The Second New Year's Eve

Between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve I wore out the Hallmark and LifeTime channels watching Christmas movies, my first time doing a marathon like that. (I know, I’m a gluten for punishment.) Last night, all I saw of the New Year’s Eve festivities on TV was the final 28 seconds of the ball dropping in Time Square then I turned back to a stupid Christmas movie about a three-years-out widow who found love again. Did you know that a surprising number of Christmas movies feature widows finding love again? I didn’t. Other popular themes seem to be the workaholics and the confirmed bachelors/bachelorettes who find love. Christmas, apparently for some script writers, means it’s a good time for romance. Queue the mistletoe and the people who invite their single friends home for the holidays who accidentally meet their neighbor/brother/uncle/the lonely widow who sings in choir or the single father who owns a coffee shop and you have a genre holiday movie. And I can think of at least three house swapping Christmas romance movies including the one last night. There seems to be a rule about house swapping movies that requires not one, but two couples to fall in love and at least one of the four must be widowed.

The overload of romance Christmas movies didn’t bother me---it’s Hallmark and LifeTime, after all and they do genre, formula films so I knew what I was in for---but what really got me irritated with the Christmas movies is how many costume directors don’t seem to know that snow is cold! They have couples walking along snowy streets, having snowball fights and watching tree lighting ceremonies while wearing nothing more than summer weight clothing. Hint to movie makers who grew up where it never snows: when there’s two foot of that white stuff on the ground and snow is gently falling, it’s below 32 degrees! Your actors should be wearing coats unless you show them with their teeth chattering so much they couldn’t find each other’s mouths for a romantic, winter kiss if they tried. And high heels might be sexy but they aren’t ski lodge and icy sidewalks friendly.

One widow themed Christmas movie I saw twice and on one level it intrigued me because it feathered the woman’s devoted husband who appeared as a ghost that only her teenage son could see until near the end of the film when the ghost finally appeared to his wife as well. The ghost said she couldn’t see or feel him because she was still mad about him dying and leaving her with so much debt and responsibility. Thus, he couldn’t go on to where ever it is that ghosts/spirits go. But true to genre romance films along came a white knight, aka her son’s school counselor and a widower himself, who saves her from being alone and lonely. She finally forgives her died husband allowing his ghost to pop into her life to say a final goodbye. The timeline of her finding love again so closely following her husband’s car accident and his spirit appearing in her life was totally unrealistic and silly in my opinion but it got me thinking about my experience with Don’s ghost in the house. (I wrote about here.)

At the time I thought I had a ghost in the house I vacillated between thinking there had to be a logical explanation for what was going on with my wedding ring appearing where I didn’t leave it and thinking that Don’s spirit was playing head games with me. But after all this time passing with no more ‘ring incidences’ the most logical explanation leads me to believe spirits do hang around awhile after the physical body dies. Before then, I believed spirits and ghosts fell in the realm of pure fiction. Like the teenager in the movie who felt his dad around him, I could feel Don around me until sometime this past summer when one day I woke up and couldn’t feel him close-by anymore. Even though life got lonelier after that revelation I viewed it as widowhood progress. It was like Don had decided I was standing on solid ground and I didn’t need handholding anymore.

I’m glad the holidays are over. They started out with so much promise but ended in a whimper. I didn’t manage my holiday expectations very well and that led to unnecessary disappointments. I also didn’t make any resolutions to start the New Year which, except for last year, is out of character for me. For 2013 instead of resolutions I used a one word mantra of ‘courage’ and that worked well for me. I repeated it many times over the first part of the year, to get me out of my comfort zone. For 2014 I thought about picking ‘choose your change’ as a mantra for the new year but then I decided that makes it sound like I’m expecting a whole year of transition. Instead, I going with the mantra of ‘seek contentment’ which I hope will help me keep a tighter lid on my expectations and help me to settle in, building within the social circles I established last year. I have the bones to a more satisfying life, I just need to flesh it out.

Whatever you’re goals for 2014, I hope we'll all find success in the coming months. ©