No one was injured, but the china and glassware presents wrapped and stowed in the back seat with the baby, me, took a terrible beating. I’m told I laughed and giggled through the entire adventure. This simply set the stage for Christmases to come.
Years two through four were uneventful, but once I started school I found Christmas vacation an occasion. I had perfect attendance, but the first day of vacation found me covered in little red splotches. The German measles kept me inside and in bed for the entire two weeks of vacation. My understanding was that you only got the German measles once. I was wrong. Since I didn’t build an immunity, over the next run of Christmas vacations I had regular measles twice, German measles four times, mumps, and chicken pox. All occurred beginning as each Christmas vacation began.
In my freshman year of college I finished my finals for the first semester only to contract swine flu. I was so sick the college nurse came to my dorm room. I’m one of those rare people whose temperature drops when I’m really sick. When she took my temperature to find a cool 94-degree reading, she promptly got on the phone to my mother and told her to please come get me and get me to a doctor. She later confided to me that she thought I was going to die on her. That evening the school was serving Cornish hens with all the fixings for dinner. My dorm mother figured if chicken soup was good, Cornish hens would be better, so she went to the cafeteria and got two hens with all the trimmings. After stuffing those two dinners down me, my mother arrived to take me home.