Christmas

I had an awsome Christmas this year. Sure I had to work, but it was an amazing day.

This is my forst Christmas as a nurse, and I do not think I have ever worked on the actual holiday itself before. About a week or so ago, my wife decided that since I was working for the Holiday, she was going o provide dinner for some people at a recovery center. My initial reaction was, "whatever..."

Christmas morning found me in the kitchen, preparing and roasting the turkey and stuffing While my wife slept after her long night of work on Christmas eve. As I was working on the food, I realized that I had not ever done this before. I was cooking a meal for a group of less fortunate strangers and I was doing it for free. Gratis. I'm sure during my years in the restaurant business I may have cooked a meal for someone less fortunate than me, but I damn well got paid for it! I don't even know these people and I am making Christmas dinner! After the food was in the oven and going, I had an hour before I had to prepare for work and I decided to call the center and let them know that my Wife was not cooking the meal there like originally planned but that the food was indeed coming. The gratitude I heard in the voice on the other end of the line was profound. I just threw a turkey in the oven and MacGuyver'ed up some stuffing using some Hardee's Sausauge biscuits instead of real sausage. It was nothing to me, but this guy on the other end was almost in tears.

Bolstered by this experience, I went to work in the nursing home. One of our residents has been declining in health and I was there for her and her family when she passed away a couple of hours after my shift started. I had the privledge of caring for her since my first day of work as a nurse, and in fact she was the very first patient to whom I administered medications. It was a really rough Christmas for her family and I was glad I was able to be there for them and honored to help.

Before Christmas this year, if you had told me that this was going to be my Christmas experience, I would have thought that it sounded like Christmas was going to suck. After yesterday, I can only say that I had one of the best days of my entire life. I have always heard that there is great joy in selfless giving, I just never really believed it until now.