The ghost of Christmas yet to come

Ghost of the Future! I fear you more than any spectre I have seen. But as I know your purpose is to do me good, and as I hope to live to be another man from what I was, I am prepared to bear you company, and do it with a thankful heart. Will you not speak to me?

Duty on Christmas is reliably mellow. You make a few rounds, munch candy canes with fellow watchstanders, energize the Christmas lights, dial up the holiday tunes, and settle down for a long winter's night of catching up on your undone work while nobody’s around to bother you. While you eat leftover Christmas cookies dropped off by sympathetic shipmates, who are now at home, bundled up by the tree.

There's usually a nice Christmas dinner spread put on by the cooks (or in this case, the contracted galley staff). There's no competition for the weights or cardio room, it's easy to find a parking spot, and often the CO calls or stops by to dole out some non-alcoholic holiday cheer. At OCS, my first Coast Guard Christmas on duty, I think they sent us the Chief of Staff and his pleasantly cordial family to raise our spirits as we sat around drinking forbidden soda, eating forbidden sweets, and watching forbidden football (when we weren't sneaking off to find forbidden pay phones). I swear, that'll be me some day: all the other flags are home popping Christmas crackers and re-gifting fruitcakes, and I'll be the schmuck out awkwardly celebrating Christmas with the troops. Every year. I'll volunteer.

Christmas is quiet. Excepting the odd officer or chief who calls to share holiday greetings, nobody calls. Nobody emails. Nobody arrives. Even the message traffic slows to a crawl.

What you don’t expect is to hear from the detailer.

Christmas Eve morning, sure, you're supposed to be at work unless you're taking leave. So maybe the detailer was trying to wrap things up before he headed out for the holidays. But Christmas is a holiday, and this year Dec. 26th was a federal holiday too, and then it's the weekend. I figured the detailer'd maybe get back to me sometime next week, by which time I'd hopefully be safely aboard BOUTWELL somewhere in the Pacific, making it that much harder for him to extract me and stick me elsewhere.

I woke up relatively early Christmas morning, not for Santa or stockings but to arm up and make a security round. I checked message traffic, eyeballed the logs for any overnight issues, and as an afterthought, glanced at my email. Maybe somebody'd wished me a Merry Christmas.

There was only one email, a quick message sent from the detailer's Treo. Does he sit texting while his kids rip open presents? I wondered. Just what I needed on Christmas - another "great idea" to yank me off the deployment. I wasn't sure I wanted to open it.

The two COs have been negotiating, he began, and they've worked out a plan that'll get you off the BOUTWELL a little early so you can still get to JARVIS. This is sort of a "have your cake and eat it too" scenario. If you still want to go to JARVIS, let me know and we'll work out the details later.

Did I ever! Aloha Hawaii! Now that was a Christmas present. I didn't stop to wonder how the detailer knew I'd be at work on Christmas Eve AND Christmas Day. Except that I always seem to be.

Again the ghost sped on, above the black and heaving sea – on, on – until, being far away, as he told Scrooge, from any shore, they lighted on a ship. They stood beside the helmsman at the wheel, the look-out in the bow, the officers who had the watch: dark, ghostly figures in their several stations; but every man among them hummed a Christmas tune, or had a Christmas thought, or spoke below his breath to his companion of some bygone Christmas Day, with homeward hopes belonging to it. And every man on board, waking or sleeping, good or bad, had had a kinder word for another on that day than on any day in the year; and had shared to some extent in its festivities; and had remembered those he cared for at a distance, and had known that they delighted to remember him.