 illustration by Jason Stout |
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.
Pick 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.
This article appears in December 20 • 1996 and December 20 • 1996 (Cover).