What Christmas Means to Me, Now That It's Over

What Christmas Means to Me, Now That It Is Over

I don’t know what your mother was doing two days before Christmas, but mine was sitting at our kitchen counter sewing hand-crocheted dreadlocks onto  baseball caps she bought  for a dollar each at a True Value hardware store.  When my husband asked what she was doing, I listened as she told him the whole story, which had to do with her fall cruise to the Caribbean with her friend Louise.  My husband, leaning over her shoulder and frowning, didn’t have a chance to say a word before she said,” Believe it or not, I have requests for these.”  We believe it, having been through recent projects like dust gloves with red felt fingernails and oversized t-shirts decorated with  rhinestone studs. 

She worked in silence while I made a salad for dinner.  She did ask me if I would tie a knot in her thread.  Our hands are similar:  long, square-tipped fingers, liver spots and strong veins, knobby joints predicting a tendency to arthritis.

The miracle was that she was there, in my kitchen, spending the holidays with us.  The year she turned seventy-five, feeling old and alone, she wanted to move into our house.  I said no.  Now, two years later, I was trying not to be so abrupt and territorial.  I’m not sure what she was trying not to be.

.  “Did you enjoy the holidays?,” the checker at Safeway  asked me two days after Christmas.  Seven days  before,  she pleasantly asked, “Are you ready for the holidays?”

I would like to tell you about wonderful moments that occurred in the interim between putting  up the tree and taking it down, between getting ready for it and getting it over with.  The truth is that I am depressed about the holidays.  I was on edge with my mother.  I didn’t feel light-hearted about her presence.  It was more like an emphysema patient’s relationship with an oxygen tank.  I needed her for emotional survival, but her presence was a burden.  I know.  What an awful image.  What an awful way to feel.

Furthermore,  my relationship with my sister is in a state right now.  She called the Monday before Christmas in tears and fury:  “I don’t like him.  He’s too hard.  I don’t like the way he talks on the phone to his tenants.  He says I have alienated his children from him.  He has done that himself.  I can’t stand to be here another minute.  I hope I have the courage to leave him.”

I tell her not to run away; that she has to face him; to make lists; call three friends; call me if she needs me.  She never called.  I waited a week.  When I finally got her on the phone she said, “Christmas Day was low-key but pleasant.  We took a walk.”  There was silence from my end.  She finally said, “I’m so embarrassed about my outburst.  I must have been suffering from depression.  That’s all I have to say about it.”

I didn’t know how to respond to her; still don’t.  I feel shut out and tired of the pretense, yet afraid that without it we will have nothing, not even a pretend-Santa world.  Just the wind blowing down a cold chimney.

A few days before Christmas, I was giving my daughter’s friend, Sephra, a ride home, and I asked her if Larissa, her younger sister, still believed in Santa.  It seemed unlikely since Larissa is in the fourth grade.  Sephra, who is sixteen, said, “Nah, when Larissa was in first grade, my brother—the jerk—told her the truth.

Sephra’s father is a Lutheran minister and, as I drove past the stone church and pulled into their driveway, I wondered what, in this instance, the truth was.  For the world I grew up in, the truth was this:  there is not a literal Santa and everyone conspired to create and sustain the belief in this great collective lie.  There came a time when someone, a brother or a stranger, told us the truth, and we went from belief in a lie:  there is a Santa; to belief in a truth; there isn’t a Santa.   We were expected not only to survive this process but also to perpetuate it.

I remember the strength of my own belief.  When I was in first grade in a small rural school in northeastern Nevada, my father talked one of the ranch hands into playing Santa for our school Christmas party.  A fake white beard didn’t hide the familiar hare lip and nasal voice saying, “Well, little dirl, what do you want for Christmas?”

I blurted, “You’re not Santa.  You’re Cliff!”  But that was not the end of my belief.  The collusion was so deep that I was ready to accept  the party line:  The real Santa is at the North Pole getting ready for Christmas and Cliff is just Santa’s helper.”

It works. until the moment it doesn’t work

For me, Christmas is a psychological place that I enter, experience, and emerge from saying, “I’m glad it’s over,” just like you might say, “I’m over my cold now,” or “It’s finished.    I’m over him.”  I am glad it’s over.  I’m finished cooking and spending money and finished being in that place of memories, yearning, and the agony of belief and disbelief.

This is the most important part. Time and time again, we will have to alter our sense of what is true and what is real.  We will give ourselves over to belief and then we will withstand its destruction.

I use “we” and I should only be talking about myself. Like my belief that everything will be okay for my children. That just because Vallejo has one of the highest crime rates in the Bay Area, my son, who lives there, will be safe.  That when my daughter leaves the house in the rain and I say, “How will you get home?” and she replies, “Hitchhike,” that she is kidding.  Belief that our modest financial security can be sustained.  That when my husband says the  small company that he manages has been bought by a large corporation from Southern California and the specter of joblessness hovers in the room, I can't begin  to describe the sudden pull of disaster, the fear of loss of income, illness, powerlessness and death.

In one way or another, that’s what Christmas does to me every year.  Going through the process of affirmation of family ties, friendship, community, wholeness and harmony is an ordeal to be experienced and endured.  I am on the other side of it now, thumbing through seed catalogs, as a matter of fact.

Although it is only January, I know it won’t be long until I’m hearing the countdown of shopping days til Christmas.  The thought makes me anxious.  There’s no use planning a trip to Oaxaca or Squaw Valley for the holidays or even planning on donating more time to the Food Bank.  It’s my mother and my sister and my brother-in-law and my niece that I have to come to terms with.  What a skimpy little tribe.  How hard it is to make peace.