We are now six Christmases in and I
have yet to celebrate Christmas again. I have managed a small tree for a
few of those years and in 2014 I understood fully why I just couldn't do
Christmas but even in the early stages of catastrophic grief I believed Christmas
would come back for us in a year or two. It is surprising even to me that
six seasons later I am still not having Christmas.
I have worried that it was a
rebellion of sorts stemming from an unrecognized underlying anger with God but
I really did not "feel" angry anymore and don't feel that I would
ever do that so I really couldn't understand why I was actually, intentionally
balking at having any kind of Christmas celebration. Last year I actually
felt like Christmas could possibly "come back". I was a little
enthusiastic about decorating and even purchased a new smaller tree but then
December 3, my sister went to the hospital with pneumonia. When she got
to the ER by ambulance her fever was over 105 and she went into a coma and
ended up in ICU on life support for 15 days. Waking up by nothing less
that a pure miracle on Christmas Eve --the entire month of December missing from
her life. It took six months of therapy to get her mobile and back to
maybe 75%. She will never really fully overcome that huge
setback.
So this year I was fully expecting
to have Christmas on track full steam again. Not.
I have less enthusiasm than I had
last year. It seems Christmas returning is farther away than it was four
years ago. And I have been totally baffled as to why. This morning
I read a devotional that I get by email daily. It was about
Christmas. It really ended up being nothing about anything remotely
familiar to my life and yet the beginning of it hit me like a brick -- an
epiphany of sorts and suddenly I realized what my deal with Christmas is
actually about. It is not, as I had worried, a rebellion towards God or what
Christmas stands for at all. It is about what Christmas had become for
me.
As a child I was such a
dreamer. I was beside myself over Christmas every year. The promise
that it held of the latest and greatest new toy being advertised on TV, a
family outing to pick out a tree, everyone gathering to decorate it, the
lights, the beautiful packages with ribbons and bows. And of course every
year I prayed for snow. I live in Atlanta, Georgia - never in my
life did I see a white Christmas but it didn't stop me from praying for it in
rapt anticipation year after year. I stared out the window into the
darkness late into the night Christmas Eve looking for Santa's sleigh. I
imagined of my mother putting out cookies and milk for Santa and the family
gathering around and singing Christmas Carols as we hung stocking on our
fireplace. I was a hopeless dreamer.
I was the oldest of four children
born to two alcoholic parents Christmas for us was about as far from my Norman
Rockwell dream as it could get.
My mother always saw to it that we
always had a tree and toys. And I should have been more thankful for what
we did have I guess. But it wasn't toys I longed for. It wasn't
greed that fueled my disappointment. I wanted "family". I
wanted normal. I wanted the things money could not buy. I wanted my
mother home for Christmas. I wanted us all gathered around the table for
a festive Christmas dinner together. I wanted us to spend time together
baking cookies, wrapping gifts, singing carols. But she never was.
She was gone. Almost every Christmas eve as long as I could remember -
sometimes she worked, sometimes she was just gone all Christmas Eve. We
never saw her till Christmas Day - grouchy, half asleep and
hungover.
We were left with Daddy and Daddy
was crazy-mean when he was drunk. Our Christmas Eve was spent wondering
what lay in store for us before morning. Were we going to be beaten or
were one of our pets going to be abused or killed. And Christmas for some
reason brought out the absolute worst in him. Ghosts from his raising I'm
sure. So we had memorable Christmases but not the kind
Norman Rockwell would paint about.
One memorable Christmas Eve, while
Mama was working of course, he gathered all of four of us into the car (usually
in pajamas, barefooted and without coats) and informed us we were going for a
ride. It was his thing to get drunk and want to drive around - a particularly
terrifying event for all of us. He drove around for about a half hour and
then pulled down a dead end street and parked the car. He turned off all
the lights, opened the door and got out which was also very typical of these
late night rides. And he disappeared into the darkness leaving all four
of us in the cold, dark car wondering what was coming next. When he
returned we heard him open the trunk of the car, fumble around, cuss and then
he pulled open the drivers door and got in. He was carrying the 38
caliber pearl-handled pistol that he had dubbed "Old Smoky" that
always seemed to appear when he had a few drinks. For a little added
drama, he had a glove he also had taken from the trunk of the car and tossed it
into the back seat to my sister closest to me in age and demanded she check it
out and tell him what she found.
She answered, "bullets
Daddy."
"How many?" he
demanded.
"Five" she
said.
"Yes, he agreed. Five;
one for each of you and one for your mother."
We all started to cry and ask
why? What had we done?
No answer. He got out of the
car again and disappeared into the dark as all of us sat there frozen waiting
for the shooting to begin.
Then he later comes back to the car
and without another word cranks the car and heads for home.
Another Christmas Eve while yet
again Mama was "gone". He put us to bed early and then around
1:00 am came and woke us all up and had us open all of our dresser drawers and
empty the contents onto the floor. Where then he instructed us to take
them to the kitchen and place them into the washer to wash the clean
clothes. When they were washed, dried and folded he dumped them into the
floor and said, "Now do it again till you get it right." So we
washed clothes, clean clothes, all night until daybreak Christmas morning.
There were Christmases where we had
to leave home and interrupt some relatives Christmas begging them to let us
stay with them because he was in a drunken rage and we had no where to
go. There were Christmases where the police came and hauled him away in
handcuffs with all of the neighborhood kids watching.
Yes, our Christmases were always
memorable albeit in a "Stephen King" sort of way.
And yet, every single year like an
idiot, without fail I had hope anew that "this year" we'd suddenly
wake up in a normal home and Christmas would be wonderful.
When I left home at 14 we had still
not turned into the Cleavers.
But I determined that when I had a
family of my own and it was entirely up to me - my kids would have the perfect Christmas
of my dreams. Perfect of course does not exist but I tried. God knows, I
tried.
We had no money so I started
Christmas shopping in July buying one or two things at a time. I hid
gifts, I wrapped gifts. I made handmade bows. I planned family
outings to a tree farm where we went up and down rows and rows of ridiculously
priced trees to find the perfect one. I slowly over the years collected
little old fashioned wooden ornaments and carefully wrapped and packed them
every year like they were fine crystal and when I pulled the out the next year
it was almost a "holy event" as we carefully lifted the little wooden
toy ornaments along with whatever hand made ornaments my children had made that
year in school. I'd fix snacks and we'd have a little mini-party as we
put on Christmas music and all decorated the tree as a family. It was
several years before we had a house with a real fireplace but once we did, I'd
string live pine garland with mini-lights the length of the mantle with big red
bows and all of the kids stockings. We'd pile packages under the tree and
make games out of trying to keep my middle child from peeping into his gifts
before Christmas. In later years I baked Christmas cookies and made
homemade fruitcakes and divinity, the menu and the guest list grew as our
little Christmas Eve party gained momentum.
My children got married and grand
kids came along and we added stockings to the mantle and our Christmases got
large and loud and messy and wonderful. We began inviting anyone that had
no place to go on Christmas. We bought extra gifts and always had tons of
food. Soon my children numbered 17 and Christmas had grown to about 30 to
40. Then life and divorces happened. Schedules became complicated when my
boys both had to fight for a few hours with their children on Christmas
Eve. Geography and time constraints and the whims of ex-wives made our
Christmases begin to be stressful and difficult and everyone began to seem on
edge. The last Christmas we all had as a family 2013 working a full time
job and driving 3 and a half hours a day in Atlanta traffic meant I had to work
on getting Christmas together for weeks a little at a time. I
planned. I decorated. I cooked. I wrapped. And
Christmas came and everyone seemed to just be in a hurry to leave. They
ate. Unwrapped gifts and all began to get up and get ready to
leave. My son came from four hundred miles away to stay one
hour and the two local children and all of their children said they
had to go because they were all getting together and going to see a
movie. It was their "Christmas Tradition" now to all go see a
movie on Christmas Day. So they all left and I sat alone in the middle of
all of my weeks of Christmas Crap and cried the rest of the
afternoon and vowed I would never do "all this" again.
And I never have. That was
the last Christmas I was to ever have my entire family and it was also the
Christmas that I realized that Christmas as we had always known it --was
over. Truly over.
It was not something any of them
wanted --a big traditional family Christmas --was my dream because it was
something I had never had as a child. It was never theirs. They had
always had it so to them it was no more than an aggravating annual obligation
that they could not wait to get away from.
Kids grow up. Grand kids grow
up. Life changes. Traditions change. It was heartbreaking and
on top of everything else I had to grieve, I also grieved the loss of our
family Christmas. And so I haven't had Christmas since 2013.
And I realized this morning that
opting out of Christmas was never a rebellion. It was just the end of an
era. One that's time had passed. Family get-togethers, I had
assumed, much like fruitcake and homemade bread, are a thing of the past. They still have family traditions like going to a movie on Christmas Day and
even family get-togethers at Christmas. I'm just no longer a part of their
family now...
