It's All Relative (31 page)

“I want ice blue, frost blue,” Gary told me in Target, “not the tacky royal blue that straight people love. I want everything to look dipped in ice, like a winter sky at night.”

Speak-y English, I wanted to say
.

But I quickly got the point five hundred dollars later.

“I desperately need some ice-blue tapered candles,” Gary then said.

And I desperately needed something, too, I thought: I desperately needed a turkey baster inserted into my pee hole to dwarf the pain I was experiencing.

Another three hundred dollars later—after buying candles and faux ice blocks and icy blue penguins and ornaments we wouldn't
even use—I cracked standing in Michael's while looking at luminaries.

“How can a quarter ounce of paper,” I asked, my voice rising with each syllable, “cost four dollars?”

“Well, each luminary has this adorable cutout of a northern star …” Gary began.

“That's a rhetorical question!” I yelled.

“What's wrong?” Gary asked. “Don't you want to throw a holiday party?”

I did. But I also wanted to retire before I was 112. And we hadn't even hired the caterer or bartenders.

And, to be honest, I always felt stupid and worthless when it came to tossing our holiday parties. I was never really allowed to do anything except pay for it.

That's when it hit me.

“Hey, why don't you let me handle the food? I can do it,” I begged like a child. “You want simple. I can do simple, I swear. I can do retro.”

“Don't go …” Gary stopped himself before saying the word
cheap
. He couldn't right now. I controlled the funds. And I looked insane. “Okay.”

I spent weeks agonizing over the food, finally deciding on a menu I knew I could do well: garlic-rubbed standing rib roast, maple-coffee-glazed pork tenderloin, and baked apple turnovers, among many other things. I would hit only the best produce markets, the best butchers.

But as I began to price the menu on my own, the Rouse genes took over, the ones my grandmother passed on to me, the ones that forced me to buy the bruised peaches in the sale bin.

So when I walked into the grocery with my list in hand, I reasoned that my original menu was simply too grand for all this exceedingly well-planned simplicity.

Standing in the produce aisle, an idea so grand in its simplicity and yet so perfect for our theme knocked me over the head.

“Stuffed peppers!” I thought. “They're simple. They're retro. They're fun. I can use red and green—it's not blue, but they'd be oh-so-old-fashioned Christmasy.”

When I returned home and told Gary of my new menu, he, honest to God, twitched, just like Wile E. Coyote does when an anvil falls on his head. But Gary wasn't in a position to fight me—literally, or he would have—considering he was hanging off a ladder in midair attempting to dangle blue spruce limbs from our chandeliers and ceilings in order to create an in-the-middle-of-the-winter-woods effect.

And yet, though he was suspended and had wire in his mouth, he managed to give me his patented “Don't fuck this up!” look.

Gary tweaked and tucked and terraced the next few weeks, up until the very last moments before our Blue Christmas guests arrived, leaving me free to run with my retro menu that included fondue and fun fifties finger foods. I was thrilled with the menu, excited, finally, by my lone contribution to one of my partner's perfect parties. Instead of simply dressing up, looking pretty, and then falling into the tree because the only thing I'd been entrusted to do was pretest all the holiday drinks, I was actually supplying one of the most important elements for any party.

I was laughing and dancing and replenishing food in a drunken Blue Hawaiian–cocktailed haze when I noticed that two of our guests—no matter how hard they tried, no matter how they balanced their plates, no matter what they used—couldn't cut through their green peppers.

Houston, I thought, we have a problem.

And we did. I realized, too late, I had never actually cooked stuffed green peppers in my life. Especially for fifty. This was my mother's recipe. They all were. And she had made them all sound so
easy; but then again, I realized too late, she was a nurse. She made catheterization sound easy.

I looked at the fondue. It was clotted and cold. I looked at the pigs in the blanket. They resembled uncut cocks.

No one was eating.

Everyone was whispering.

I was drunk.

“Eat up!” I screamed at the crowd, shoving raw hunks of meat and bread and cheese into my mouth. “It's
soooo
good!”

In a stupor, I handed out even sharper knives, never a smart idea being drunk and handling cutlery, and then to prove my point I used one to try and saw a pepper open. I grunted and, finally, succeeded, only to watch a wall of water cascade from the middle. The rice was undercooked, the meat raw, the peppers like concrete.

My dinner was a disaster. More likely, spoiled.

And, to the horror of Gary, I started eating it like a junkyard dog.

I'd spent eight hours—and roughly forty-two dollars—making this food.

It wouldn't go to waste.

And I wouldn't be humiliated.

“It's okay, Wade,” one of my friends finally yelled. “Really, it is.”

And then she shared with the crowd the time her award-winning soufflé fell when everyone clapped at its arrival. And then someone else told of how they forgot to turn on the oven at Thanksgiving. And someone else tried to cheer me up by recalling how he had used cumin instead of cinnamon in a dessert, causing all his guests to aspirate their coffee.

While everyone laughed and shared, I realized we all occasionally wilt under the pressure to be perfect. Life is so
not
perfect. That's why we have friends. That's why we love to be entertained. So we can just be for a little while.

I looked around. I wanted to share this newfound wisdom with Gary.

He, however, was already on the phone. Ordering two hundred dollars' worth of Chinese food to be delivered by the angry tranny. He was none too amused that his Blue Christmas had turned into Chinese New Year.

After everyone left I lay in a chair, staring up at our tree and our blue-spruce-forest ceiling, icy blue lights whirring in front of my drunken eyes, Elvis continuing to croon “Blue Christmas.”

As I began to pass out, Gary tossed a blanket over my body, pulled a holiday stocking cap over my head, and said, “We won't be going
simple
anymore, will we, Mr. Peppers?”

He then kneeled down and kissed me on the cheek, an icy cold smooch that fit in perfectly with the party's theme, a kiss to let me know—silently—that my hands were tied. Forever.

And then I puked peppers.

But just like Martha, Gary had already planned for that.

A blue ice bucket to catch my hurl was already waiting on the floor next to me, along with a frosted blue dish towel with dancing penguins to dab my mouth.

I
can track the spiritual decline of Christmas—make that the moral decay of our entire country—not to technology's dark hold on our children, or even gay marriage, but to something much more sinister: the Christmas form letter.

The Christmas letter is the most vile of holiday traditions, started by and now embraced by people the world over.

It has become our generation's fruitcake.

In gay terms, the Christmas letter is the equivalent of getting a braided belt for the holidays, or seeing a bride walk down the aisle with a spiral perm.

It's difficult to quantify the horror. Or the reasoning.

For those of you who don't know, the Christmas letter is that annual form letter that families send in the middle of an unsigned holiday card from the dollar store.

The letter not only combines poor writing and eye-glazing dullness, but it is also a completely self-absorbed and self-indulgent endeavor, wrapped in a hypocritical shell of compassion.

Most galling to me is the fact that there is nothing personal in this seemingly personalized Christmas letter, not even a signature. (I mean, is it too much to sign a name?) The letter is Xeroxed—sending
the exact same message to hundreds of different people—while the card is too flimsy to display, and the photo of a vacant-looking family sitting in front of a fake fireplace at the Sears Portrait Studio is downright disturbing.

Why must you all wear matching red sweaters and smiles that say, “The electroshock therapy is going quite well, thank you”? The worst parts of the photo are (1) I can actually see the faux fireplace's extension cord winding its way off to the side, and (2) Why are you so tan? I know it's because you took this right after you got back from vacation in the Wisconsin Dells. You told me about it in your letter.

I came to peace with the Christmas-letter perpetrators, much as I came to peace with the fact that George Bush would remain our president, by coming to grips with a few important facts: First, I realized what a blessing it must be in life to be so cluelessly egotistical and self-obsessed; second, I came to understand that the facts being presented are flawed from the get-go; third, I was no longer duped by the supposedly exciting news being presented, just because multiple exclamation points had been added to the ends of incomplete sentences; and, last and most important, I came to know that I would never really be close to those who offended me.

In reality, most of the Christmas letters I received were from “acquaintances,” people I heard from once every year, former schoolmates or work colleagues who happened upon my address and thought I might be interested in the tortuous minutiae of their lives.

But then something changed: I opened our mail one early-December day to discover no fewer than a half dozen Christmas letters … all from good friends.

I was especially surprised to receive an eerie form letter from a woman whom I'd always deemed a true friend, a funny, smart, creative, hip woman with whom I'd stayed in touch closely, even after the start of her own medical practice, the birth of her children, the
building of a new house. I did anything I could to help her out when she needed it, no matter how busy I was at the time.

Her letter was so crass, so impersonal, so devoid of human emotion, that it shook me to the core of my soul. So in order to cope, I did what I would normally do: I wrote about it. To be specific, I wrote my own letter, which I share with you now: