Gluttony, thy name is Christmas BY CAITLIN SHETTERLY

Well, the holidays are over and I’ve decided to go on a detox. Like any good WASP, I’m leaning toward the gin detox to get me through January and February. The problem is, I’m recovering from a serious case of stuffed lung. It’s almost as dangerous as black lung, except in this case it’s pieces of gooey sage stuffing and turkey gravy forced like sausage meat into the natural casings of my lungs.

I realized this was my illness when after enormous meal number four, this one being Christmas itself, my lungs actually began to hurt and it was hard to breathe. I couldn’t even sit in a chair to watch the pile of movies we had picked out for our holiday weekend. Instead I had to lie prostrate on my bed, holding my stomach like it was a baby I might feel kick. I admit, I was a little worried that what was inside might indeed kick.

Cowboy, who came home with me for Christmas (and was the first boyfriend to come home with me for this holiday) found he had to spend most evenings after dinner lying on the floor holding his stomach. After yet another enormous meal with my surrogate grandparents, he thought he might vomit because he had shoved so much down his gullet.

I’m sure blaming Christmas for my gluttony will just put me in the O’Reilly camp of Heretics Against Christmas waging the War on Christmas. And he might be right. Because, my question is this: What does excess do to bring us closer to each other? And does excess really celebrate anything? I’ve heard more times this year than any other that people feel they really overdid it and ate and drank way too much this Christmas. And my thought is: People are empty. We are empty because the war is still going on; because our president is wiretapping us and lying about it; because the economy sucks; because there is so little hope in a world where disaster after disaster comes and goes like yesterday’s news, and no one can overcome their A.D.D. enough to realize the longevity of relief help, and what help means beyond writing a check.

Every year at my mother’s, I decorate her jade plant and her crèche. The jade plant has become enormous and gnarled over the years and is the perfect antidote to a sacrificial tree. I cover it with little white lights and then go out into the woods behind her house with a Little Red Riding Hood basket and fill the basket with moss and lichens, rusty dried ferns and black-eyed Susan heads, reeds, and rushes. It usually takes me a few hours to decorate what I call "The Christmas Room," but is really my mother’s small library. And while doing it I go back to the innocence of my childhood, where I spent entire days outside making forts and fairy-houses in the woods behind our house. When I emerge and call my mother to come look, the plant is covered with little ornamental animals — birds and camels, hippos and polar bears — dry leaves and branches and green moss surround its base, smelling earthy and wet.

And it is this process, making the "tree" beautiful, and the crèche lovely (this year Mary and Joseph watched over a small dog), and reading A Child’s Christmas in Wales aloud as we do every year whether it snows for six days or twelve, that seems to mean more than ripping open reams of colored paper covered with little bells, or eating turkey and duck until ready to burst while drinking wonderful Tempranillos or eating my cousin Carrie’s divine chocolate-covered toffee. Because Christmas, when we feel empty, should be a time to fill our empty places with something other than stuff or stuffing. With what, in a world gone so awry, I do not know.