Eight. Hungover for the Holidays #2
“Well, I need to get that hot cocoa started,” Mom says.
She pulls herself away from Dad like it’s hard to leave his side and glides past me.
She squeezes my cheeks. In the kitchen, she pulls out a pan and some milk as well as marshmallows, whipped cream, and chocolate shavings.
Since when did she make hot cocoa that was anything other than a Swiss Miss packet?
“I’m going to, um, go for a quick run.” And since when do I say I’m going for a run, even as a convenient lie?
“I’ll ice your hot cocoa so you can have it with whipped cream when you’re back!”
I’m still wearing the fuzzy slippers, but Mom doesn’t even comment that I am not wearing appropriate footwear for a run, let alone that I’ve never run recreationally in my life.
But then, she’s still on cloud nine from her canoodling with Dad.
Maybe while I was out, they all got carbon monoxide poisoning?
“Great! Thanks! Can’t wait to enjoy the snow!”
I step over the new doormat that reads Dance in the Rain but Wipe Your Feet After!
and look for a coat on the rack that’s replaced the hooks.
There’s no sign anywhere of the unflattering parka of Mom’s I borrowed, so I take a pretty hunter green wool number.
I look for the booties I thought I chucked by the door last night and only see a pair of even higher-heeled boots.
But they’re the only shoes in my size, so I slip them on, grab my phone off the small console on the other side of the door, and leave.
Outside, the air is refreshing but not too cold. And every house within view looks recently painted and decorated for Christmas. My parents’ crabby neighbor, Mr. Withers, is outside in snow pants putting a head on a snowman. He waves. “I have those same pajamas,” he says.
I glance down, remembering my flannel ensemble. No, I need to figure out what’s going on here before I go back in the house. “Just having a little fun with fashion,” I chirp, waving back. I turn in the opposite direction, toward Ninety-Fifth Street. I walk as briskly as I can in the boots.
I pass a wiener dog in a cable-knit sweater that matches his owner’s cable-knit sweater, and a station wagon with a lush Christmas tree strapped to its roof drives the speed limit down my parents’ street as “Winter Wonderland” pours from its windows.
I put my hands in the pockets of the coat and find a pair of sunglasses waiting.
The sun is bright, so I put them on. The frames are a light golden color, but the lenses are dark enough that I can hide how often my eyes go wide at what I see around me.
Because this is not the Powell Park I came home to a few days ago.
When I turn at the end of the block onto Ninety-Fifth, the insurance office is still there, but its window is painted with a jolly Santa, and working inside, a sweetly round woman in a Christmas sweater—a subdued one with holly on the shoulder—waves at me as I pass by.
The rest of the block looks different, too—like, dramatically so.
The storefronts that were closed or taken up by long-standing oddball businesses, like Gary’s Plumbing Supplies and Massage Outlet (which I always believed was a mob front), are now filled in with a cute bookshop, a florist, and a toy shop.
And everything seems recognizable but a bit compact—the six wide lanes of Ninety-Fifth are compressed down to two, and the usually heavy traffic is now manageable.
But when I check the street sign, it still reads Ninety-Fifth Street , though in a prettier font than I remember.
Giovanni’s Ristorante and Amano’s Deli, which share the block, were yesterday the only distinct-looking businesses on this expanse of street, but now they’re flanked by a cute salon and a gift shop flaunting an array of painted wood signs and figurines.
I continue my speed walk, and Ninety-Fifth, which in Powell Park you only walk down to get to your car or the bus stop, now overflows with well-dressed shoppers clutching wrapped packages and oversized shopping bags.
Someone is selling hot cocoa on the corner, and as I make my way farther west, I see SweetHart’s.
The building is no bigger than it was yesterday, but its gray facade is now a standout red brick, and the sign is way larger.
A line forms outside, but no one seems pissed to be waiting.
Just like the rest of the street, the snow in the parkway is white and crisp, while the sidewalks are perfectly void of ice or slush.
The view is so pretty, so quaint, I reach for my phone and snap several photos, thinking I’ll cleverly caption a slideshow with “What a dump” (double meaning intended), but when I go to open Instagram, there’s a “Countdown to Christmas Day!” ticker on the home screen.
My fingers shake as I swipe up and see most of the icons on the screen look different and none of them like Instagram.
But my background is still a photo I had Zav take of me in front of the Hollywood sign on a hike a million years ago, so I know this is my phone.
The countdown ticker displays the date, December fifteenth, and proclaims that Santa arrives in Sweetville, Illinois, in just under ten days. But, what’s Sweetville? And more importantly… What is going on?
I stop in my tracks to look at the library and the green across the street.
Powell Park’s big tree is decorated with way more lights than I remember, and little kids are waiting beneath it for a turn to see Santa, who’s hanging out in the polished sleigh.
The car dealership advertisement is gone, and the sleigh looks brand-new.
None of the kids are recoiling at the puddle of puke I think I left in the bottom of it before I…
… passed out? Was abducted?
Holy fucking messy Santa.
Am I dead? Is Sweetville, Illinois, my version of the afterlife? And if so, what did I do so wrong in life that my afterlife is holiday themed?
But no, if I’m dead, how would my whole family be here?
There’s another explanation. I just need to be observant, and I’ll figure it out.
Wondering what happened to the Starbucks and the Dunkin’, I get a cup of coffee from a place called Brew Ha-Ha—lucky for me, there’s a twenty in the pocket of the coat I grabbed—and sip it as I notice that everything in this town, this Sweetville, is pumped to what I can only call balls-out Christmas.
For real, if there were a literal war on Christmas, this would be the place its enemies had to take out last. Evergreen strands are wrapped around every light post, there’s an elf ringing a bell for donations outside a butcher shop advertising plump Christmas hams, and all of the people I see look fresh and photogenic, nothing like the haunted and exhausted shoppers I saw out yesterday.
A woman emerges from the shop carrying a package wrapped in white paper, and a man walking his dog pulls back on the leash as his pup starts sniffing in the woman’s direction.
I hear her say, “Charley!” to the dog, and then Charley’s owner says, “You know Charley?”
“I run the animal shelter and couldn’t forget his sweet face,” the woman says.
“My late wife got him for me there two Christmases ago,” the guy says.
The woman smiles kindly at the dog’s owner, who’s a bargain basement version of Denzel Washington.
“I remember your wife. She had an excellent sense for the best of our lot.” The words are freighted with significance.
The man seems shy about realizing that the animal-shelter lady is implying his late wife had good taste in choosing both him and Charley.
Now he smiles and… Am I witnessing a very schmaltzy meet-cute?
The soon-to-be new couple doesn’t notice me or my daytime pajamas as I pass them, thinking how rare it is to see a meet-cute in the wild.
I stop in front of the toy store, Annie’s Toy Chest, and wonder who’s buying toy trains and giant stuffed animals when I thought kids all wanted iPhones, or at least Legos.
I step inside, browsing a display of soft teddy bears, when I overhear an attractive young woman in an apron behind the counter lay into a man in a business suit.
“I might be a small shop, but my grandmother started this business, and this town will see to it that you can’t come from the big city and just buy whatever you feel like buying. ”
The man, who’s very chiseled and handsome in a knockoff Justin Theroux kind of way, closes his briefcase and says, “You can’t stop progress… even if you do look very cute trying.” The woman throws a teddy bear at him. He turns to leave, but there’s a smirk of interest on his face.
Huh.
On my way out, I smash into a woman in a business suit.
She’s a near facsimile of Reese Witherspoon but without the distinctive chin.
She huffs a huge, exasperated sigh in my face and glares at me while she talks into her cell phone.
“You don’t understand. I need to get back to the city to present my new designs for the prince’s crown!
He’s royalty; he doesn’t care if it’s the holidays and you’re overbooked! Please, fix this!”
Then, somewhere in the distance but also somehow right inside my brain, I hear those jingle bells shaking. The contented female sigh. Someone—presumably the sigher—saying, “Open your heart.”
I know why the sounds are so familiar. They haven’t changed in years.
And if they’re playing right here, right now…
Oh my God. It hits me in a rush.
The decorations, the quaint shops, the festive clothing, the good-looking people who aren’t quite good-looking enough for anything past a TV movie, the tidings of comfort and joy pelting me like snowballs in the face.
I’m in a fucking Heartfelt movie.