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Sunday, Jul 5, 2009
My parents divorced and we moved across the country. My sister told me Santa was a fake, and a plague of mice destroyed our tree. No wonder I longed to return to sunny California.
Dec 25, 2005 | Happy Christmases are all alike; every unhappy Christmas is unhappy in its own way. Or so it was in my family. There is a picture of a pretty, chubby toddler who was me, aged two, wearing a blue smocked dress in front of a blue flocked Christmas tree with dark blue glass balls (California circa 1965). My sister Heather, aged five and a half, is standing next to me in a red jumper. We look like girls who have plenty of presents and feel good about it. I don't remember this day, but it is documented. A few years later our parents were divorced. My mother moved us from Los Angeles to Tennessee where she married my step-father and we started a new life. Lying in bed late at night with my sister that first Christmas Eve in Nashville, a few weeks after I turned six, I told her I heard sleigh bells on the roof. She in turn dispelled me of what was nothing more than idle Santa gossip. In retrospect, I think that Christmas and Santa should be inextricably bound together by a thick rope so that when you throw one off the roof the other would have no choice but to go crashing over the gutters as well. If I had to give up California and flocking and smocking and my father and Santa Claus, it would have been infinitely easier to just give up Christmas.
But this is not a sad story about divorce or childhood. There were, after all, plenty of happy days. Flip through the photo album of memory and there we are: skating a little Sunfish across the lake in the silvery light of noon, or riding our horses, Sundance and Midnight, bareback through the woods. On balance we were as happy or unhappy as any other family that we knew. It was only our Christmases that were worse. For almost every other moment we had mastered that level of normalcy that reconfigured families aspire to, but the season of peace and good will towards men unfailingly sent us straight to the pits. The lion's share of the blame for this must rest on the shoulders of my step-father, a good man who probably could not help but ruin the holidays for the rest of us because he had himself endured Christmases so biblically dreadful that he knew no other way. The linchpin of this entire story lies in the fact that my step-father shared a birthday with the baby Jesus, and so spent his entire childhood without a birthday present or a birthday party or even a nice birthday wish from his mother. Every Christmas wreath and stocking and reindeer covered wrapping paper dredged the whole horrible memory up for him again so that by Christmas morning he was nothing but a blur of grief. There was always a good bit of weeping beneath the tree in Tennessee.
There was weeping in California as well, as Christmas was the day that brought my otherwise stoically divorced father to his stoic knees. As soon as we heard the phone ring on Christmas morning, my sister and I would begin to sob like Pavlov's depressed dogs. We didn't like being so far away from him, but most of the year we lived with it. On Christmas morning we couldn't live with it another minute. My father would cry and we would cry in turns, first my sister, as she was older, then me, then we would hand the receiver back and forth a few times to cry harder and louder just because we couldn't help ourselves. We stayed on until the whole phone was so thoroughly soaked that I asked my sister if we might be electrocuted. She said I was an idiot.
My mother did her fair share of crying too, in part out of sheer sympathy for the rest of us and in part because my step-father's four children from his first marriage arrived every year on Christmas day. Coincidentally, they lived in California not far from my father, although they didn't know him, a fact which all of the children found puzzling. Every year my step-siblings (a boy and a girl slightly older than me, a girl and a boy slightly younger) spent Christmas on a plane so as to split the day between their parents. When they got to the house they always seemed happy at first, diving into their presents with real energy and interest, but then one by one they'd all start to realize it was Christmas and their mother was on the other side of the country alone. That was the point at which they put their new baseball mitts and board games aside and began their own weeping. I would move into my sister's room where I would sleep with my step-sisters, Tina and Angie, while my step-brothers, Mikey and Billy moved into my room. My sister Heather moved into the walk-in linen closet where she slept on a pile of towels until everyone went home again.
"The Worst Noel: Hellish Holiday Tales"
By collected authors
HarperCollins Publishers
207 pages
Nonfiction
As bad as this situation was, there was one year very early on when we tried it another way and the other way was worse. My step-father surprised us all by taking us to California. My mother and sister and I thought we were taking him to the airport to fly out to visit his children, but when we unloaded the luggage from the trunk I noticed the corner of my favorite quilted bathrobe, the white one with the little rosebuds embroidered on it, was hanging out of one of his suitcases. Why, I wanted to know, a tremor of hysteria creeping into my voice, why was my step-father was taking my bathrobe to California? To give it to one of his daughters for Christmas? It was then that he confessed we were all going together, as a family.
