Subtract One

by Susan Anderson
Tuesday, December 18, 2007 12:31 PM MST

Do you need something else to worry about this Christmas? How about taking the Quick Christmas Stress Test at assessmentgenerator.com?

This is one test you just know you are going to flunk.

“The Maximum Christmas Stress Score is 60,” the instructions inform you happily. If you take the test, they will grade you and send you your score. As soon as I saw this question, I could see how many people were doomed to failure:

“At Christmas time I take special care to look after myself. True or False.”

Is this test writer from our planet, do you think?

When you search for Christmas advice online, you discover such articles as “SOS: Save our Christmas Sanity” and “Merry Meltdown.” One Web site, titled “Anxiety Recovery Centre,” featured lots of complicated suggestions ending with a recommendation for the top place to get help -- your financial planner.

Simple-minded advice

My advice is to Subtract One.

No matter what the event, after you’ve got it all figured out in your head, subtract one activity, one present, one dish.

Having people over for dinner is a good place to start with this. You’ve invited guests and you have the menu planned. Now, just don’t cook one of the dishes.

I realize that this flies in the face of most approaches to entertaining. If you cook enough things, people are certain to like something. Plus it looks like you made an effort.

But subtracting one lets you off the hook enough to be a little more relaxed, which is going to feel much better to the guests than having an extra dish to eat in the company of a frazzled, resentful chef.

If you want to rank elements of a dinner party, the chef hardly ever thinks about the fact that one genial host is worth two perfectly prepared dishes.

Turkey stuffing is a good place to subtract one.

Each year, a different stuffing ingredient surges to the top of the popularity list. There was the year of the oyster. I once had a recipe for “savory spinach and artichoke dressing.” Then there was “Ibby's Pumpkin Mushroom Stuffing.”

The “apples, oyster and bacon wild rice” recipe sounds very nice, but in the picture it’s clear that the stuffing turns out to be gray, a fate of almost anything involving wild rice.

There’s nothing wrong with any one of these ingredients, but by the time you add them all together and cook them in a turkey, it seems like you might as well put all the dinner ingredients in a blender and drink them as a turkey shake.

County singer Willie Nelson’s family takes the cake, so to speak, for odd recipes. His sister Bobbie describes longingly how at Christmas their grandmother made buttermilk biscuits and chocolate gravy with hot chocolate.

Bread, onions, celery and butter -- that’s all you need for stuffing.

Wrapping up Manhattan

Christmas lights are one area where I do not apply the Subtract One principle, much to the disapproval of other family members. If I could, I would put multi-colored lights all over the house and on all nearby trees.

My husband has aesthetic and financial objections. It’s true that last December our electricity bill was a bit high. My 11-year-old daughter, on the other hand, objects for reasons having to do with global warming.

Outnumbered as I am, I resort to whining that since there likely will be cutbacks on outdoor lighting in the future and I promise to buy LED lights next year, I should go completely crazy this year. These are, after all, the longest nights of the year.

I also promise to re-use ribbons because “If each family reused just two feet of ribbon a year, we would save enough ribbon to tie a bow around the earth,” according to eco-artware.com.

Or better still, I’ll reuse the gift bags because, as The Green Book says, “If 40 percent of U.S. households used just two fewer sheets of holiday paper this season, we'd save enough to gift wrap Manhattan.”

And all I want is to put 10,000 lights on one little house in Casper.

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