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Here's how I rank Christmases: from bad to worse to move over, turkey, and make room in there for my head. You might not know this if you happened by my house during December. Because every year, for many years, there's a tree -- trimmed with homemade ornaments and gingerbread boys/people/womyn/whatever. The scent of pine mixes gorgeously with heavenly aromas of the kitchen variety, for I spend the two weeks before the holiday practicing random acts of incessant baking and senseless confecting: dozens of cheesecakes, pumpkin bread, cookies, brownies. Heck, I even have Christmas lights up, year 'round, in my bedroom. But, if you dip below the sarcastic surface ho-ho-ho's, I promise you will encounter a very thick layer of oh-no-no's.
illustration by Jason StoutPick a Christmas -- any Christmas -- and I can tell you how I wrecked it. For me. For my family. For any family unfortunate enough to believe they could be the ones to get through to me, to turn my inner-Scrooge into something warm and fuzzy, not knowing that when I think warm and fuzzy, I think "something recently vomited by the resident feline."
1988 was a great one. That was the last time I ever went to my parents' home for the holidays. I drove 800 miles in my '67 Valiant -- East Tennessee to South Jersey -- to get there. Wasn't in the door five minutes before Daddy said either that bumper sticker had to go or else I did. All it said was "Shit Happens." (Hey, don't roll your eyes -- this was before shit was happening to every other bumper in America. This was the first one of those stickers. I swear.)
Anyway, if I've learned one thing from Daddy -- a man who has spent his whole life telling the world what he thinks via his bumper sticker collection -- it is not to back down in one's beliefs, certainly not by removing a sticker. Which left me with only one alternative. I left. In a huff. Broke my mother's heart. Again. Spent Christmas day retracing those 800 miles, alternately crying over Daddy and scratching myself thanks to the most memorable gift I got that year -- a case of the crabs, discovered on that drive, when I could not find one open drugstore the whole way back in which to purchase some relief.
For 13 hours I wrote letters in my head to keep myself awake and alert. To Daddy cursing him out. To crab-daddy, cursing him out. To my ex-lover in West Virginia who'd allowed me to sleep (alone) in his bed on my journey up, who no doubt himself would be itching any day. To him, I apologized too much. No matter. None of those letters ever journeyed much further than my mind.
Christmas 1994 was another big winner. Unlike other children, my son can sleep through anything. He hates the morning. He doesn't care if Santa or God or the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have been by in the night. He'll get up when he's good and ready. So that year, I sat impatiently, wanting to get the whole dreaded gift thing over with -- a ritual I was just doing so he wouldn't feel deprived, not because I wanted to.
At last, long after nine, maybe even 10, he came downstairs, wiping sleep from his eyes. Because he saw the tree, because he saw the gifts, because even at age four my kid had long known sarcasm, I announced "Son, you slept right through Christmas." Uh... bad idea. My teasing words were more powerful than any visible proof to the contrary. Too, they were more than he could handle. He burst out crying, only deepening my I-always-feel-like-shit-on-Christmas blues.
Did that cure me of my inappropriate behavior forever after? It did not. In fact, like a label on a shampoo bottle, I immediately repeated. Once I'd calmed him by letting him tear off the outer wrapping from his gifts, I refused to let him take off the manufacturer's shrink wrap and actually play with his games and toys. Instead, I loaded him in the car and forced him to go see Little Women, which opened that year on that day. He complained the whole way there -- he wanted to stay home with his presents. But I had good reason for taking him, reason I could not explain to a child: This is the day that Mommy bursts out crying every hour or so, in her grand Pavlovian Holiday Way.
I chose that movie on purpose, had read the book a thousand times. I knew Clare-Danes-as-Beth would die a dramatic death and give excuse for my tears. I felt okay crying in a darkened theater. I wanted to fool my kid into thinking this was the reason for my sniffles. I didn't want him to see me weeping in the blinking lights of the Christmas tree. I didn't want him to feel like I felt all those years, watching Daddy lying on the couch, bummed and lethargic every Christmas season. I did not care to pass on the tradition of festive depression to him.
My plan worked, too. For however cruel it may have seemed, Henry soon forgot his toys and enjoyed the movie, the snowy scenes, the little women in their old-fashioned clothes. I cried hard, got it out of my system, and made it through most of the rest of the day in decent shape. So pleased was I, I decided from then on to find a way to cope with that which I cannot seem to avoid. If I can't beat the holiday depression, I might as well wrap it up and disguise it as something else, right?
And so I began contemplating Christmas '95 in September. It wasn't early planning the way my sister-in-law does -- she has a hundred gifts bought and wrapped by July. In my case, I started shaping strategies to prevent me from acting like a real jerk. Believe it or not, I don't take joy in spreading this gloom.
For starters, I accepted Santa into my heart. In prior years, I'd told Henry -- again not to be cruel, but because I can't bear lying to him -- that Santa is a load of crap. Okay, I didn't put it that way, I said something like Saint Nick was a cool guy, but that guy in the red suit at the mall is really just a guy in a red suit at the mall. Nonetheless, I also told him it was his choice whether we would be believing, and so, when he insisted there is a Santa Claus, I said okay.
I also determined that I would do what my Jewish friends call mitzvahs -- good deeds selflessly done for others. This, I hoped, would instill in me some sense of peace and joy and all that other stuff. God, or Saint Nick, or somebody -- delighted to have such material as my cranky heart to mess with -- decided to test these good intentions of mine at every turn.
Good deed number one involved turning my modest apartment into Aunt Spike's Kiddie Care when Henry's preschool shut down for two weeks to give the kids a much-needed break from all that coloring and pasting. Some parents, who don't have my flexible, work-at-home schedule, needed some help with daycare. I said, in my cheeriest, good-deediest voice, "Send 'em over." To ready myself for Lord of the Flies '95, I decided arts and crafts were in order. Sure, I knew that a trip to Hobby Lobby mere days before Christmas could be a dangerous thing. Still, I pasted on a smile, tapped my red Keds together three times, and said, "Mitzvah. Mitzvah. Mitzvah."
We arrived at the craft emporium to not-such-a-big-crowd. I thought, "Okay, I can handle this." I went up and down the aisles, tossing styrofoam Christmas balls, sequins and pins, Santa posters, colored pens, etc. into my cart. Then I remembered: the Menorah. We needed candles for the Menorah. Because over half our friends are Jewish and I want to offer Henry a whole range of religions to reject in the future, we celebrate Chanukah, too. In fact, that very night our local-sportswriter-celebrity-Jew-friend was planning to prepare his grandmother's coveted latkes in our very kitchen. We had to have those candles.
I stopped an employee -- a woman who obviously sleeps with her hair wrapped in toilet paper -- and asked, "Do you have candles for my Menorah?"
The way she looked at me -- it was more than puzzled -- the way she said, "huh?" like I was an alien -- my my, I felt the centuries of the oppression of the Jewish people come crashing down on my Catholic shoulders so hard it was trying for me not to snap at her. But I didn't. "Mitzvah, mitzvah," I mumbled. And I settled with resignation on crayon-shaped birthday candles for our Chanukah celebration when it became apparent Hobby Lobby has a different opinion when it comes to naming the chosen people.
Mere moments later came yet another chance to do a good deed: not lose my temper in the checkout line and lunge at the cashier. No easy feat. A sweet young thing with a crazed look in her glassy green eyes, a Star Trek t-shirt, and a Starship Enterprise medallion necklace, began to ring us up on a cash register that was, technically speaking, one baby step above an abacus. When she muttered "oops" several times in a row, when I noticed the growing line of hostile folks behind me acting like it was my fault, I knew we were in for trouble. Forty minutes, two overrings, and several Enterprise-necklace-caught-in-the-bag-rack incidents later, we finally headed out to the parking lot. Hadn't I lost my very loose temper just a little? I had not. Mitzvah, mitzvah, I thought, and smiled as serenely upon that Trekkie as the Virgin did smile upon her swaddled newborn.
Next day, the sweet little children arrived. Did any of them have the remotest interest in my structured holiday arts-and-crafts regimen? In creating homemade gifts for Mommy and Daddy? Or did they prefer to jump on the couch, fill the guinea pig's cage to the rafters with carrots, and spill juice everywhere? I smiled, I smiled. And finally, when I felt like screaming Mitzvah Schmitzvah, I removed myself from the situation, snuck upstairs, locked myself in my room, and had a little relapse in my ongoing quest to quit smoking.
Two puffs into it, I heard, "Mom come quick!!" I dashed, I pranced, like a reindeer I flew down the stairs to discover that little Shelley wasn't kidding earlier when she said her stomach hurt. In fact, little Shelley had thrown up. A big, big, wet, wet, bucket's worth of puke. On my futon. My futon. The only thing I ever paid money for. The furniture equivalent of a super-plus tampon.
Did I weep? Did I crash? No, I did not. I breathed. I hummed John Lennon's Christmas song. I said to myself, one day -- though I absolutely at this moment cannot discern when -- this will make a funny story. Then I put little Shelley in the bathroom and stripped the futon and used every last bit of baking soda -- and there was a lot on hand for all that baking -- to do the best I could to clean what I could not afford to replace.
Later that night, as I wrestled with the futon cover, which -- yes, thank you -- I had shrunk, onto the somewhat aired-out futon, I thought many profound thoughts. I tugged and I pulled and I thought: Now I know why men hate condoms. I pushed and I cajoled and I thought: Now I know why Aunt Barbara had plastic covers on her furniture. At last, when I finally got the dang thing zippered I thought: Wow, remember when I was 15 and I weighed 110 and thought I was fat and used to lay on the floor and suck in my tiny stomach so I could pull up the zipper on a pair of jeans that a child couldn't comfortably wear?
Then, triumphant, I looked down at my covered futon. And what I saw was this: Quasimodo. Clearly, this hump would not lend itself to my Christmas guests. The success was a failure. I unzipped it as the futon sighed in relief and spilled out onto the frame.
All this, and there were still five more days until Christmas. I breathed some more. I retreated to the kitchen. I baked ten more cheesecakes. I looked at my son, oblivious to it all, begging to open one more flap, one more day early, on his chocolate advent calendar (true story). "For the kid," I said to me. "For the kid."
I cranked up Chryssie Hynde singing "2,000 Miles". I sang with her at the line: "It must be Christmastime." I cracked a beer. And I cracked a smile (sort of). Mitzvah, mitzvah, I thought.
And then I braced myself.
