Christmas is an emotionally complex time for most people – a composite of the year’s successes and failures. If things went well for you in 2021, it’s likely that you are thinking warm, toasted thoughts, maybe with a Bailey’s (nice and creamy) or eggnog, maybe watching a TV special that is a perennial reinforcement of previous good itmes, like an ugly sweater or a tree ornament that has to be placed prominently, no matter what your partner says. No matter if it’s silly or stupid. Because it’s your bridge to the past, and good times in 2021 become recursively linked to your happier past, frozen in time.
Even if times are rough, Christmas is a time to practice the suspension of disbelief in your dreary adult life. (If anyone had told me that life is going to be that much of a disappointment, would I have ever bothered to be good for Santa?)
My mother, who was about the least ornamental person you could imagine, would become shamelessly brassy and bright around this time of year, like a cheap bulb on a Douglas fir. It was the one time of the year that she could affect and pretend that things are great, something impossible otherwise. Something most people do all year round, but something for whom a single mother couldn’t afford the emorional cost.
It can’t be overstated how much my mother hated anything “foofy” as she would call it. I used to joke that she was a secret lesbian, and that she had the flair of a frat boy when it came to all things aesthetic. (To be fair, when I was ‘cast’ as George Washington in the third grade school play, she had the right outfit for the occasion – a tasselled, shoulderpadded black and gold blouse that looked like Mervyn’s take on Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814. Just add a mop that she had ironed and braided to look like a Revolutionary hairdo, and you’ve got a decent-looking look for a lead role in a school play, but I digress.)
Just like she pulled my costume together out of nowhere, she pulled it together somehow and became seasonally appropriate. She usually made dozens of tamales a few eves before Christmas Eve, bringing some to work , some to neighbors, and the rest to the Tupperware trenches in our frost-free fridge. If there was only one set of songs that were required listening in our household, it was Barbra Streisand’s Christmas album. I will never forget the awkward collision of irony and nostalgia that came over her face when she sang along to “What Child Is This?” My mom, if anything ,lived to prove people wrong and surprise them. Johnny Mathis was another favorite – I think she had a thing for blanched non-white people acting in a very white world.
The Rudolph and the Red Nose Reindeer claymation was another favorite – she would tell everyone that the elf that was a misfit, that wanted to be a dentist, was just like her son Matthew. I didn’t think much of it, but the anti-hero outcast nature of that character was essentially an attempt to engender sympathy for the other among us – and neither of us did well at conforming on the societal level. Yet we fell for the trappings of Yuletide groupthink every single time!
Christmas was that one time of year that my mother, practical and extreme in her hate of ostentation, would undergo a dramatic costume change. Kind of like a crossdresser who gets a moment of encouragement from a one-night-stand, out came the parade of costumes, just lurking below the surface in the nosebleed section of her chest of drawers. Some time around Three French Hens, out came my mom’s green turtleneck sweater, and her ill-fitting, scratchy-acrylic sweaters that were too warm for any other month. Some of these ugly hibernal sweaters were inherited from my great aunt Lois, who was about as much of an outlier in her little world as my mom was in hers – a secular, progressive Democrat who was the secretary for Oklahoma City’s biggest architecture firm, the epitome of a classy career woman.
Yet, somehow, the classiness of a septuagenarian like Aunt Lois didn’t always translate downward generationally, and my mom ended up looking like a frumpy tart, like what a horny office lady might wear as she tries to get laid near the eggnog water feature at the holiday Christmas party. But it was Christmas, it was okay to be a bit merry. It was expected.
She really hated shopping, for herself or anyone else, a person who spent most of their day entrenched in other people’s unpleasant realities. At the doctor’s office she worked at for 15 years, her favorite patients, the Whitmans, would always remember the pictures of her little boy on her desk, and they would give us two boxes of Whitman’s Samplers, one for her and one for me. We would perform a ritual later that night, where I would exchange the nougatty, foamy, chewy candies, the ones with cloying cherry syrups, for the crunchy, peanut-brittley, less bon-bon-esque candies, and both would be satisfied with the fact that our tastes were opposite in terms of candy sampler boxes. We had the same inverse symbiotic rleationship with Hickory Farms – she loved anything with dijon or horseradish, and I gnawed on the summer sausage and the Andes mint.
People loved my mother year round, but knowing that she was a single mother, they really thought of us in particular during December.
The neurologist my mother worked for was this stereotype of a Jewish guy – he looked like a dark-haired Richard Dreyfus. His wife, Mrs. Edelman, who I called the Pig Lady because her nose was upturned like a porcine truffle hunter, once took me out to a movie in her 1988 Mercedes Benz 300TE station wagon (classy AF). Afterwards, she gave me a Lionel train set to put under our Christmas tree – a Jewish woman giving a Gentile a fancy gift, that’s how much my mom deserved it.
Christmas was the time of year that my mom got a break. It was a time when you saw the magic of society, the coming-togetherness, the auld acquiantances being forgotten, the peace on earth, can it be? part of Christmas that makes my throat tighten to this day, with a lozenge of sadness stuck halfway down, like a lump of coal in my Adam’s apple.
The sad difference between the Christmases with my mom, and the ones today, aren’t just the fact that she’s not here. It’s not even the fact that adult reality has set in for a long time now. It’s because the difference was that people were relevant in others’ lives, people mattered to other people. When you look at the socially distant, isolated, beScrooged world I live in today, I realize that this is what’s missing – the ability to matter to another. If you don’t have that in your life, as I don’t, you can’t see Christmas as anything but a marketing scheme, a brazen attempt to graft a generic feeling of joy to this diseased, poisoned world.
But I’ll never forget the ugly sweaters and “What Child Is This?” The difference between now and then is simple – she had a child, she had the Whitmans, she had Mrs. Edelman, Aunt Lois, and Barbra Streisand. She mattered. People were present in the lives of others. The question is, what have I done with all of that joyful yuletide legacy that my mother fashioned together for her son? I haven’t done miuch with it, except realize that I’m sorely lacking in a lot of things this Christmas, and I don’t see sany George Bailey moments happening any time soon.
But there’s always the tamales and the elf who would be a dentist.
