The Last Christmas

“You’re always bah-humbuggy during the holidays, Curmudge. Why’s that?”

“Holidays are an awful lot of work, Julie. But they’ve always been more work for Mrs. Curmudgeon than for me. She worked harder than Santa Claus, but I was just a helpful elf.”

“How so, Rudolph? Did it have something to do with her profession as a church organist - choir director?”

“It had everything to do with it, Julie. Choir rehearsals began in October for the major Advent oratorio. But the efforts didn’t begin to get intense until December. Then we had to decorate the house for holiday entertaining. A tree inside and on the porch, figurines all over the place, and more greenery than a national forest. If all of the candles had been lighted, the house might have burned down.”

“Thank goodness it didn’t. So when did all the entertaining occur?”

“It began with a small dinner party for my long-ago professional colleagues and their spouses. We were a fairly subdued bunch, as you’d expect from chemists, but it took a while to straighten the house after they left.”

"I know the next event—the big oratorio with festival choir and orchestra. Remember last year’s awful snowstorm on Saturday? On Sunday there were more singers in the choir than people in the congregation.”

“Traditionally, we held the big choir Christmas party on the following Wednesday evening. That was the main reason for all the decorations in the house. The night before was spent making 80 or so ‘Aunt Lucy’s ham-and-cheese sandwiches’ to be served at the party. The usual beverage of choice was ‘Ethel’s punch’ that I concocted.”

“Of course, all of the parties included caroling around the grand piano. One year, even one of your friends with Alzheimer’s sang.”

"That’s right, Julie. With 40-50 people, the house was filled to overflowing. You can imagine the cleanup job after everyone left. At noon on the following day, Mrs. Curmudgeon’s colleagues from church came for lunch. Then a week later we did the full-house thing over again for another circle of friends.”

“Golly, Curmudge, with the parties and great music, I’ll bet that everyone had a wonderful time. It’s pretty evident that Mrs. Curmudgeon loved good friends as much as she loved good music. But I must admit that the whole effort sounds exhausting.”

“It certainly was. During one of our late-night cleanups, I commented to Mrs. Curmudgeon, ‘I hope we won’t be doing many more of these.’ It was not my intent to be prophetic. However, Mrs. Curmudgeon must have sensed more clearly than I that her interstitial lung disease was worsening and that these parties might be the last.”

“And finally Christmas arrived—along with pneumonia.”

"Mrs. Curmudgeon had to play three church services on Christmas Eve. It was quite a struggle for her to climb the 32 steps to the organ loft. Her breathing was labored…as if she were climbing to the top of Mount Everest. By the time the final service was over, it was Christmas Morning. She came down from the loft completely exhausted, and three weeks later, she died.”

“Curmudge, it sounds as if you helped everyone else to have a merry Christmas. Perhaps you and Mrs. Curmudgeon had a good time mostly because everyone else did.”

“Julie, she made great music and hosted holiday parties for about 40 years. In years past when people would ask when Mrs. Curmudgeon planned to retire, her answer was an emphatic, ‘Never.’ She would go on to explain that she hoped to flop dead on the organ console. She came close.”