KATHRYN CANAN
“And cancel Christmas!”
This line, snarled by the Sheriff of Nottingham, is the only line I remember from the movie Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. For years now I’ve been tempted to cancel Christmas myself.
I’m not sure when I became a grinch. Certainly I remember the magic when my children were small—tackling an elaborate gingerbread house, staying up half the night assembling bikes and writing letters from Father Christmas. I had the energy and time to crochet, cross-stitch and do needlepoint on Christmas ornaments and stockings, send personal, handwritten cards, and make or buy the perfect gifts. As an early music specialist, I delighted in discovering medieval and Renaissance Christmas music never heard in the malls, and I loved sharing this ancient music in any performances I could arrange.
Family recipes from both sides melded together to become our own traditions. Spritz and sugar cookies, almond crescents, nut butter snowballs, gingersnaps and homemade fudge were all essential. When my parents visited, they brought Springerles from our German heritage; these never caught on with the rest of my family, but I appreciated the ritual of dipping the rock-hard anise bricks with quaint pictures into coffee. Christmas breakfast had to include homemade sourdough cherry rose rolls and the oranges from our stockings, and dinner, where I resisted a menu set in stone, still had to include Yorkshire pudding and strawberry Jell-O with crushed pineapple.
The handmade stockings became the hallmark of our Christmases. They weren’t just for the kids; Dave and I had them, too, and filled them for each other. As we all grew older, they took on themes. Last Christmas our younger son, Tim, on the path to becoming a cardiologist, got a bacon-themed stocking, including a tie he could wear under his white coat. Guests got them, too; when my sister Patricia visited us in California for the first time, I crocheted her a stocking and filled it with California avocados and kiwis. Trouble was, the stocking kept stretching as I added weight to it, and it morphed into the legendary Avocado Monster.
I think now that I was a victim of my own success. The problem with creating so many heartwarming Christmas traditions is that my family grew to love them—all of them. Some things need to change as children grow up and the family changes, but Christmas traditions are not conducive to change. It seemed to me, as the years went by, that the Martha Stewart Christmas I always tried to create morphed into National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, with nearly as many disasters.
Now that my children are grown, they are home for only a few days during the holidays. I don’t want them to waste that time shopping; I want to spend time together. One year I took my two sons skiing the day after Christmas. It was the only day that week the weather was perfect, and as we headed up to the Sierras, we felt as if we were driving into a Christmas card. We arrived at the hill by 10:00 a.m. and managed to find a parking place within two miles of the lift. Tim and I had our own equipment; Jon, who had flown down from Seattle, needed to stand in the rental line—he didn’t receive his skis until 2:00 p.m. Then he had to stand in another line to trade his full-day pass for a half-day pass. We don’t go skiing during Christmas week anymore.
Gifts for our children now have to fit in carry-on luggage. We avoid the problem somewhat by giving gift cards and finding new ways to wrap receipts for gifts shipped directly to their homes—creating strange ways to use paper bags and duct tape is another tradition—but it’s hard to evoke the same magic on Christmas morning these days. In fact, I increasingly resist the whole commercial aspect of Christmas. I avoid the malls and make a spiritual practice out of not shopping on Black Friday.
As a musician, I’m sensitive to noise—including bad Christmas music, which starts before Halloween these days. Even my initial enthusiasm for unusual medieval and Renaissance carols has dimmed. (Must we play “Ríu Ríu Chíu” again? The tenors never come in on time.) The last time my consort played for a party at a winery in a replicated castle, we had to fend off grapes shot from spoons the guests had turned into mini-catapults. Christmas spirits can be a problem in the entertainment world.
Our daughter, Robin, became an accomplished pastry chef by the time she was twelve. She began to concoct amazing variations on everything in the cookie cookbooks we owned. Of course, we couldn’t do without the traditional favorites, so we kept adding to the cookie repertoire. I bought a freezer, donated freely to every December gathering I attended and invested in cute tins for gifts of baked goods. I did compromise and get rid of the Springerles the year that rats found the dough chilling in the attic because the refrigerator was too full. I still had to get out the low-carb vegan cookbook every January to recover from the sugar high.
On Christmas Eve, Dave and I used to be able to cook and clean up dinner, go to a candlelight service, visit the Grinch and set visions of sugar plums dancing, put the kids to bed with a lullaby of Kermit singing carols with John Denver, assemble half a dozen toys, fill the stockings, arrange the presents under the tree, compose a letter from Father Christmas à la J.R.R. Tolkien for the mantel, fall into bed around 3:00 a.m., and still wake up early enough to make the cherry rose rolls before the kids clattered downstairs to the stockings. As the kids (and we) got older, it helped that they slept in longer and Father Christmas wrote his final letter to them, but the toys got more complicated, the assembly instructions were outsourced overseas and somehow we lost the ability to stay up past ten. And church? We got tired of hot wax burning our fingers while we forgot the words to “Silent Night.”
The crowning glory of our Christmas disasters, however, has been the perpetual tree argument. We don’t have a fake tree, and we never will. When we first moved into our house with cathedral ceilings, we happily trooped up to the foothills and brought a fifteen-foot tree home on the roof of our minivan. There were a few problems—most stands are made for eight-foot trees, and we had to accept that the topmost string of lights would always fail within a day. It got harder when we traded in the van for a Honda Civic, but we made do: we paid a high school boy with a pickup truck to deliver it, borrowed or rented a truck or bribed a neighbor with a bottle of wine (he didn’t want a tin of cookies). We put the tradition on hold for a couple of years when the tree nearly fell on Robin as a toddler, but when she got old enough to dodge a potential accident the monster trees resumed.
And then we got Psycho Cat. We’d had a cat before, a nice, benign cat that knew how to go outside when necessary and was pretty laid-back about everything. He liked to sleep under the tree, and even the lowest ornaments were safe. But after Frodo died, we picked out an orphaned kitten, a calico Manx who was easily frightened and hated change. Bringing a fifteen-foot tree into the living room and covering it with lights and ornaments was change. She also never learned the difference between a throw rug and a litter box, or the difference between a Christmas tree skirt and a throw rug (please apply the transitive property of equality here).
One year, it seemed that all of the negative aspects of Christmas hit at once. Jon had married our beloved new daughter-in-law, Ramona, in August, and we had enjoyed Thanksgiving with them. But it was her parents’ turn for Christmas and they were in Denver, a thousand miles away. Dave’s father, James, had died in September, and we were still deeply grieving. My Civic had been rear-ended, leaving my back and neck temporarily sore. Tim, now in medical school, was rarely awake during the few days he was home. The recession had hit, and since music lessons and live music are expendable expenses, I had no income that month. I was feeling especially anticommercial anyway; I even dragged my husband to a workshop on simplifying Christmas, but the workshop only accentuated our irreconcilable differences about the holidays. We loaded up the credit card anyway, put up the insanely tall tree and tried to keep Psycho Cat out of the living room.
Christmas came and went despite the gloom, and on December 28 Dave and I awoke to celebrate our thirtieth anniversary. We took our coffee into the living room for a peaceful, romantic morning alone, but another smell was fighting with the odors of pine and cinn
amon. I threw the tree skirt into the washer and began to clean up the rest of the mess. I had to lift up the plastic mat we had placed under the tree to protect the floor, and suddenly we had a much bigger mess to deal with. Fortunately all those crocheted and embroidered ornaments weren’t breakable, and the tree missed the lamps on its way down.
Just when I felt the whole season deserved to be swept under the rug, Robin came running down the stairs, several hours before she usually got out of bed during vacation. She waved her cell phone at us. “Jon says to check the porch for a package!”
She opened the door, and there stood Jon and Ramona.
Sometime in the middle of all the hugs, Jon explained, “We’re spending New Year’s Eve with friends in San Francisco, so we came a couple of days early to celebrate with you. Happy Anniversary!”
The newlyweds were glowing with the joy of their first Christmas as a couple, and their love transported us back to the early years of our marriage. We remembered our tiny Chicago apartment, and our first Christmas away from our families in Montana. We’d bought a small, dangerously dry tree in a drab city parking lot and covered it with generic ornaments from Woolworths. A thunderstorm on Christmas Eve destroyed any hope of a white Christmas; without a car, we splashed through the streets and shivered through a service in an unfamiliar church. And yet, that first Christmas, we also had our new baby son, whose eyes were glued to the sparkling lights. Jon was happy just playing with boxes and ribbons and getting his first taste of solid food. Now, with our family together again, welcoming Jon’s new wife into our traditions, Dave and I realized that all of the “disasters” from thirty years of Christmas had transformed into good stories, a tapestry of shared memories that hold us together.
Since then, Christmas has regained its magic. We replaced the Civic with a small SUV that can carry a twelve-foot tree, and we gave three boxes worth of ornaments to our children for their own trees. I plan to make a new tree skirt in memory of Psycho Cat as soon as I finish cross-stitching Ramona’s stocking. Robin’s culinary experiments have expanded beyond dessert, so I have ceded control of the kitchen to her. We cut down on the cookies so we can enjoy Grandpa’s favorite rum and orange juice with our adult children; we also treasure even more the time we still have with our mothers. We haven’t yet missed a Christmas with the new doctor in the family, which has to be a miracle, and we’ve adjusted to the rhythm of sharing Jon and Ramona with her delightful parents. We’re beginning to look forward to assembling toys and writing Father Christmas letters for as yet mythical grandchildren. When they do arrive, Christmas will move to their house, where they have room for a twenty-foot tree.
I’ll bring the Springerles.
THE CHRISTMAS TREE
NEVA J. HODGES
What had I done? The forever vows my husband and I exchanged in a wedding ceremony a few hours ago took on a new meaning. Changing from my travel clothes into my wedding nightgown on what I’d always believed would be the most romantic night of my life, the calm and sure belief that Jim was my true love deserted me. There was so much I didn’t know about love and marriage. I looked around the small motel room. And romance? When would that start on this honeymoon?
Both Jim and I were raised in a strict religious environment, and even though the sexual revolution of the sixties pervaded our culture, we waited for our wedding night to consummate our relationship. However, stolen kisses and deep caresses highlighted our dates.
Jim proposed in June 1966, when he stopped to see me at my parents’ home in Pueblo, Colorado, on his way to a six-week geology field camp. That same day, he said, “Let’s look at rings.” I couldn’t believe it. We drove downtown and walked into a jewelry store. Jim told the owner I could have whatever I wanted. A simple one suited me. It had a quarter-carat diamond set in a half loop of gold. Jim later told me he was afraid I would choose the most expensive ring in the store. My taste fit his budget, though. Then Jim told the storeowner he didn’t have the money and that he was a college student. I held my breath. “No problem,” the owner said. “You can make monthly payments.”
In the car, Jim slid the ring onto my finger and pledged his love to me.
After he left to meet his fellow geologists in Utah, I dreamed of a June wedding a year later—time enough to save money and plan the details. My parents could not afford to pay for the wedding. I left my hometown to look for work near Jim’s college in Golden, Colorado. I stayed with a friend until I had a job and enough money for rent.
I searched for a place to live and found a small in-law unit at the back of the landlord’s house. At least it was private. My fiancé, though, upped the ante. He wanted the wedding during his semester break. I told him I needed time to plan. His persuasive powers carried the day. He was practical and said, “I’ll have a new job after graduation and I don’t want to move and get married the same month.”
We chose December 23 for our wedding. Young and in love, we didn’t consider that people might have other plans for the Christmas holiday. Each week before we married, Jim stopped by the little house we would soon call home and gave me a greeting card. I loved seeing him, but the cards disappointed me. They were humorous. I wanted the romantic, serious ones that pledged undying love. The words didn’t match the passion we experienced every time we met. I wanted more.
I proceeded to plan our wedding, which was less than four months away, even though I worried that we were missing the romance I wanted. Many weekends I rode the bus from Denver to Pueblo, my hometown, two hours away, to choose my wedding dress, arrange for a photographer, secure my attendants and buy the cloth and patterns for their dresses. I lived paycheck to paycheck and bought less food to save money for the wedding expenses. By the time I bought my gown, I was a size eight, from a twelve. Even though I was hungry at times, my wedding dominated all that I did. A coworker saw how thin I had become and said, “Are you eating?”
I assured him I was.
The night of the rehearsal arrived. I was fine until Jim and his groomsmen teased me, laughed and in general had a good time. Tense and serious, I said, “Knock it off, you have to pay attention.” They laughed, which added to my angst. I wanted a perfect wedding and, therefore, I needed a perfect rehearsal.
During the confusion, one of Jim’s brothers slipped out and came back with hamburgers for everyone. It suddenly dawned on me. My fiancé hadn’t planned a rehearsal dinner. Some people had driven two hours to get there and were returning home that night. They would come again the next evening for the wedding. My future husband hadn’t read the bride magazines, and I later learned that he didn’t know what his responsibilities were, except for choosing the groomsmen and arranging for the honeymoon.
Calm overtook me by the next morning. I rested in the afternoon and anticipated what it would feel like to have Jim make love to me that night.
Incorporating the beautiful colors of Christmas for my wedding, my attendants wore empire waist dresses, which matched the style of my white wedding dress. Their bodices were deep pink satin and the long flowing velvet skirts were deep rose. Fragrant with evergreen sprays, the floral baskets held a mix of carnations the color of the bridesmaids dresses. The containers sat on pedestals next to the white arch under which we were married. Everything went well during the ceremony until the moment we faced each other and listened to our vocalist sing “More.” As the song filled the church sanctuary, I felt Jim sway—was he about to faint? I held his hands tight and pulled him closer to me. “Don’t faint,” I whispered. He unlocked his knees and the moment passed. Relieved, I turned my attention back to the ceremony. We said the vows we had memorized and waited for the final sentence, “You may kiss the bride.” And now, to the honeymoon, the moment I’d longed for these past few months.
We drove to Colorado Springs for our first night, fooling the guests who had decorated Jim’s ’58 Chevrolet with cans that dangled and rattled and the words “Just Married” written in shaving cream on the rear window. We took his parents’ car instead for
our trip to explore the snow-covered Colorado Rockies. Yes, I did overcome my wedding night jitters, all doubts fled. But another problem soon troubled me. All the time we’d been planning this wedding, it never occurred to me to plan something for Christmas. I’d been so focused on dresses and flowers and vows. How would we celebrate our first holiday in a sterile motel? I turned to Jim that morning and admitted my mistake.
He looked at me and smiled. “I’ll be right back,” he said, closing the door to our room behind him. Another funny greeting card, I guessed, watching him from the window as he headed to the car. The romantic atmosphere of our wedding ceremony seemed to have faded quickly.
I guessed wrong. Jim opened the door to the room and dragged in a four-foot-tall, undecorated Christmas tree. “Merry Christmas. I put this in the trunk and thought we’d take this along with us on our trip. That way we can put it in our room every night.” My husband. He was a romantic, after all. Who needed sentimental cards when the man I married could surprise me with a special gift? And after forty-six years together, he surprises me still.
ENCHILADAS, HOLD THE BEER
PAM WALTERS
Holidays are a time for nostalgia, merriment and good cheer. We clink glasses and remember the past. We salute the present. And we toast each other for happiness and good fortune in the new year. But here’s a sobering thought. How many people are merely putting on a party face? While most folks are wishing for lavish presents under the tree, some people are simply wishing for a way out of their emotional pain. To many people, a certain kind of personal freedom would be the most loving gift they could give to themselves.
By the time I was eighteen, I was drinking excessively. It started innocently enough in high school, yet I already knew that drinking meant more to me than it did to my friends as we snuck booze from our parents’ liquor cabinets and shared it in the back of someone’s car. I behaved differently than they did when it came to liquor, and I knew that my friends thought I was beginning to have a problem as well. I could tell by the looks they gave each other when I wanted to keep drinking after everyone else had stopped. As the years went by, my dependence on alcohol increased, and by the time I was forty, alcohol wasn’t just important to me, it was the only thing that mattered. I was head over heels in love, having a long-term romance with alcohol.
A Kiss Under the Mistletoe Page 8