By Word Rubble
We often associate Christmas with fragrances everyone loves: cinnamon sticks, sugar cookies, pine needles, hot cocoa, gingerbread. You probably feel warm and cozy imagining those holiday aromas. Just nod your head, yes.
Speaking of unforgettable fragrances, I vividly recall going to a movie on Christmas day after enjoying a bountiful meal prepared by my mom—a polite way of saying, a gluttonous orgy representing an epicurean disregard for gastronomical moderation of any kind. Call me biased, but my mom made the best holiday spreads imaginable: a glazed roast ham, mashed potatoes with gravy, green beans, sweet potatoes with brown sugar. Other fixins’ included homemade mac and cheese, sweet and tangy cranberry sauce, freshly baked dinner rolls, and desserts galore—pumpkin pie, bite-sized slabs of fudge, and a medley of Christmas cookies: sugar, gingerbread, spritz, and snickerdoodles. I ate it all—in enthusiastic, heaping mouthfuls!
These are time-honored family traditions. ’Tis the season of excess. Holiday meals grant you the license to let yourself go—with reckless abandon, and go, and go. It’s not just a belt-busting banquet; it’s an endurance test. The first plate? A warm-up—loosening food muscles, stretching the gullet. By the fifth, you’re a contender. By the twelfth, you’re in the Olympics. You’ve downed more calories than a semi-nomadic Nepalese yak herder would in an entire year! The twentieth? Well, you’re dead. Your family will bury you in a piano case, but the glory of your gormandizement, that ecclesiastical symbol of your last supper, will live on.
Unfortunately, there’s a fine line between glory and gastrointestinal catastrophe. On that Christmas day at the cinema, I didn’t bring the scent of a wintry forest with me, full of the earthy fragrances of pine, fir, and cedar. There was not even a hint of citrus. No, I brought the worst gas of my life.
The theater was packed with holiday cheer. People wore Santa hats, clutched candy canes, and murmured about the film. It was all very magical—until it wasn’t.
After the movie started, it was detonation time. I feared I might spontaneously combust in my chair. It smelled like I was sitting in the lap of a corpse. And with the room-clearing toxicity of my gassy emissions, I half expected the theater to send me a bill for fumigation costs.
A poor woman trapped in the seat behind me—a victim of collateral damage for two punishing, smell-rrific hours—emitted pitiful gasps and pleas each time I deployed one of my little mushroom clouds. “Oh…Oh, God. I can’t breathe. I think I’m dying. Please…please.”
Looking back, with the passing of…uh, er…time, I’ve had to accept that my contribution to that poor woman’s Christmas didn’t provide the quintessentially seasonal delights of peppermint candy or cookies baking in the oven. What she got instead … was something baking in my oven.
I felt bad about it, truly, oh, truly I did. But to quote Charles Dickens and his yuletide lore, they’re now the farts of Christmas past.
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To be continued…
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