping a piece off a relative's wafer and consuming it. The act of eating a sliver of wafer is a full pardon and forgiveness for any fault or error in the past year, a total absolution. I'm not sure in which direction the pardons work, but since each pair eats at the same time, it doesn't matter. So since her mother's family has better programming for Christmas, I'm reluctant to squabble over holiday rights when it comes to Christmas.

I wish I had a couple of wafers to share with my brother, Mathias, and his partner, Olaf. I understand that the wafers can be mailed to absent family members. They have tended to withdraw from the family during the past few years. I had attended the Christmas Eve candlelight ceremony at Renaissance Unity, the church that Marianne Williamson renamed when she was the lead minister for two or three years around 1999 - 2002. I sat right down in the front row by the choir, a smooth, emotion-tweaking group called the Gospel Truth. They always get me going, and they always get the congregation going too. Kleenex is kept in boxes beneath the seats in the amphitheatre. Mathias and Olaf are Lutherans, Olaf being the son of a Lutheran minister and a collector of christian literature of antique publication, and they often refer to Renaissance Unity as "Christianity Lite". Renaissance Unity is just two minutes from their house, and I called ahead after the candlelight service, and Mathias picked up the phone right away, but he didn't invite me to come over. Mathias and Olaf are not attending my mom and dad's weekend Christmas either, and that mystifies all of us.

Ten minutes walk from my house, a Presbyterian church went on a different tact after the sanctuary caught fire and was rebuilt. It shelved all the hymnals and books of service, which I guess weren't lost in the fire, and began offering a contemplative service. I had attended the Sunday service before this Christmas. I'm exaggerating somewhat here. The minister read a meditational poem by Lisa Dancing-Light and performed a ceremony of lighting candles for Advent. His granddaughters were happy to light the candles for him. For me, the high point of the service was seeing how sacred those children felt moving forward to the Advent candles with their lit tapers. He screened a short video on the Mekong River in Laos because water is one of the symbols of Advent, and then we all meditated and contemplated in silence for the next hour. At previous times, the service has ended with the Reiki masters-in-training applying the healing touch to all the congregation, but not this holiday Sunday.

That's only a few ways the holiday was different. It was totally filled with little gifts, though. For example, at the end of the service at the Presbyterian Church, one of the granddaughters came up and gave me a Christmas card enclosed in a red envelope. When I opened it at home, it was signed in pencil by all three sisters.

Since I was going to see my country relatives out at the farm the Sunday following Christmas, I didn't want to drive out there for Christmas Day. All of my friends dropped by with Christmas cards or to have a Xmas nosh with me in the days leading up to the holiday, but on Christmas Day, I was at a loss. I considered dropping in at the big Salvation Army mission in downtown Detroit and offering to help prepare, serve or clean-up the annual feast, but believe it or not, there's virtually a waiting list to volunteer for that event. I was afraid that the Salvation Army commander, a Major Barbara look-alike, would decide I was a bum and tell me to sit down and not cause trouble. So instead of going to the Salvation Army for dinner, I went to the casino. Do you remember the good old song called Salvation Army? "Put a Nickel in the Drum, Save Another Drunken Bum?" I could be that drunken bum the way my luck is holding out. When you take the drink away from the drunken bum, all is left is a bum.

So I drove to the new 800 million dollar MGM Casino, and the house comped my Christmas Dinner, which I didn't have to eat at the long, fold-up tables with the other castaway men found anchorless on Christmas Day. My table, eating single at a two top table, looked carved out of a single block of black walnut. Instead, I dined upon cold bluepoint oysters and wood-roasted lamb chops and rotisserie chicken to my heart's content, and then I followed up with piccolo cups of green apple, banana and raspberry gelato, key lime pie, demitasse cups of chocolate mousse and strawberry garnished cheesecake.

Maybe they were so generous because it was Christmas and they couldn't serve alcohol? I didn't gamble one dollar though. I'm thinking my tolerance for any loss is totally gone. I drank free cokes at the bars that couldn't serve anything other than free soft drinks and juice. I talked with a few girls, including this one woman in heels and the push-up, sparkling gown of the MGM girls. She complained that without the heels, she stood four foot ten, one inch higher than a legal midget. She would be pretty tall lying on her back in bed, and I'm not talking about her tum-tum. A very yummy girl, and the management had her removing cups from between the slot machines. She was far better looking than more than one of the regular cocktail waitresses. Didn't ask her for her number. After a run-in with Casino guards in Oklahoma, I am not persistent in my pursuit of dates in casino situations. Wilbo doesn't get between and woman and her Wheel of Fortune because a Woman and her Wheel of Fortune is a profitable thing.

If Wilbo Enters Heaven, Poets Are Probably Not Going to Sing About The Occasion