Fixing Christmas

My first Christmas without my mother is a reminder of my first Christmas without. For all my earliest years, my mother made Christmas magical. But, by the time I turned 10, she also took it away.

Growing up in the 1970s, there were five of us in a small house in rural North Carolina – Mama, Diddy (as we called our dad), my older brother and sister, and me. We didn’t have much, but we had a console TV with a record player on top. For us kids, that’s all we needed.

Whether by choice or necessity, Mama oversaw everything Christmas: the tree, presents, putting greeting cards on a string to display, and giving the season its sparkle. This meant large colorful lights and drowning the tree in silver tinsel.

Diddy was a farmer. He worked from sunup to sundown. I don’t have a lot of memories of him at Christmas, but my favorite is the year he watched the Santa tracker with me. The local TV weatherman, Frank Deal – a lanky fellow with curly red hair – would chart Santa’s journey from the North Pole all the way to our little town, advising us when it was time to go to bed. As Santa grew closer, Diddy said, “Close your eyes or Santy won’t come.” I squeezed my eyes shut. I wanted Santa to see from waaay up there that I was asleep!

By 3 a.m. I couldn’t contain myself. I’d bound out of my room, rip open my presents, and play with everything at least once. Then I would pass out in the wrapping paper landfill. All before sunrise.

In 1981 when I was nine, Diddy moved out. We went from struggling to being among the “dirt poor” of Mama’s own youth. The thermostat went off and kerosene heaters went on, ones that seemed like they might set the house on fire at any moment, and left my nostrils filled with soot. In time, tarps and duct tape were all that seemed to hold the house together.

That first Christmas without my father, we couldn’t afford a tree, so I made one out of construction paper and taped it to the wall in our den. On Christmas morning, my sister and I emerged from our cramped bedroom to find one gift for each of us sitting on a recliner – identical jewelry organizers, a curious choice given that we had no jewelry. My brother received a statue of a bald eagle. None of the items were wrapped. There was no frenzy of tearing paper off. No exhaustion from playing with the toys we’d received. Mama slept in and we just went back to our rooms. I think we had known deep down this Christmas would be different; the money stress had been hard to miss. But we’d grown up with tales of Christmas miracles – surely one would come our way. The silence of tiptoeing around our sleeping mother and witnessing the gray stillness on that December morning sent us each into our own space to cry. We were hurt. We grieved – the best of our childhood was likely over.

Mama grew bitter. The money problems worsened. The following year, we stopped celebrating Christmas altogether. As a symptom of our decline, instead of watching holiday specials, Mama rented movies like The Town That Dreaded Sundown. I stopped dreaming of presents and started wishing for safe rooms.

The message I received was, once we were broke, we were broken.

As my siblings and I grew up and got jobs, we tried to “fix” the Christmas of our past with Christmas presents, pun intended. My brother worked and sacrificed to buy us our first VCR – at a time when it cost almost a thousand dollars. My sister would save all year, putting cash into a little white envelope to buy everything on our Christmas lists. Once I was making my own money, I tried to do every Christmas-y thing I could: host dinners, see all the light displays, send dozens of Christmas cards, go to every holiday concert, movie, and stage show (looking at you, A Very Die Hard Christmas), and, of course, go overboard with gifts – so many gifts for my friends, my family, for strangers in need! We thought if we had more of what we didn’t have as kids, it would make the holiday feel right again.

It never did.

My sister and mother died just months apart earlier this year. The double losses put me in a deeply reflective state on the meaning of things. Each time I went into a store, I was hit with a pang of loss – this year I wouldn’t be buying cards or gifts for either of them. It was in Staples, of all places, where I finally broke. Mama had loved taking me to get school supplies when I was young. We’d walk the aisles and she’d help me pick out paper, pens, and Trapper Keepers. She never rushed me. Instead, she’d tell me stories of what it was like when she was a kid – how she couldn’t afford to buy a copy of her class photo (back when they’d just take one picture of the entire room of students), so she’d sneak and take one of the unpurchased ones out of the trash. She’d had so little in her own childhood that she delighted in giving me more in mine. For the earliest years of my life, she’d been trying to fix what she’d missed out on, too. In that moment, next to stacks of notebooks I didn’t need but always seemed to buy, I sobbed. Mama and me – we weren’t so different. And all I wanted to do was tell her. I get it, Mama. I get it.

But I couldn’t tell her. I would never be able to tell her anything again.

In my grief, I finally realized what we lost so long ago. It wasn’t the Christmas stuff. It was the Christmas spirit. We had mistaken the garland and gifts for what mattered most. Hope.

Mama must have thought that when she couldn’t give us more than she’d had, there was no point in trying. I wish I’d known then what I know now: Mama, it wasn’t the presents that made us happy. It was you.

I have something now I didn’t have before: perspective. The best part of Christmas wasn’t the toys – my favorite thing I ever received was a complete set of Charlie’s Angels dolls, yet I soon destroyed them and buried Kelly in the backyard. (Sorry, Jaclyn Smith. Nothing personal.)

The magic was in watching Mama be happy. Creating memories I’d savor all these years later.

In the days leading up to Christmas, back when Diddy still lived with us, I’d eavesdrop as Mama took the receiver from the wall phone and its long cord and hid herself in the next room to order Barbies from the Sears catalogue. She would come home from stores like Kmart and our local chain, Roses, with loud, crinkly bags stuffed with treasures unknown. Sometimes she would surprise me early with a toy. “Give Mama sugar,” she would say and gesture for me to kiss her on the cheek.

Once the tree was decorated, Mama would take us outside. She wanted to see how it looked through the window to neighbors and passersby. And on the rare occasion when it snowed, she’d beckon us out into the cold to share in her sense of wonder. When I moved to Southern California in 1998, she would keep snowballs in the freezer for me to come home to.

As the years went on, my mother became mercurial. Difficult. Even downright mean. On the one hand, she might tell me, “You don’t have the good sense God gave a billy goat.” On the other, she would Fed Ex me Krispy Kreme donuts when I moved to a state that didn’t yet have them. She was capable of flying into a rage and breaking gifts we’d given her, but then she would have a change of heart and try to make a joyful shopping trip out of going to Wal-Mart to get “a better one.”

Eventually, I pulled away. I had to stop engaging with the negativity – I got a separate phone line just for her calls. It was my “scary phone” that off-loaded her rants into the voicemail ether. As a good Southerner, I never stopped loving my Mama, even if I didn’t always like her.

Our family home rotted and fell apart, and so did Mama. The house and her own cognitive decline put her at risk, so she was forced into a nursing home by the state. After suffering from dementia, she died in June. At her funeral, my aunts, uncles, and I joked that the cracks of thunder outside were “Mama having the last word.”

Before she passed, I visited her in the memory care facility. Her eyes were cloudy with age and confusion. Gone was her rage. In its place was the Mama of my youth. A tiny wisp of a woman with a beautiful head of hair. Perfectly curled. She didn’t recognize me. But she lit up like a child at the sight of my two Pomeranians. She held them as if they were her own. She kissed on their heads just as she’d done to me as a child.

It was as if I was being granted an early Christmas wish – a little taste of the miraculous. Mama was the nicest she’d been since I was young, watching her scoop up snow in her mitten-covered hands.

At one point she looked at me and said, “You seem like a sweet girl. Your mama must have done a good job raising you.”

Yes, Mama. You did.