The Worst Noel

by Collected Authors of the Worst Noel

  “They’re coming,” I said.

  The ambulance skidded to a stop, and the attendant strode toward me, lugging a white plastic case in one hand, using the other to gesticulate as he spoke with a Jersey accent.

  “How stupid are you, lady?” He launched into a litany of my unforgivable gaffes, from “takin’ the victim outta the goddamn car” to “lettin’ a total stranger bleed all over ya” and other things that “any pinhead knows from junior high health class.” I didn’t bother explaining that in parochial school, health education was preempted for abstinence-only indoctrination, primarily concerned with “the devil, the world, and our sinful flesh.”

  “Will he be okay?” I asked.

  “No thanks to you,” the ambulance attendant assured me.

  Meanwhile, two other EMTs rushed over, dragging an assortment of equipment. Once the first guy had completed a perfunctory exam on Father Christmas, they carefully maneuvered him onto a gurney and took him away. I got up, shaking, partly because of the cold, partly because the human body does that when it realizes the person it embodies has been changed.

  “I’m gonna need a statement from you,” a policeman called from the curb, but I pretended not to hear him. I crunched back through the dirty snow to my car and opened the door. Jerusha looked up at me with big brown eyes, her mouth and both hands full of gingerbread.

  “You shed I could haff a cookie.”

  I gave my statement to the officer, who stuffed my bloody coat into a trash bag as if it were evidence in a case of foul play. We’d already missed the preschool luncheon, but I figured we might still make the program, even if I stopped to buy a clean dress.

  “C’mon, c’mon,” I mumbled, cruising up the frontage road. “There’s a friggin’ Wal-Mart jammed into every crevice of the known universe. There’s gotta be a Wal-Mart around here.”

  “There!” Jerusha pointed.

  Uncanny. The child was a shopper from day one.

  “Mommy! You’re pulling!” she complained as I dragged her across the parking lot.

  “C’mon!” I barked. “We’re in a hurry!”

  “My shoes are gonna get wet,” she whined. “Carry me!”

  “No. I don’t want to stain your dress.”

  “If I get a stain on my dress, can I get a new one?” she asked.

  “No.” And knowing how her mind worked, I added, “Don’t even think about it.”

  “You get a new dress,” she wailed, dragging her feet. “Why don’t I get a new dress?”

  “You get a new dress every five minutes! You’re wearing a brand-new dress! Now C’MON!”

  First the lies. Then the barking. Now I was yanking her along by her little candy cane arm. Obviously, years of therapy stretched out in front of this child like industrial gray carpet between aisles of plastic wise men and flocked fake trees in Wal-Mart’s Holiday Center. I joylessly selected a cheap blue shirtdress and asked the clerk if I could leave my soiled dress and tights in the trash can behind the fitting-room counter.

  “No,” she said, crinkling her eyebrows together. “But here.”

  She primly held out a plastic bag. I took it, changed, and shoved my bloodied clothes into her trash can when she wasn’t looking.

  “Merry fucking Christmas,” I mumbled.

  “You said the Fword,” Jerusha saw fit to mention. “If you get to say the Fword—”

  “Don’t even think it.”

  We arrived at the preschool just in time for her to run up and join her class onstage singing “Jazzy Jingle Bells.” There was a little play about a snowperson family, and a few other songs that carefully avoided saying anything that might mean anything. All adorable, of course, but it felt so empty. As the children sang “We Wish You a Happy Holiday,” inoculating the traditional lyrics with stilted rhythm, Santa burst into the back of the room, hefting a huge bag of Little Golden Books, which the Mothers of Preschoolers had wrapped and garnished with curly ribbon at our last MOP meeting.

  “Ho Ho Ho! Merry Christmas!” he bellowed, and parents crowded around, waiting to photo/video-document their child’s meeting with Santa. But I’d left my camera in the car, I realized, so I just stood there lamely when he lifted Jerusha to his lap. She stared intently at his face, reached up, touched his nose. I could tell by the look on her face that she had awakened from the dreamiest part of her childhood.

  My own awakening had come in second grade. On the last day of school before Christmas vacation, I sat cross-legged with the rest of my classmates in the Story Corner of Mrs. Glenmar’s classroom at Mount Calvary Evangelical Elementary. Cold winter sunlight spilled across the linoleum floor. With her crown of blue hair, stumpy orthopedic shoes, and a spray of jingle bells on her green dress, Mrs. Glenmar looked as festive and welcoming as a fake Wal-Mart Christmas tree. We wriggled and giggled with excitement as she pressed floppy felt letters onto a nubby board. They stuck as if they were made of magic, and because we were big enough to know important stuff like letters, we called each one out loud.

  “S-A-N-T-A!”

  “Who can tell me who that is?” said Mrs. Glenmar with that winkishly conspiratorial expression adults wear all December long.

  “Santa! ”we cried in hyper-ecstatic holiday shrill.

  “That’s right!” said Mrs. Glenmar. “And who can tell me who this is?”

  She slowly rearranged the letters, but this time, the spelling-along was a lot less enthusiastic.

  “S-A-T-a-n.”

  “Anyone?” Something about the arch of her eyebrow said, Answer, or face the lake of fire.

  “Satan?” I volunteered meekly, because all my classmates were sitting there with their little peppermint pink mouths hanging open.

  “That’s right. SAY-TAN, ”Mrs. Glenmar enunciated. She went on to explain how Father Christmas was a lie invented by the Pope, who served the Father of All Lies, and anyone who believed in Santa was stealing baby Jesus’s birthday. And that made Jesus very sad. She looked up at the plaster-cast crucifix on the wall near her framed and autographed eight-by-ten glossy of President Nixon (who’d recently been reelected by the will of God). Our eyes followed, but quickly slid away from the Savior’s wounded expression. To get crucified by Jews and have your birthday stolen by Catholics—well, no wonder he always looked so mournful.

  I didn’t cry. I wasn’t a crybaby like all those other kids. And I loved Jesus! No way was I a sniveling little birthday-stealer. A few kids tried to present repudiating evidence. Thumpy noises. Mysteriously vanishing Oreos and milk. Someone’s daddy had actually stepped in reindeer droppings! But my eyes were open now—even before Mrs. Glenmar explained that sometimes adults lie to children for reasons we would understand when we grew up. And when I grew up, I did understand.

  Twenty-some Christmases later, I also learned the true story of Santa.

  I was playing the Virgin Mary (oh, shut up) in a traditional Elizabethan miracle play at a little theater in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. (Pennsylvania’s Bethlehem is to Messianic birthplaces what fake Christmas trees are to a pine forest, but it’s close enough for about eight hundred million tourists, so local artists make the most of it.) My friend Rita Lipsitz was playing the angel Gabriel. I loved Rita, even though it took a lot of energy to quash my kids’ giggling at her name. She was a brilliant artist who (when she wasn’t struggling with the anti-gestalt of being a Jew announcing the birth of Christ) taught liberal-artsy college courses like Renaissance Poetry, Ecclesiastics, and Dance History. I got smarter just having coffee with her.

  My husband worked nights, including that particular Christmas Eve, and Rita was a single mom, so she and I decided to get together for an amalgamated festivity we called Hanuchristmakah, which included: little gifts from the Everything’s 99 Cents! store; stockings stuffed with kosher candy; and an interesting mix of holiday carols and Broadway show tunes. Rita and I sipped wine in my kitchen, watching the kids decorate cookies with tinted frosting, red licorice strings, and sprinkles. Just before midnight, we lit our me
norah, tucked baby Jesus in the manger, and set out treats for Santa. (Actually, it was more like a quarter to nine, but we told the kids it was midnight, and they believed it, not because they were gullible but because they were guileless.)

  “Do your kids still believe in Santa?” I asked Rita, once the children were nestled all snug in their beds, while visions surgically inserted by multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns danced in their heads.

  “What’s not to believe?” she said. “He was a real guy. A Turkish bishop. Nicholas of Izmir. Legend has it, some nobleman couldn’t afford dowries for his three daughters, so one night, the bishop threw a bag of gold through the window to cover the first daughter’s marriage. Second night, he pitched in enough for the second girl. Third night, finding the window closed, he dropped the third daughter’s gift down the chimney to the fireplace, where stockings were hanging to dry, and the rest is history.”

  “No way,” I said. “If a member of the unfunded gentry received gold via an open window two nights in a row, there’s no way he’s closing that window the third night.”

  “Coldhearted skeptics notwithstanding,” said Rita pointedly, “the legend is in keeping with the bishop’s documented reputation for benevolence. I mean, they don’t just canonize any old fart off the street. Nicholas is the patron saint of those who love Christmas most: children, bakers, and pawnbrokers.”

  “We didn’t have saints,” I said. “We had lawn ornaments. Blow-mold nativity scenes.”

  “Blow mold?”

  “Yeah. Those hollow plastic figures with lightbulbs inside. I’ve been searching eBay for a blow-mold holy family. Three blow-mold wise men. Blow-mold shepherds kneeling before a blow-mold baby Jesus in his little blow-mold manger.”

  “You’d never put something that kitschy in your yard,” said Rita. “You just like saying blow-mold baby Jesus.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “My kids want one of those ten-foot inflatable Santas with the fan unit in the base that keeps him nice and rotund. You have to tether him to a tree so he doesn’t topple over onto the plywood reindeer. And you hate for the kids to see Santa tied to a tree, but what can you do? A legend that overblown has to be anchored to something solid.”

  “True that.” I raised my glass to the Gospel According to Rita Lipsitz.

  We like our cultural icons big. A Santa larger than life. A Jesus larger than death. We present them as Sebastian Cabot and Fabio, though they actually looked more like Trini Lopez and Osama bin Laden. We make them white so we’re not troubled by our innate racism. We make them supernatural so we’re not pressured to live up to their example. But in reality, both these guys were about love, not magic. At the base of the grandiloquent image of Jolly Old Saint Nicholas resides a quietly persistent habit of human kindness. And nestled long ago in the real-life manger was an extraordinarily ordinary newborn boy, who inspired more than a legend when he inspired Nicholas of Izmir.

  He inspired a man to become a saint. To love his neighbor. To give and give and, without recognition or thanks, give again. To hitch a sleigh to his good intentions and to brave snowy rooftops. To venture out onto icy streets behind the wheel of a powder-blue Buick he was far too frail to drive.

  “Joseph dearest, Joseph mine, help me cradle this child divine…”

  The battered Santa and I breathed soft clouds, waiting for the sirens.

  “Schum schie… schum schie…”

  How odd, in that moment, to find myself so comforted by this little song from a church I thought had scarred me. But in life’s most metal-twisting moments, we often retreat to our traditions. Dormant faith awakens to meet crushing need, and the contrast is as sharply drawn as the disparate sensations of hard ice beneath me and the warm weight of St. Nicholas in my arms.

  Christmas surrounded us like a snow globe, and it was undeniably real. Cold. Lullabies. Blood. The authenticity of care, when one is caring for a stranger.

  I closed my eyes and purposely returned to the dream of believing.

  CHRISTMAS 2001

  Anne Giardini

  It has only just occurred to me that there might be some profit in re-creating the worst Christmas of my life beyond the potential inspiration of a blossom of schadenfreude within the breastbones of my readers. Most of life—even the parts that should be encased in concrete and dropped to the bottom of an abandoned salt mine in New Mexico until they have ceased to pulse with a toxic, incandescent gleam—most of life has at least the possibility of inducing an increase in wisdom, if held up to scrutiny, and wisdom is the only worthwhile consolation I am aware of for getting older. Even the worst events of our personal slice of history might, if brought out from time to time and subjected to examination, have something more to tell us than just how much misery we are capable of withstanding without being permanently broken. There is also always the possibility that there is something linguistically significant in the suitcase of the word recover; that to recover a memory fully brings with it the possibility of fully recovering from it.

  Several holiday seasons present themselves to my line and hook as I cast back over the years. There was the Christmas when I was a child, one of five, all of us under age twelve and all felled with a strain of flu that induced muscle pains, lethargy, and violent vomiting. My parents took turns pressing damp cloths onto our brows and murmuring comforting words while we discharged the acid contents of our stomachs into bowls. When Christmas morning came, I moaned to my mother—feebly, pathetically—that I was too sick to open my presents. But the truth of the matter is that I was in thrall at that time to Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and was not too weak or delirious to fail to appreciate how pleasingly Beth-like was my pallor and languor, and not too far gone to enjoy the private documentary short that unscrolled inside my aching eyes: my brother and my sisters, sobbing at my funeral, contrite at last for all their sins against me.

  Another contender is the Christmas about ten years later, when I was nineteen and took a Greyhound to a large U.S. city to see a loutish boyfriend who had fallen asleep and failed to meet me at the bus depot. The bus got in at ten at night, and the pimps and drug dealers on whose turf I had been discharged began to encircle tender, wide-eyed me with growing menace until, just before midnight, I had enough sense to get another bus out of town. But wait, that wasn’t Christmas exactly. I recall now the driver of that second bus turning in his seat and announcing “Happy New Year” to his three passengers—we sat as far from one another as possible, each in his or her own dark, rumbling misery—as the clock ticked over into the year 1979. I remember the chafe of the driver’s cheerful voice, although I see now that he might simply have been making the best of it. The night got worse in fact, because, when I arrived at the door of my boyfriend’s mother’s house— she had offered to take me in for the night—I spilled out on her threshold my story about the big black pimps who had been threatening me only an hour before. Hundreds of them, eight feet tall at least, dressed in shiny leisure suits, with fat gold rings and chains. It was only when I stepped into her kitchen that I saw her New Year’s Eve guests still at the dinner table, most of them black, their conversation entirely interrupted by my noisy, plangent arrival.

  The Christmas at the end of the year 1986 had the potential to be the worst. My parents were spending a sabbatical year in Paris in a rented apartment, and all five of their children, in our twenties by then, traveled to France to camp on their floors and couches. There had been sporadic bomb attacks in Paris over the past year, and I remember that my brother was nervous about attending Christmas Eve services at the American Church in Paris, but we went anyway, and we all sang noisily and off-key. “Joy to the World,” “O Come O Come, Emmanuel.” It was, I believe, the year of the greatest labor unrest in France since the worker and student uprisings of 1968. Rolling strikes interrupted the electricity, the buses, the trains, the subways. But, for us, all of this had a glamorous Parisian cast to it. We practiced the art of the Gallic shrug until we thought we had it mastered,
the Qu’est-ce qu’on peut faire? upward shift of the eyebrows, the pursed lips, the dislocation of the molecules of inconvenience from this earthly plane out into the stratosphere by means of a readjustment of the vertebrae and neck, every minor nuisance and difficulty sent spinning with a lift of the chin. Over the days between Christmas and New Year, peace broke out. Algerian terrorists took a break from bomb-making. Perhaps, like us, they were drinking cold glasses of Beaujolais nouveau and small cups of scalding coffee in the local cafés, and thinking of gold and frankincense instead of fertilizer and fuel oil. I stayed with my boyfriend in a friend’s apartment with a sideways view of the Eiffel Tower from her tiny wrought-iron balcony. We got engaged and then made our way to Italy, where he was living then, on a train whose engineers were not on strike but whose ticket-takers were, so we got all the way back to Florence without having to pay so much as a sou. Not the worst Christmas by far.

  Another jump forward, to the end of 2001. A miserable year, memorable for its earthquakes, terrorist attacks, wildfires, drought, war, and human rights outrages. A year that will be remembered for our collective retreat from the idea of the global village, a time characterized by a constriction of the human heart, by suspicion, by doubt, by fear of the shadowy other. At the end of this year, my family gathered on Galiano Island to mark what we understood would be my mother’s last Christmas. She was dying of breast cancer, and we had been told that she would not last long into the next year.

  Galiano is one of British Columbia’s Gulf Islands, a stretch of islands scattered like dice in the Strait of Georgia, between Vancouver Island and the mainland. The islands are made of coarse rocks that were formed by volcanoes millions of years ago in the Pacific Ocean. They then hitched a slow ride eastward on the earth’s shifting plates toward the coast. Galiano is six miles long, and narrow, only a mile and a half at its widest. Its Web site (www.galianoisland.com) proclaims it as “glorious in spring, especially for naturalists and bird watchers. Wild flowers flourish in the forests and above the shores, and migrating birds visit on their way to summer nesting grounds.” The fall is also highlighted as “a time of golden light, ripe berries and the northern birds returning south. The days are still warm, the air is fragrant and rain is rare before November.”