Not Quite 'Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire'...

...But this is a chestnut of my own creation and I break it out every year in and around this holiday because it's sort of my Christmas story; if you've heard it before, this might be a good time to move on because I'm going to tell it again anyway. 

It's a perfectly logical consequence in a relationship that began forty-seven years ago yesterday, Christmas Day, which was when I first spoke to the person I was to marry. 

I'd note I haven't had much gelegenheit to speak since then, or to get a word in edgewise, but that would probably earn me a black and blue on one of my upper arms.

I had seen the woman on several previous occasions, but could not work up the courage to speak to her. Nevertheless, I knew with absolute certainty I would marry her though if I didn't solve the 'haven't talked to her yet' obstacle, it would be tricky. 

Me and my friend Chris, thick as thieves then and now despite half a continent's distance, had gotten a head start on the Christmas Cheer and had been downing it by the glassful for hours as we made the rounds in the Frankfurt am Main party district, Sachsenhausen. We probably weren't the only lost and lonely people, swarming like flies, but I believe we were two of the better lubricated.

At some point, we came to be in Old Smuggler's a bar near Eschenheimer Tor in mid-town am Main (great restaurants, terrific shopping, none of which we had any interest in). Chris and I were toasting NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as we'd concluded it was in support of the Alliance that he and I found ourselves on the cutting edge of the sword of freedom, not that either of us could actually utter that turn of phrase at that point in the evening.

I got much drunker much faster than Chris, who did a very good job looking out for me which is always necessary since once I got my drunk on I was even more of an ass(et/hole) than when I'm sober. I stopped drinking not because I suffered from alcoholism (I enjoyed it a great deal) but because I got tired of getting the snot beaten out of me mostly by inanimate objects that snuck up and tackled me. To this day, the only chair I trust is the one I'm sitting on, and only when I'm sitting on it.

Through a very crowded Christmas night came this woman who wanted to share our table and whom, in my liquid state, I felt should sit on my lap to save space. When she agreed, I knew it was now or never. (I was successful at falling in love. I hadn't been successful at staying in love. So far). Chris assures me I was very suave when I said to her, 'Now that you're sitting on my lap, don't you think you should tell me your name?' Okay, not how Shakespeare scripted it, but, remember, it was a long time ago.

As I munched on some mandelspekulatius today, my second-favorite Christmas memory of Germany, I tried to imagine how events had to happen in just the order they did for her and me to meet when we did as we did. My brain hurts and again I concede the limitations of a liberal arts education because I lack the mathematical wherewithal to pull off the arithmetic to do the figuring. I just accept some things on faith and how I met your mother is one of those things without question or quibble.

There is a reason for everything we do and everything we fail to do. And as much as I love the 'we're prisoners of an indifferent universe' state of mind, I don't buy it. Hold on and hold out. It worked for me and I would hope no less than the same for you. Love is always a gift, as it can never be earned and Christmas is the season of love and gifts. 

-bill kenny