The Worst Noel

by Collected Authors of the Worst Noel

  Where I came from, Catholics took Christmas as a kind of eating festival. There wasn’t much actual religion involved. Going to church on Christmas was required, of course. For lots of people it was the only day out of 365 that they went to church. Because of the overflow this caused, the rules of attendance were loosened and my family migrated to a late-night time slot—Midnight Mass. When I was a kid this seemed exciting, staying up late and getting a little high on the incense. Later, I realized that the adults preferred Midnight Mass because it allowed everyone to sleep late the next morning, and on this one day, church could be experienced after a nice meal and a few drinks. (Though in the case of my grandfather and uncle, only a sunrise service would preclude a few preparatory drinks, and probably not even then.)

  Contrary to this, just after we crossed the Mississippi River out of Memphis, Dixie warned me that her father and stepmother might ask us to go to church a few times. Also, they did not drink. That seemed about the deadliest combination of habits that I could conceive: dry serial churchgoing. I pictured a grueling day of sober worship, like the Salvation Army scenes in Guys and Dolls. I thought of getting us into a minor, though time-consuming, auto accident somewhere around Little Rock.

  But I didn’t. It would only have delayed the inevitable. Newton might have said it: Bodies in motion toward meeting parents tend to remain in motion, no matter how many times those bodies try to postpone things by stopping at Stuckey’s. By the same unfair and perverse laws, it was axiomatic that we would get to the parents’ driveway, leave the car, and ring their doorbell.

  “Well, hi therrrrrre. It’s so good to finally meet youuuuuuu. We’ve all been just so lookin’ forward to this.”

  Dixie’s stepmother, Miriam, told me I should call her Mi-Mi, because that’s what all the grandchildren did when they were first learning to talk. Mi-Mi opened the door into what might have been a very nice Texas ranch house, except it looked like a Christmas bomb had gone off inside. Wreaths and ribbons and ornaments and garland and figurines filled the place. It was what an elf must see in his fevered dreams. A Christmas song was on the stereo. Lights twinkled. I got a whiff of gingerbread. At any moment, I expected Andy Williams to walk out of the kitchen.

  Instead, out came Pee-Pee, which, of course, is not Dixie’s father’s real name but what the grandchildren used to call him until they learned the unfortunate implications. I could call him Bob, he told me, which is what I did immediately, naturally. But I still can’t quite think of him as anything but Pee-Pee. He was a big-bellied guy who seemed to reside on the opposite side of the land of enthusiasm from Mi-Mi, thank God. He wanted reports about our trip, and I could tell that he wouldn’t be bored if I analyzed the variations in our gas mileage between the mountain and plains states. He’d been a bookkeeper.

  “I’ve been to New York and all,” Pee-Pee reported. “It’s a great town, but I don’t know how anyone could live there all the time. I mean, you can’t even cross the street without just about gettin’ killed. It’s like that Midnight Cowboy movie.” Dixie then pinched me in the back, and before I could ask her why, her father began his impersonation of Dustin Hoffman as Ratso Rizzo crossing a deadly Manhattan street.

  “Ahhhhmmmm walkin’ hairrrrr,” Pee-Pee called out. “Ahhhhmmm walkin’ hairrrrr.”

  I hadn’t seen Midnight Cowboy in a while, but I was pretty certain that Ratso didn’t have a thick Texas accent. I smiled at Pee-Pee with a big grin of wonderment and tried to decide whether I should at least compliment him on capturing Dustin Hoffman’s feral intensity. But Mi-Mi broke things up.

  “Who wants punch? Yawl gotta try my Christmas punch. It’s wuuuuunderful.” She virtually skipped into the kitchen.

  Dixie pinched me again and whispered, “Wuuuunderful is her favorite word. She was a cheerleader.”

  I’d been briefed ahead of time by Dixie on the basic facts. I knew that Mi-Mi and Pee-Pee had gone through recovery for various things, and had been clean and sober for years, which was fine with me. But did that mean I had to drink the punch? There was a big vat of the goopy stuff. It contained colors that I don’t think occur in nature. There were big chunks of melting sherbet floating around in the bowl. Mi-Mi passed around Christmas mugs that looked homemade. Since she and Pee-Pee had retired early (he had been a smart bookkeeper), Mi-Mi was discovering her creative, arty-crafty side. It wouldn’t have surprised me if she’d crocheted me a cup right that minute. I accepted a mug full of punch, took a sip, and thought I might fall into diabetic shock.

  “Wonderful indeed,” I said. Dixie pinched me again.

  Our wonderful punch sipping and small talk went on quite longer than I expected. We’d actually shown up on time, and it was a hidebound family tradition among Dixie’s people to be incredibly late. Sipping her odd-colored punch, Mi-Mi said, “Don’t you just lovvvvve the holidays?” and then repeated it again in about nine slightly different ways. Finally, Dixie’s sister, Suzie, made it—only forty-five minutes behind schedule—dragging her daughter, Hannah, and a Pekingese named Fluffy, who was part of a cavalcade of Christmas presents for Hannah that included every American Girl doll ever produced and some that had never made it out of prototype.

  Hannah was a great distraction, and Fluffy was even better because they took Mi-Mi away from our punch circle and into the living room full of pine scent and presents. Pee-Pee and Dixie and Suzie and I discussed the possibility that Suzie’s husband, Bill, would actually make it for dinner. He sold things to convenience stores and drove around Texas for at least sixteen hours every day of the week, keeping up with his nonstop supply requirements. Dixie had taken to calling him Sasquatch, because whenever she visited her sister, Bill was often just a vague, lumbering shadow that passed through the house at odd hours. Suzie said she was sure he would make it for dinner, but that he’d better not fall asleep at the table, as he had done last year.

  Then we heard Mi-Mi shouting in the other room. “Stop staring at me! Stop staring at me!”

  “Hannah,” Suzie called. “Stop staring at Grandma.”

  “It wasn’t her,” Mi-Mi said, rushing into the kitchen and pouring herself a soothing punch. “It was that dog. That dog was staring at me!”

  Mi-Mi’s sweater had so many shiny green and red beads sewn in the shape of a Christmas tree that a normal dog could easily have become transfixed. Fluffy wasn’t being bad; he was probably hypnotized. Pee-Pee took Fluffy to the garage for a time-out. Hannah started to cry. Mi-Mi was sweating a little and seemed to be vibrating. Someone that tightly strung needed something besides neon sherbet in her punch.

  Dixie and I had taken Hannah to see Fluffy in the garage when Dixie’s stepbrother, Trey-Trey, arrived. He was a sallow and thinner version of his father, and when I got close enough to shake his hand, I developed a notion of why he was late. From the smell, I guessed that Trey-Trey had offered a Rastafarian reggae band a ride to their gig. Trey-Trey was in his midthirties and drove for a living.

  “You still working for Dominos?” Dixie asked her stepbrother.

  “Nah, that was two jobs ago,” he told her. “I was workin’ as a host at TGI Friday’s, but that ended a few weeks ago.”

  “What happened?”

  “Ah, you know how things are in big corporations. It’s all just politics.”

  There wasn’t time to analyze the Machiavellian nature of surviving in the restaurant jungle that is TGI Friday’s because Dixie and Trey-Trey’s grandfather showed up right then. Of course, his name was Paw-Paw.

  Paw-Paw was wearing a bright white turtleneck and a well-cut soft-leather aviator jacket. He looked like the most prosperous man in that part of Texas, though I knew he was not. On his arm was Grace, a little woman with a slight stoop. (How long would it be before they compounded her name?) Grace was Paw-Paw’s new girlfriend. They’d met in the assisted-living facility where he’d gone after his wife died. Paw-Paw had waited a respectable couple of weeks before replacing his wife of sixty years.

  Grace and Paw-Paw went in
to the house, got their punch, and headed for a sofa, where they nuzzled like teenagers. I saw Mi-Mi looking at her father and his new girlfriend and thought that at any minute her head might just start spinning around. I tried very hard not to stare.

  It seemed that dinner could begin any time now, it being almost two hours past the scheduled time. But still no Sasquatch spotting, and we were waiting on the Dickeys. That was Dixie’s stepsister and her new husband, Willie, whom the family thought had lots of good qualities compared with her first two husbands. Willie drove a bigger truck than numbers one and two, carried a bigger knife on his belt, and kept a steady job. The biggest drawback was that marrying him meant becoming Vicki Dickey, but everyone was adjusting.

  They finally arrived—separately. It turned out that the Dickeys had managed to be individually late. “I ain’t seen you all day,” Willie said to Vicki. “Gimme a kiss.” She pecked at him, and he pulled her around and said, “I mean a real kiss, woman,” and proceeded to go at her with a fervor that made me blush. Across the room, Paw-Paw started to whistle and applaud.

  And so, without Sasquatch, we sat down to dine.

  Through dinner, I kept flashing back to Graceland and how it might have been for Lisa Marie to bring her latest beau home for a Yuletide bacon-and–peanut-butter sandwich with Dad. Would the table chatter have been any better than Paw-Paw outlining his plans for his impending marriage to, and honeymoon with, Grace? Would Priscilla, if she’d stayed with Elvis, have been able, as Mi-Mi was, to make a totally dry turkey that seemed to come with macramé crust?

  People think that Tolstoy said, “All happy families are boring in the same way.” But he just said, “Happy families are all alike.” Happy or not, all families—crazy or corny, dignified or dysfunctional—are unique. And oddly, in that way they’re all the same. It’s what makes them both unendurable and sustaining at the same time. Mi-Mi was trying to force-feed me her special green Jell-O with marshmallows (molded into a Santa shape). I took a sip of sparkling cider and realized that this family was fine with me. As weird as they all seemed now, a day would come soon when they’d be as warm and dull as a piece of toast. I would marry Dixie and stay with her forever. That way, I would never have to meet another new family, especially during the crankiest time of the year.

  After dinner we all stood in the kitchen around a big sheet cake that said jesus in red frosting and was decked out with birthday candles. Pee-Pee lit the candles, asked us to join hands, and started us in singing “Happy Birthday” to Jesus. As it happened, I was standing between Trey-Trey and Willie Dickey, and the three of us holding hands must have looked like the true definition of discomfort.

  “Happy Birthday, dear Jeeesuuuus,” we sang. “Happy Birthday to you.” Dixie couldn’t help herself, and as the song finished, she added, “And many morrrrrre.” Sasquatch showed up then, fixed himself a cold plate, and fell asleep in front of the fireplace. We all played a present-swapping game and ate more sugar. I felt sick and content. Another Christmas had come and gone. Bless us one and all.

  We were getting ready to leave when Mi-Mi presented me with her handmade “Thankfulness Book” and ordered me to write in it what I was most thankful for on this holiday. The effect of having to write something on cue made my mind a desolate tundra, devoid of thoughts, frozen.

  “It should be easy for you,” Mi-Mi said, hovering. “You’re a writer.” She was staring at me. That woman was staring at me!

  I shook myself to attention, and the first thankful thought came to me: That Christmas comes but once a year. I had to pull away my writing hand, Dr. Strangelove–fashion, to keep from putting that into Mi-Mi’s arty-crafty little book.

  Instead, I set the pen down on the thick colored paper and wrote, “Getting to know my new family. Merry Christmas.”

  EIGHT

  Amy Krouse Rosenthal

  1.

  "There was the Christmas when I was growing up where we went to my cousin Andy’s in-laws’ house. We were greeted at the door by a warm and gracious, albeit unfamiliar, matriarch. After being motioned inside and handing over our coats, we gathered in the living room with the other also unfamiliar guests. We half chitchatted, half waited for our cousin and his family to appear. The dialogue had to have been stilted and off-kilter, not unlike the odd feeling of trying to make sense of a conversation when you’re catching only every third word. Twenty minutes later, and still no cousin. Could he really be tied up this long with guests in another room? We finally—because we are smart that way—realized that we were not at our cousin’s in-laws’ house at all. Oh, you want the Cairo family! You want the house next door! We wondered who you were, too! Oh well, nice to meet you, folks! Take care! Merry Christmas!

  There was the Christmas not too long ago when I went head to head with a virus that was clearly not on holiday. This nasty and persistent little bug first had its way with my insides. That was followed by a few hours of commercial-free vomiting. Next came the passing out in the bathtub trick, where I came to only after flooding the bathroom and the entire bedroom. Then I pretended I was fine (fooling exactly zero people), deteriorated to the point of hallucinations, and ultimately ended up in the hospital.

  Those were weird and unfortunate Christmases, respectively. But the worst Christmas I ever had was, hands down, the Christmas I found out I wasn’t Christian.

  2.

  I was eight. I knew I was Jewish on some level. I knew I wasn’t Christian like other people were Christian. But I thought I was some sort of you-got-Judaism-on-my-Christianity/no-you-got-Christianity-on-my-Judaism amalgam. See, there’s Orthodox Jews, Conservative Jews, Reformed Jews, and Children-of-the-’70s Jews. All the Jewish kids I grew up with were pretty much a member of that last sect. I don’t say it like oh, everyone was doing it as a way to make it sound more acceptable. I say it because in retrospect I find it interesting when you look at it in its historical context, how the pendulum/Jewish households swung after World War II. There were a great many little Jewish boys and girls all over the country who had trees in their living rooms, stockings on their mantels, and chocolate chip cookies for Santa on the table.

  3.

  This stocking footnote: My grandmother’s friend Gladys knit one for each of us four children. They were red and happy looking, with spots of soft white fur and our names along the top. They were a treasure, and they represented everything that was merry about Christmas.

  Shortly after meeting my husband, another child of the ’70s, I discovered that he also had his very own “Gladys stocking.” Turns out that Jason’s grandmother was friendly with the queen knitter as well. This certainly goes back to the point about the prevalence of the Christmas spirit across the faiths in my generation, but it’s also just a nice bit of serendipity, wouldn’t you say?

  4.

  The year 1973 was when my parents agreed it was time to pack up the ornaments and bring out the Judaism. Up until then, our Jewish rituals consisted of Chinese food for dinner every Sunday night, being scolded in Yidlish (half English, half Yiddish, as in, Oy, vay iz mir, turn off The Brady Bunch and clean up this mess), and one full-fledged holiday—Passover at my aunt Barbara and uncle Henry’s. We had joined our first temple earlier that year—I was starting Sunday school—and it was the rabbi who suggested to my folks that having a Christmas tree might be, you know, a tad conflicting for a Jewish child. Interestingly, all of our ornaments were hand-me-downs from another Jewish family, good friends of my parents whose kids were a few years older than us, and they had come to this exact same Christmas/Hanukkah crossroad (no pun intended, but I do rather like it) a few years before.

  I suppose then that my worst Christmas was technically my first non-Christmas. All my prior Christmases, as best as I can remember, were pretty white, bright, and excellent. We went from Christmas morning to Christmas mourning.

  5.

  Looking back on this time, I would say that I remember Christmas feeling very big, and Hanukkah feeling very small. It was as if the day afte
r Thanksgiving someone flipped a switch and Christmas was “on” everywhere. People’s houses were magnificently decorated. (Where did all those lights come from? Who’s making them blink on and off like that? How’d they get that big plastic Santa on the roof?) Mothers and daughters wore red-and-green matching knit sweaters. Frosty and Charlie Brown and Miracle on 34th Street came back from wherever they had been hibernating and permeated the tube. Talk of stocking stuffers and gifts was omnipresent. Everyone knew on Tuesday that there were 16 shopping days left, and then everyone agreed on Wednesday that there were 15 days left. Candy canes were everywhere in such abundance—at school, at stores, at the car wash—that you could eat one without your mom counting it as dessert, almost like we were obligated to help consume them. And so in contrast to all this, Hanukkah felt like a P.S. It also felt distinctly foreign and insular, like a science experiment with confusing instructions that you tried to figure out all by yourself in the basement.

  6.

  That first Hanukkah may not have entered with a bang, but it did enter with a bush—the never-popular Hanukkah bush. (My sister recalls it this way: “Man, that thing was cheap.” Not surprisingly, my parents didn’t bother with the stout plastic shrubbery after that first year.) Digging deep into my memory, I see some fuzzy, halfhearted dreidel-playing—that really never really caught on, either. However, those coin chocolates wrapped in pinched gold foil—that was something we could get excited about. My mom serenaded us with “Herman the Hanukkah Candle,” sung to the tune of “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Where she learned this, I have no idea. But it was cute and sweet, in a sad, consolation-prize kind of way.

  What was truly special about Hanukkah—aside from the fact that as long as you ended it with an h and inserted a k or two in there, you could pretty much spell it any way you wanted—was the lighting of the menorah. Unlike the Hanukkah bush, unlike Herman T.H.C., the menorah was all ours. It wasn’t borrowed or adapted or a Jewish version of a Christian something. It would be years before I completely understood the hows and whys of Hanukkah, but I did understand, from the very first candle on that very first night, that it was beautiful and it made us quiet and that it was something I rightfully and naturally belonged to.