The Season of Sharing

This will probably go down as the Christmas of sharing.

It all started when my son's boys started showing up at my kitchen table early in the morning.  With dripping noses and woeful faces they begged a place to hang out for the day since they were too sick for school or the sitters.  So I spent the last days before Christmas checking for fever, delivering liquids, and re-setting the DVD player.  A trip to the doctor reassured me that they only had head colds, not the flu.  Soon the whole family was feeling better, but hacking and coughing like a wheezy engine.  Thus we started the season of giving. 

My daughter and her family arrived from Iowa with her husband bringing a newly acquired cold as a gift from his Iowa family.  We happily settled in with my son and his family,  to catch up on old times, new germs, and the season of sharing.   The bottom line is, if you put 6 healthy people and 6 sick people in a house for a week, they will all swap illnesses!  In spite of gallons of hand soap, hundreds of disinfectant wipes, jugs of hand sanitizer, and constant admonitions to blow, wipe, wash, and cover, we were all soon sniffling and blowing.

The sounds of Christmas in our house were like many others.  Paper ripping, children squealing in delight, toys clattering, and lots of singing and laughing.  Interspersed in these sounds were the counter-rhythms of sneezing, coughing, sniffing, and calls of "go blow your nose" , "cough into your elbow", "don't drink after her!", "WASH YOUR HANDS!"  It was a symphony of "Yea!", sneeze, "I love it", blow, "How did you know?", sneeze and sniff.  Yep.  We were really into sharing.

As principle food preparer, I found myself becoming increasingly paranoid about washing my hands.  Pat a head,  Wash hands.  Fix a toy.  Wash hands. Hug a boo-boo.  Wash hands.  Soon the hand lotion had become a fixture in the center of the kitchen table to soothe the chapped hands from all the soap and hot water.  Still each morning welcomed a new crop of sniffling and snotting.

It wasn't long until the house began to resemble a winter landscape.  Soft drifts of white piled up along tables and couches.  Trash cans overflowed with Kleenex.  Children blew noses and dropped ever settling clouds of white on every surface. I collected, tossed and WASHED MY HANDS, a few thousand times more.

Soon I had to run to the drug store to stock up on more Kleenex, antihistamines, cough syrup, Tylenol, and any cold remedy that promised instant relief and sleep.  While there I bumped into a friend.  "How was your Christmas?", she started. Then seeing the heaping arm-load of cold supplies, she hastily took a step back.  "Oh, I see that your family isn't feeling well. I'll call you next week...or sometime."  Yep.  It is the season of sharing.

This morning my daughter and her family packed up the car and headed home.  After hugging each sniffling loved one good-by, I wearily turned to my couch and sank down and grabbed a Kleenex.  Ahhhh---chooo! 

Yep.  The gift that keeps on giving.