When my wife and I married we made one of those accommodations married couples make: she agreed to spend every Christmas Day with my family in Greenwich and I agreed we would celebrate every Thanksgiving in Boston. What I forgot is that there are twelve days of Christmas but only one Thanksgiving Day.
Don't get me wrong. Boston is a wonderful place to visit and I enjoy the company of my in-laws, most of the time. The problem is the standing bet I have with my mother-in-law of a bottle of champagne based on the success of our baseball teams, the Red Sox and the Yankees.
It used to be so much fun. I would magnanimously accept a bottle of champagne as my due as the Yankees reeled off World Championships in 1996, 1998, 1999 and 2000. In 1996 when the Yankees won the World Series for the first time since 1978 I was in Boston for the clinching game. I was so ecstatic that I went out for a walk in my Yankees hat (always a chancy clothing choice in Boston) and a voice cried out from a college dorm window "Yankees suck" followed immediately with another voice shouting "they're world champs, get over it."
Then came 2004, the first Red Sox championship since 1918. I gamely presented my mother-in-law with a bottle of Dom Perignon to celebrate an event which I declared "happens every 86 years." Then the Red Sox won again in 2007. Now with the Red Sox victory in 2013 I have to face the fact that the Yankees twenty-six championships in the 20th century aside, in this century the Red Sox have won the World Series three times in 2004, 2007 and 2013 and the Yankees only once in 2009.
I don't know what I am going to do this year. Maybe I'll just grow a beard.
