Christmas before and since
After I finished cleaning my room — company was coming! — I wedged myself into the 12 inches or so of space between the side of the hi-fi and the wall. The hifi was a piece of polished-wood furniture: a turntable, woofer and tweeters housed in a wood cabinet fronted with wicker-like fabric. Its sturdy spindle was stacked with four Christmas albums. They would drop one at a time after the current one finished playing, and then we’d flip all of them over and re-stack. We had one Christmas album in red vinyll that was all instrumental music, with no singing. Others were from a Readers Digest box set called Joyous Noel, and I liked those for their variety of styles and singers.
I loved the jazzy version of “Jingle Bells” (bring coats and hats / you look warm, cats / I’ve got my horn to keep me warm) and the nighttime scenery Good King Wenceslas looks upon, where the snow was deep and crisp and even under a bright moon, and a poor man comes looking for a meal.
My mom was cleaning the house. My grandparents, uncles and aunts on my dad’s side would be over for dinner of ham and a little dish of pickles and a few cans of beer and, well, I don’t remember what else. I was so impatient to open ONE PRESENT (allowed on Christmas Eve) that I hardly noticed what we ate or what the adults talked about — only that they talked far too long at the table. I was the only child, so I had no ally to make them come into the living room.
In the meantime, I tried to lose myself in the Christmas carols while I kept track of my mom. Soon she would help me pick out what to wear, such as my best patch-pocket jeans and my long-sleeved T-shirt with the horse on the front. Then she’d get just a little bit dressed up in slacks and put on some lipstick.
After dinner, while I waited for the adults to migrate from the table to the sofa and armchairs, I crawled behind the Christmas tree along with my cat and sat in the corner. I loved to look up through its colorful lights and ornaments. With all my friends, even my favorite next-door friend, off with their own relatives, I had to do whatever I could to enjoy the each sparkling moment of Christmas and resist getting bored.
My mom had shown me over and over again that it was my own responsibility not to be bored when there were so many things I could do alone, such as read or draw or talk with her, write in my journal, or write a letter to my aunt. At nine, I had learned to feel excited about things on my own. I was starting to create my own world of creativity and curiosity and little projects. My mom had made some Christmas tree ornaments with sequins, and I had made a clear jar of interesting winter-dried flowers and silken milkweed seeds. She baked cakes sometimes, and I experimented — when she let me — with different toppings for popcorn besides butter and salt.
Two years after this, when I was eleven at Christmas, my mother was dying. The family came over as usual. My dad and my grandmother served ham and pickles. I wrote in my journal about what I hoped to get for Christmas — a tape recorder — and I sat on the floor behind the tree with my cat, probably for the last time.
On subsequent Christmases, after we lost my mom, my dad and I would get a tree and decorate it with my friends, and he would take care to find gifts I wanted. But without my mother, the color had drained out. I had to call upon all of the optimism and imagination she had fostered in me and find my own ways to enjoy winter, and Christmas.
My favorite carol then was “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” with its yearning lyrics. Someday soon we all will be together if the fates allow. Next year all our troubles will be miles away.
These lyrics have been changed in recent years to remove the uncertainty, but I think the old ones still apply, maybe now more than ever.
