Eating Christmas: How Robrt Pela spent his first holiday after 'divorcing' his family

Today we wrap up this year's collection of Eating Christmas essays at a fancy steakhouse on Christmas Eve. As KJZZ contributor Robrt Pela explains, sometimes "fancy" can leave a bad taste in your mouth.

ROBRT PELA: It’s Christmas Eve. A woman I don’t know has just placed a tiny bowl of mushrooms in front of me. This itty-bitty appetizer costs more than the handknit vicuna cardigan I’m wearing.

I’ve eaten expensive food before. What I haven’t done before is dine in a restaurant on Christmas Eve.

I’m sitting in this snooty supper club and I’m not feeling grateful that I get to spend the holidays with the nicest man in the world, to whom I happen to be married.

No. What I’m doing instead is thinking about how someone really ought to write a song about the first Christmas you spend away from your family.

I mean, we have a holiday song about finding a hippopotamus in your stocking, for Christ’ sake. And one about someone’s grandmother getting run over by a reindeer.

But we don’t have one that describes what it’s like to be 45 years old and passing the holiday in an over-decorated chain steakhouse, surrounded by strangers, clutching your husband’s hand as if you’re about to be wheeled in for emergency gallbladder surgery instead of ... waiting for a piece of balsamic-glazed monkfish to be brought to your table.

I’m thinking that the lyrics to this Christmas song should be vague, so that people who’ve been deployed to Iraq or recently divorced or whose boss is making them work on Christmas can relate to it, too.

And not just, say, someone who’s divorced his family right before the holidays. That’s too specific — and not very Christmassy.

The first stanza could be one in which a grown-up person who’d bought into the “family is everything” nonsense suddenly finds himself doing something different on Christmas Eve. Nothing too whiney, though.

The second verse could be about how the subject’s husband has suggested they spend their first Christmas Eve alone in a fancy restaurant, eating monkfish and mushrooms.

Really expensive mushrooms.

I’m thinking about how, in the chorus, it might become plain that the husband thinks eating in a restaurant on Christmas Eve will distract the person who’s no longer speaking to his family from feeling sad.

I’m sitting there, eating mushrooms and trying to figure out if the bridge of this song should be instrumental and where a modulation might occur — maybe from G major to A flat major for a nice, gospel-like surge — when my monkfish arrives, and my husband says "it looks nice" and I smile and try to think of something brave to say.

Just then, a woman at the next table slams her fork onto a plateful of puttanesca and announces, “Dammit, Norman!”

The man seated across from her — perhaps this is Norman — glances over at our table. He looks uncomfortable.

“I told you not to mention Mom tonight,” the woman bellows, glaring at the man who is obviously Norman.

“But it’s Christmas, Bettina —” he begins, and the woman with the puttanesca — whose name appears to be Bettina — leaps from her chair and storms out of the restaurant.

I try to catch Norman’s eye. I want to say to him, “Maybe you should think divorce your family, too!”

But he’s not looking our way, too busy telling the four others at his table what exactly he thinks of them ... and Bettina. None of his comments contain much of what you’d call Yuletide cheer.

Unable to get Norman’s attention, I turn instead to my husband.

“Merry Christmas, dear,” I say to him. “Next year, let’s stay home — just the two of us.”