In the Off Season

Last week, we celebrated Christmas in July, on July 25, to be exact. Yes, it’s the middle of summer, and to be fair, we are Jewish, but hear me out. I had my reasons, and they were all pretty good as far as I am concerned.

For starters, it’s hot, ungodly hot, the kind of heat that makes domestic abuse and other violent crimes increase. It is so hot you literally want to beat or murder another human, as if you needed another reason.

Also, it’s six months from Christmas. That’s a long time to wait for holiday fun. Think about it, other than summer vacations, what does the summer have going for it in the way of celebrations? Fireworks and red, white, and blue clothing? Hot dogs and hamburgers cooked on a grill? Watermelon seed spitting and competitive eating? None of those hold a cinnamon-scented candle to the winter holidays. There’s no gift exchange, no special decorations, not even any themed movies. And forget about Hanukkah in July. That has literally no ring to it. Plus, there is no way I am stinking up the whole house with the smell of fried potatoes.

Which brings me to the real reason we celebrated Christmas in July.  Have you seen Krampus, a movie loosely based on a German folktale about the darker side of Christmas? Krampus is a sort of half goat, half demon creature that punishes the bad boys and girls who don’t deserve Santa’s good graces, and seems to have that dark side we have come to expect from German traditions. The movie premiered last holiday season, but we did not get a chance to catch it at the theaters, and now it’s available on Redbox. It seemed wrong somehow to watch a holiday movie in the middle of summer….but if you make it a special occasion, well, you get Christmas in July.

I am known as one who likes to run with a theme. I sat down and came up with a whole menu and everything. Originally, it was going to be turkey sandwiches with cranberry mayo and decorated sugar cookies, but S, my daughter, didn’t like the idea of mayo on her sandwich, and I can barely stomach the mess of decorated cookies at Christmastime. We switched to roasted turkey, mashed potatoes, green beans, rolls, and frozen hot chocolate, most of which could be purchased from an upscale fancy grocery store and reheated at home. Score!

The day of the festivities arrived. I was working on an article about ways to keep cool during the heat of summer, which is one of the more interesting topics I’ve had from my freelance web content job, and I learned a few ideas during my research. Some of the weirder tips included spritzing your sheets with cool water before you slip into bed, which is a great way to get a head start on your night sweats, and putting a fan behind a big bowl of ice like it’s 1916. One of the other things I read suggested reversing your ceiling fans to run counter clockwise in order to push the cold air down.

I mentioned the fan trick to my husband while my daughter, S, and I sat on the couch, trying to keep cool and save energy by not moving any parts of our bodies. He said that went against logic and engineering, but if I read it on the Internet, it must be true, so we could give it a try. He reversed the direction on the fan. It slowed down, stopped, and then began turning in the opposite direction. My husband stood directly below it with his hand stretched in the air, trying to see if he could feel the cooler air.

And then, just like that, it started to snow.

Gentle puffs of built-up dust and cat hair floated down and settled on the coffee table, the sofa, even on S and me. The dust and funk of that ceiling fan that no one can reach blew softly around us like fat gray flakes before blanketing every surface underneath it.

“Look, snow! It’s snowing for Christmas in July!” I exclaimed.

“That’s disgusting, and it’s getting all over me,” S said.

“When was the last time you cleaned this fan?” my husband asked.

S sneezed, and my husband returned the fan to its normal clockwise setting. I got up and vacuumed all the snow dust.

“Gee, cold air,” he said, and walked into the other room to play the Centipede arcade game that he bought the family two Christmases ago.

Later, we listened to Bing Crosby crooning familiar carols while we ate our lukewarm mashed potatoes and rotisserie chicken. Even upscale fancy grocery stores ignore turkey in the summer months. After we cleaned up and made the frozen hot chocolate, we settled under blankets upstairs to watch Krampus, and for a moment, we forgot all about the summer heat.