At this point, I’ve got so much holiday perfection in my life, I could have had my own family-based special: A Very Suburban Philly Christmas, featuring all four of us singing my mother’s medley of carol titles in front of my parents’ purely decorative white living room fireplace.
There was just one problem: On December 25, after weeks of holiday foreplay, and a morning spent joyfully opening the presents Santa had left for us on the second shelf of the living room armoire, next to the chrome-framed color eight-by-tens of my parents’ trip to Israel, my family hopped into our car in the eerie, silent dark of early winter. We pulled out of our driveway carefully (so much snow, so many travelers!) with all the other Real Christmas families.
There was a wood-paneled station wagon filled with kids in front of us, and another one behind us. We could see them through the Christmas tree shapes we cleared with our mittens on the steamy back windows: blond parents in front, kids in back, wearing rugged jackets over sweaters like the ones we’d seen on TV.
We waved to them, and they waved back. “Merry Christmas!” We caravanned, our blue four-door between their wagons, to the main intersection of town, with its four-way stoplight and its warning written in big white letters across the black asphalt: PED. XING.
On the corners, the previous night’s snow had created sloping white hills in front of the pharmacy, the bakery, the plant nursery, and the Quaker schoolhouse. Tiny fairy lights on tall leaf-free trees highlighted nature’s clean peace and calm. For almost a full minute, we were silent—setting a new family record.
Normally, our suburb had none of the natural charm of a village or a town. With the exception of these four buildings from older, gentler times, our main street was just another holding zone for gas stations and discount drugstores and clothing stores with puns for names (the SWEATer SHOP, the SHOEHORN!). A mile down the road, it intersected with Route 1, the saddest way from Miami to Maine.
But that night, there was an old-world, small-town quiet everywhere. We were at the Christmas crossroads: a place of pure holiday magic, where anything could happen. And nobody wanted to be the first person to break this holy gift of silence.
The light turned green. Our car headed left, toward our favorite Chinese restaurant. The Real Christmas kids’ cars turned right, to the churchy part of town. And it hit me that this intersection marked the spot between the world of people who did Real Christmas and those of us who did Xmas, aka Christmas Lite.
“Wait a second!” I screamed.
“What? Where is it? What?” my dad yelled, braking to avoid colliding with whatever he thought I saw in the road.
“Don’t yell at your father when he’s driving!” my mother shouted at me when she realized there was no immediate danger. “What do you want to do, get us killed?”
My sister, terrified that she’d never be able to play with her new Christmas sled, hoop skirt-flaunting “Miss Scarlett” doll, and glow-in-the-dark poster of tropical fish if we died and went to heaven right then, began to cry.
In that moment, I realized that my family was suffering from Christmas misdirection, a spiritual condition I’d later describe to my postcollege suburban-refugee friends over too-strong black coffee and organic bitter orange marmalade muffins as “a serious case of Robert Frost meets Dante gone wrong.” We had come to a dark forest—okay, a couple of trees and a stoplight—in the middle of our lives, and had chosen the road less traveled. But in this case, that was the wrong choice! I wanted us to take the well-traveled road to the churchy part of town and find out what Christmas was really about.
Get it? Get it?
That’s what I used to say to my parents to make sure they got the punch lines I read to them from My First Little Book of Big Jokes. And it’s what I kept asking them as I tried to explain my holiday revelation over our traditional Christmas dinner of spare ribs and won-tons and chicken lo mein at Chun Hing Restaurant, located in the little outdoor mall ten minutes down the road.
I wanted my parents to agree that our way of doing Christmas, while wonderful, was missing something. I mean, I loved my presents and everything, I really did! Despite the fact that Santa brought me a Suzie Homemaker oven when I had asked him for an Easy Bake oven. What was Christmas missing, exactly? I didn’t know. But my parents would. They were parents. Parents had to know everything.
Including why Santa had brought me a Suzie Homemaker oven.
To adults, the two toys were indistinguishable pieces of teal plastic with tiny ten-watt lightbulbs inside. But every girl on the planet knew the Easy Bake was cool, while the Suzie was for losers. On the television commercial I watched religiously every Saturday morning, Santa left the Easy Bake under the Christmas tree of a girl who looked about my age.
Seconds after this girl unwrapped her gift from Santa, there was a knock on the door: seven girls in matching pastel polyester outfits had dropped by to bake cakes! It’s incredible how much power that oven had. In our suburb, pastel girls didn’t talk to book-girls like me unless we had older brothers with clear skin, lanky builds, shag haircuts, and zodiac medallions that dangled on their geometrically printed, flammable synthetic shirts—or a swimming pool.
The Suzie Homemaker oven, on the other hand, was just an oven. I’m not even sure it had its own commercial. Could Santa, by giving me a Suzie, have been trying to give me a hint that I wasn’t hip enough for an Easy Bake, or for groovy pastel-wearing friends?
“Santa was just extra busy this year,” my mother said.
“It’s an honest mistake. Perhaps he brought you some other girl’s toy,” my father said.
And I could almost believe it. But Christmas was for everyone, and that meant that I could have one, too. Even if I was more of a Suzie Homemaker than an Easy Bake kind of girl.
But my parents didn’t get it. They just kept telling me how the Christmas season was for everybody, but Christmas was only for people who believed in Jesus. “Remember!” they said. “Today is Jesus’ birthday! That’s what Christmas is really about!”
Years later, I would be on a TV talk-show panel with a man who had just written a book that claimed the tradition of a late December holiday began as a seasonally based celebration to help folks get through the darkest days of winter. According to the archaeological evidence, he would say, Jesus was born in March, not December. He was an Aries! But, just as Lincoln’s and Washington’s birthdays got combined into the more seasonally convenient President’s Weekend in the States, Jesus’ birthday party got moved over the years from March to December, when people were used to celebrating the big things in life.
The whole cultural-historical explanation made so much sense. But I wouldn’t know about it for years. And besides, what are facts compared to pure emotion?
“Everybody knows that Christmas is Jesus’ birthday!” I said. It’s not like I’m stupid. “But what about the bigger thing?”
“What bigger thing?”
“What about the fun?”
“Hold on a second. Aren’t we having fun?” my dad asked in that parenty way that gets the words but misses the point. “We’re going to the movies after dinner. Isn’t that fun?”
Definitely. I stole my sister’s seat when she got up to go to the bathroom, and ate all my red Jujubes first.
It’s just that driving home across the X in the road later that night, I looked around us for the Real Christmas families’ cars, and no one’s was there. We were alone in the magic, driving silently through the night as a light new snow fell. Sounds pretty perfect, doesn’t it? And it would have been, if I had been any kind of normal person. Like the Real Christmas kids, or the rest of my family. But I was neither, or both. Or something in between.
That’s the first time I wondered if maybe the problem with Christmas isn’t other people. Maybe it’s just me.
Does any of this make sense to you? I ask Mr. Canada.
“Mais certainement,” he says. “But certainly!”
I wonder: Could I fall in love with a man who gets hit in
the face with flying plastic for a living? Could I?
“So,” he says, looking adorably patient, and truly interested. “What is happening next?”
I think I could.
So now it’s six years and 364 days later. I was sitting in my dad’s blue car, stopped by another red light at that same pedestrian crossing in the road near our house. Only this time, I was driving. I was on my way to my first real boyfriend’s house for my first real Christmas Eve dinner.
Everybody knows you can’t boyfriend your way into Christmas. So if you’re thinking I decided to fall in love for the first time in my life with a Sicilian-American guy from a super-religious, Christmas-loving, seven-fish-courses family for any ulterior motives, you’re wrong. I just cut tenth-grade algebra on the right day.
We were having a remedial quiz on binomial equations, which I hated almost as much as I hated nuclear energy plants and the whale-hunting industry. I was offended by their unnatural appropriation of parentheses and letters, which belonged in English class, the way those PROPERTY OF PHYS. ED. DEPT sweatshirts the jocks wore in the halls really belonged in the gym. I even hated the name—binomial. It sounded more like a personality disorder than a way of solving things.
On the morning of the big bino test, I rode to the park on my bike, my books clipped to the little metal shelf over the back wheel. Swinging and smoking in the early-spring suburban breeze, I waited for my parents to go to work. Then I rode home and forged a note from my mother, attributing my late arrival at school to a brief but violent case of food poisoning. I fried two eggs with provolone and hot peppers, made some raisin toast and black coffee, ate a leisurely brunch over the comic section of the morning paper, and biked to school.
As I slunk up the third-floor hallway, there he was: four ten, like me.
Staring, like me.
With a gold Saint Christopher’s medal around his neck.
Like all great couples from romantic films of the forties, we immediately engaged in pithy banter to hide our true, undeniably passionate feelings.
“You dropped your sweatshirt,” he said.
“Thanks, man,” I said.
Then he walked into my friend Sarah’s chemistry class.
We had our differences. Biz was a social, A+-list, beer-drinking fifteen-year-old whose reputation as a hands-down student and teacher favorite had been cemented during his effortlessly popular years at the junior high next door. He was friends with people who were or dated cheerleaders, played guitar in bands that signed major label deals after college, and had naturally floppy hair. Was asked to every party. Drove a stick-shift orange VW Bug with no heat. Jumped double-diamond moguls. Tanned, never burned. Got along great with my little sister, who adored him. He was amazed at how much of a brat I was, how insufferably rude I was to my parents, how dumb I was to smoke stinky cigarettes.
I was your basic introverted, hair-in-the-face, cigarette- and pot-smoking acoustic guitar freak from the junior high across town.
I marveled at Biz’s 11:00 P.M. curfew, his microscopic allowance, his acceptance of going to 5:00 A.M. Mass before ski trips or crew practice, where he bossed guys twice his size to victory with a cheap burgundy megaphone attached to his head. Most of all, I admired his ability to climb out a third-story window and then drive off with the clutch of his car disengaged once his parents went to bed, assured by his angel face in their bedroom doorway that he was, as always, safely at home on time.
His lips were almost always chapped. He was going to be a doctor for kids with life-threatening diseases: I was going to be… well, you know, something cool. We would get married when he got out of med school.
During our second December together, Biz’s mother graciously invited me over for Christmas dinner. After dinner, we are all going to go to midnight Mass. Goodbye, evil X in the road. Hello, Christmas!
On the afternoon of what I was hoping would be my first real Noel, I took a bath, not a shower. I hated baths, but they took longer, and I’d recently developed this formula: The longer something takes to get ready for, the more life-altering it could be. I didn’t wear makeup yet, so I shaved my legs twice to kill more time.
If this had been an ordinary night in a warmer season, I would have ridden my bike to Biz’s house, humming the Joni Mitchell song of angst and longing I’d worked out on my acoustic guitar that afternoon.
Barefoot, bike basket filled with tulips and daisies, dressed in what a teen fashion magazine might have called my “highly personal style” of multiple flowered skirts with layers of lacy blouses tied on top, I would not be just another confused sixteen-year-old on a dark blue three-speed with foot brakes. I’d be Arty Bike Girl! Insulated from the stares of the cool high school girls with their huge hoop earrings and pastel satin bomber jackets. Able to leap through jock parties in a single bound.
But even Arty Bike Girl was no match for Christmas. So I pulled out my ultimate weapon: a long velveteen dress with a high white lace collar and petticoat, which I thought was so nineteenth century, but which people on the bus must have thought was some kind of teenage maternity frock. They always tried to give me their seats when I wore it to go to the mall in Center City to chain-smoke with my friends in the Food Court.
But there will be no smoking tonight, young lady, my more serious Christmas self told my rebellious self sternly. No lace vests tied over the velveteen. Instead, I pulled my frizzy henna-colored hair into a tight bun offset with “tendrils,” which now, with fashion hindsight, I realize must have looked more like fuzzy strands of hair pulled loose on each side. As I pulled my dad’s car out of the driveway, I had transformed Arty Bike Girl into her more elegant and polite alter ego. I had become Lace-Clad Girlfriend of Christmas!
And when the light turned green in front of the X in the road, I turned right, toward the churchy part of town!
Biz’s house was beautifully lighted with little electric candles. The candlelight emphasized the brick and stone walls and the little porch with its neatly piled cord of wood. The wreath on the door was made of fresh wreathy things and studded with berries. I’d never dined in a house with a wreath on the door before! I straightened my skirt. I breathed in deeply. I rang the bell, which did not chime the melody to “Ave Maria,” as I had hoped. (Hey, you can’t have everything.)
Biz answered the door, decked out in his yellow corduroy blazer, lightly flared chocolate brown trousers, and knit tie. He was beautiful.
Inside, opera singers were discreetly murmuring carols on his father’s living room stereo. OoOOOooo HoOOOooly Ni-i-ight! Firelight illumined the tree—the free!—which was elegantly decorated in ornaments selected by Biz’s sisters, Lissie and Claudia, and his brother, Andrew.
I handed Biz’s dad the bottle of wine my dad had bought him and gave his mom a box of cookies my mom had bought her. Then I sat down at my designated place at the table: next to Claudia and across from Biz. This was a dinner with rules. We really could have been in the nineteenth century!
As Biz’s dad said grace, my family, two and a half miles and a cultural world away, was gathering around the television—our annual holiday tableau. They would watch the same Christmas Eve specials we’d watched together every year. They would eat the grilled cheese sandwiches and canned tomato soup my mom would heat up as part of her annual display of home cooking, because “None of the pizza places are open tonight and, let’s face it, folks, who wants to eat Chinese food two nights in a row?” Tonight, of course, there would be one less cheese sandwich to grill. Our teamlet was no longer four persons strong, but three. Of course, any pangs I had about breaking tradition had been overwhelmed by the joys of becoming a Real Christmas person. But my parents, my sister—how would they deal with the pain?
In my moment of silent reflection, I saw my sister spread out across the empty space on the right side of the couch, the place that had—Hey! Get off of that!—always been mine. My mother was helping herself to my share of the iced sugar cookies shaped like little Santa hats. My father was asking her
to bring him a diet soda.
“Amen!” said Biz’s entire family.
“Amen,” I echoed. Let it be.
And then it was time to go around the table and repeat the introductions we’d done earlier in the foyer. I quickly forgot the old battles at home. Christmas now meant so many new faces and so many new names!
There were Nonno and Nonna, and Nonno and Nonna number two. There were “the aunts,” Biz’s father’s sisters, who lived together as a team. And then there were Biz’s mother’s sisters, who had brought their husbands and their kids. I waved to the ones I recognized from school; they were sitting at the other end of the block-long all-wood dining table, trying to switch their water glasses for their parents’ full glasses of wine.
The sideboard behind them was covered with steaming tureens. And if that wasn’t enough of a hint about the upcoming holiday feast, the English library-style red silk walls were covered with pictures of things that were or could be edible once they were no longer alive. There were fruits, and rabbits—poor rabbits—and fish with their Latin names drawn underneath their portraits. Over the next three hours, seven courses of real fish were brought to the table: baccalà, salty and pungent, sweet branzino in butter, trota in white wine, and scungil’ bathed in garlic, which I was convinced should be sold as a perfume. (Okay, maybe not.)
I said no to all the fish courses—I was a vegetarian at this point; still am. But then aunt number three, who had been a nurse in World War II, brought out the pasta. Each aunt had her own dish and, not to hurt anybody’s feelings, the family had asked the aunts to cook them all, twice. There were shells with cheeses, and noodles with spicy red sauce…
“You want more?” asked aunt number one, who had the kindest smile I’d ever seen. “What’s your name? Someone tell me this little girl’s name! Whom do you belong to?”
Love Santa Page 2