My new tradition is to give myself the gift of spending Christmas away from family |
Even if you’re not spending it with your blood relatives, the holiday has a way of making strangers more sociable. Websites like Eventbrite offer dozens of local events on Christmas where castaways can go to find community.
Last Christmas, I had a major problem.
Admittedly, I sometimes don’t stay on top of important parts of my personal life. Accordingly, I hadn’t been paying close attention to how many contact lenses I had left, and I had mistakenly thought that I had an extra pair stowed away.
The ones I’d been using were causing me so much discomfort that I couldn’t keep them in, and weeks earlier, I’d broken my only pair of backup glasses, so I tore up my apartment in far-sighted desperation.
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Because it was a holiday, I knew that all of the eyeglass stores and optometrist offices would be closed, preventing me from getting an emergency pair. Spending the day with compromised vision wouldn’t have been so bad, but thanks to my aforementioned lack of planning, I hadn’t bought food for the day, and my short, Christmas Day window for finding an open grocery store was quickly closing.
My legs shook as I crossed blurry streets. At Ralph’s supermarket, the automatic doors slid open and someone said, “Merry Christmas,” but I couldn’t make out faces. Muscle memory brought........