EXCERPT, WHEN ELLIE WAS LITTLE: OUR LIFE IN HOLIDAYS, PUBLISHED 2011 BY NORA GLASS
New Year’s Eve
When Ellie was little, she and I changed all the rules. After my husband left, it was just me and my little girl (and my twin sister, but she’s implied in everything I do). The cozy insularity of our little nuclear family became something to be feared overnight. Members of the PTA looked at me as if my husband’s abandonment were something catching. If Paul had died, we would have received condolence calls, hamburger casseroles, and brownies made from scratch. But because he moved fifty miles east with Bettina the blond bookkeeper, because he started a new roofing company and a new family all at once, all we got were pitying looks in the school parking lot and small, halfhearted waves.
So we changed all the rules, starting with the hardest part: the holidays.
This is how we do New Year’s Eve at my house. We don’t go out. I’m scared of driving with all the drunks on the road after midnight, and besides, why would you start a New Year anywhere but in your own home, where you feel the safest, the most loved? (Once, when she was eight, Ellie begged to be allowed to spend New Year’s Eve at her friend Samantha’s house, but she didn’t even make it till nine p.m. before calling me to come get her. “Lemon and honey, Mama,” she said. “They don’t do that here.”)
We get to do whatever we want on New Year’s Eve. There’s so very little left of the year to damage that we figure if we spend the evening watching the entire Die Hard series, no one will mind. We eat what we want, too. Sick of holiday candy and chocolate by that point, we choose things at the grocery store like fancy pickles and ham poked with rosemary sprigs. We like ropes of salty black licorice that we get at a candy store on Tiburon Boulevard. The girls behind the counter always wince when we ask for half a pound, and once one of them admitted we were the only ones she’d ever sold it to. I make a sweet, fruity bread similar to German stollen that’s supposed to be eaten for breakfast, but we eat it for dinner instead, sliced thinly, served cold, and slathered thickly with butter. I can eat six pieces before I start to feel sick, and Ellie, as small as she is, can pack away even more.
We also get to wear whatever we want. One year Ellie wore a blue two-piece bathing suit with a pink tutu. I wouldn’t let her get too close to the fireplace for fear a spark would set her entire acrylic ensemble ablaze. When she got cold, she wrapped my black terry robe around her thin shoulders and trailed the length of it behind her like a vampire cloak.
In more recent years, we’ve taken to having a pajama party. New pajamas are de rigueur, carefully bought with the New Year in mind. Last year mine were dark blue, covered with grumpy-looking sheep wearing sweaters. Ellie’s were green flannel with cowboys roping monkeys.
When the time grows near, we don’t watch the prerecorded ball drop in New York. Even at a distance, it’s too much of a party for us homebodies, my daughter and me. Instead, we keep an anxious eye on the clock, as if it might not get all the way to midnight if we don’t watch it carefully. Both of us pretend no one else has slipped into the New Year yet. New Zealand hasn’t already celebrated. New Yorkers aren’t already in bed. In our snug home above Belvedere Cove, we are the first in the whole world to greet the early seconds of a newly minted year.
Then my Ellie goes to the front door and, with great solemnity, opens it to let the year inside. We make our tea, and this is the most important step.
It springs from a New Year’s Eve when Ellie was sick with the flu, sicker than she’d ever been. She was four. Paul had left us a month before. I’d hoped Ellie would sleep through the night so I could cry alone on the couch at midnight as I watched happy couples kiss in Times Square.
But instead, she woke and came out of her room. She stumbled over the long feet of her favorite bunny-footed pajamas, coughing so hard she sounded like a dog barking.
I had a cooling cup of mint tea in front of me, and I had an idea.
I carried her onto the back porch, where, under a full moon, she picked a lemon off our tree. We squeezed the whole thing into the mug, and then I let her add a big spoonful of honey to it.
“Lemon,” I said, “because the New Year might be a little sad, like a lemon is sour.”
“Because of Papa?” Her eyes were wet with another coughing fit. They were Paul’s eyes, so bright green it hurt to look at her sometimes. “Because he doesn’t want to be with us?”
“With me, honey. You know he wants to be with you. Papa loves you.” Paul, though, was too busy then soothing his very pregnant new wife to have any real time for his daughter, something that made me mad enough to spit acid in the direction of Modesto. “But we add honey because the year will be sweet, too.”
She was asleep ten minutes after drinking the tea, her breathing easier in her chest. Mine was easier, too, knowing she hurt less.
I didn’t think she’d remember it, but the next year, when she was five, she put on the same footed pajamas, even though they were by then too small, and tucked her body into her favorite corner of the couch. She looked up at me. “Lemon and honey?”
When my daughter kissed me at midnight that year, I missed my old life a tiny bit less than I had the previous New Year’s. Paul was becoming more and more adept at dodging phone calls from his first daughter as he busied himself with his new family, but his leaving us meant I got this little girl all to myself. A girl with his blond eyebrows and my concern for wrongs to be righted. A little girl who liked to suck the rinds of our homegrown lemons (making faces all the while) as much as she liked to lick the honey spoon I handed her in the kitchen.
So this year, I wish you more honey than lemon. And I wish it for all your years to come.