Here we are, so close to the holidays, which every tradition promises is going to be a time of love and happiness.
Yeah, right.
Sometimes it’s true. I still remember my first Southern California Christmas in 1981, when I hardly knew a soul. On the other hand, I had no money. I was living on bags of russet potatoes, flavored with chicken soup packets that I liberated from the office kitchen. I had a tiny, freezing cold apartment in the Fairfax District, and my only amusement was watching my ancient black-and-white TV or hanging around bookstores reading all their books for free.
Being alone and broke at Christmas is not all it’s cracked up to be. It made me feel like David Copperfield (Charles Dickens‘ version, not the Las Vegas magician). And then I got the mail. On Christmas Eve, I opened up a Christmas card from my hermit rancher father in Colorado, and found a crisp $100 bill. (Back then, that was a lot of money.)
I got into my old Toyota Corolla with the rust primer on the back and drove to the huge Tower Records store that used to be on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. And I spent most of the day picking out $100 worth of record albums. Then, I came home and enjoyed my Christmas by rapturously playing all my new music.
But, as many of us know, spending holidays with family is not always tidings of comfort and joy. Especially when you’re a person who just doesn’t enjoy standing around trying to make small talk with people you only see once a year and who you never really liked all that much anyway.
That’s why it’s time for my annual reminder to create your invisible friend. Before you start the eyeroll, let me tell you that this actually works. The objective is to deflect attention and incipient criticism from you onto a fictional person you’ve invented, so all those restless brains just waiting to pounce on you with questions about your love life, your job hunt and your recent weight gain will instead be directed to someone else, with even more pressing problems than you.
Your new dress is looking a bit tight around the waist? Well, who can worry about that, when your friend is facing a divorce over a cheating spouse. Now, here’s the dilemma. You saw your friend’s husband at a roadhouse on the county line, getting way too cuddly with a person of the opposite sex. There was giggling. There was the sharing of chocolate lava cake. There were hands touching. There was no mistaking what was going on.
Do you tell your friend what you saw? It seems like the right thing to do, but somehow you know that the motto “kill the messenger” was invented specifically for situations like this. But how can you live with the guilt if you don’t tell her? This is such a classic and complicated dilemma that it’s been the mainstay of dozens of movie plots, but that doesn’t mean it still won’t work for you and your imaginary friend. Let’s call her Marilyn.
The best way to introduce this is while the women are all gathered doing something useful in the kitchen, like washing dishes or wiping down the good china. Twist up your face into a tortured expression they can’t fail to notice, and then when they ask what’s wrong, spill the scenario as if it just happened.
You can get a good hour of heated discussion over this and, if you’re lucky, someone else will remember a similar scenario that will extend things indefinitely. After everyone has thoroughly dissected the problem and potential solutions, you have a few choices. You could disappear and then return to tell everyone you called Marilyn and she did not react well to the news, bringing the whole episode back into focus. Or you could add additional complications that must be fully considered at length, such as that Marilyn has a chronic disease that she needs the cheating husband to help her with. Or maybe he just got a promotion and a new job in Nashville, and they were planning to move there together. Should she move to a strange place with a cheater?
What if the other woman was Marilyn’s best friend? Or her sister? (Hey, it could happen. Frida Kahlo divorced Diego Rivera after she found out he was sleeping with her sister.). Or what if the other woman was a man? You could stretch this out indefinitely. Don’t make notes and leave them in your bedroom, though. You don’t want anyone stumbling across them.
After you’ve used your imaginary friend as long as possible, there are still other weapons you can use against intrustiveness. When someone asks you a question you don’t want to answer, just change the subject.
I know this may astonish you, since many of us have been raised to be polite, but you don’t have to struggle to find the right answer to a nosy question. Just ignore it and ask the nosy person a question instead.
- Question: “When are you two going to have children?”
- Wrong: “Um, well, we’ve been doing fertility treatments for two years now but they didn’t work so we finally started in vitro but it’s so expensive bla bla bla.”
- Right: “How’s that little imp of yours doing? He must be what, 3 years old now? Did you survive the Terrible Twos?”
And this concludes the educational portion of this column. If you have other suggestions, feel free to lay them on me at mfisher@scng.com.