What Christmas Means to Me Now That It's Over

January 4, 2024.  A few days ago I slightly revised a piece I wrote over twenty years ago. My mother died in 2013. Much more has changed, but somehow the feelings haven’t changed all that much.

What Christmas Means to Me Now That It’s 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 the baseball caps she bought for a dollar each at a True Value hardware store.  They were replicas of the cap she bought in a gift shop during her fall cruise to the Caribbean.

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 arthritis.

The miracle was that she was 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  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, the same checker asked, “Are you ready for the holidays?”  I would like to tell you about  wonderful moments that occurred  between putting up the tree and taking it down.  

The truth is I’m depressed about my behavior during the holidays. I was on edge with my mother. I didn’t feel lighthearted.  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. An awful image. 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 told her not to run away; to call three friends; call 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.” I was silent.  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. I 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 Sephora a ride home. I asked her if her younger sister Larissa still believed in Santa. It seemed unlikely, since the girl 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.”

Sephora's father is a Lutheran minister. As I drove past the stone church and pulled into their driveway, I wondered what the truth was. For the world I grew up in, the truth was this:  there is not a literal  Santa, but everyone conspires to create and sustain the belief in this collective lie.  There comes a time when someone, a brother or a stranger, tells us the truth. We go from belief in a lie--there is a Santa--to belief in a truth--there isn’t a Santa. We are  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. Cliff is  Santa’s helper.”

It works, until the moment it doesn’t work.

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

And yet…this is the 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. In one way or another that’s what Christmas does to me every year.  From belief to disbelief and back again, I go through a process and emerge, sometimes miraculously, with an affirmation of family ties, friendship, community. And hope.