Like most kids who grew up in the U.S. with families who celebrated Christmas, I adored the holidays when I was young. Christmas, especially, felt absolutely wondrous and magical to me. I loved everything about it – the carols, the hustle and bustle of shopping, the cheesy Christmas movies and TV specials, the lights, Santa, and of course the presents. I couldn’t wait to come flying down the stairs of my Grandparents’ house at the crack of dawn (or earlier, if my parents would have let me) to fix my eyes on the bounty of packages beneath the tree, and the stockings hung on the fireplace, overflowing with treats.
The holiday seemed almost impossible to me. That adults would string up lights on their homes, drag a tree in from the wild (or from the nearest Christmas tree lot), only to string lights on it as well and decorate it, that they would go knocking on strangers’ doors to serenade them with carols (yes, we actually did this, I grew up in New England and this was a really real thing), it all seemed so unreal.
I remember one year when I was five or six, my parents and I took a little train through a wonderland of decorations and lights. My father can be a bit of a ham sometimes, and on this night, he decided to stand up in the front of the train, and get one side of the train to “Oooo,” and the other side to “Ahhh,” so soon the whole train was Oooo-ing and Ahhhh-ing at his command. It was whimsical. It was totally absurd. And I loved every second of it.
I was weirdly, especially transfixed by the warmth, the coziness. There was just a feeling around Christmas of being completely enveloped by…comfort and joy. We had a Muppets advent calendar that we reused every year that featured Kermit’s nephew Robin nestled all snug in his chair in front of a fireplace. I would just stare at it, feeling the glow and cheer of that warm room, and imagine myself in it.
Christmas was completely enthralling.
When I was 14, I “lost my faith,” but that didn’t much matter because Christmas was about something different to me, even when I celebrated it as a “believer.” It was about joy, coziness, magic, family.
Then, when I was 25, my family fell apart spectacularly.
My parents divorced, which was particularly agonizing for me because years earlier, my mother had told me that my father, by marrying her so young (they were 19), and I, as her first born, had ruined her life. She told me she would leave when the moment was right.
That moment had arrived. And it was difficult watching my mother follow through on a promise she had made based partially on the notion that I had ruined her life.
It was then that I began to dread the holidays. I wanted to distance myself as much as I could from my mother, but this was impossible at family gatherings. Instead of looking forward to the carols, the lights, the merriment, I would count the seconds until the entire debacle would be over. And then I would get blatto, blackout drunk on New Year’s Eve to celebrate the damn holiday’s demise for that year.
Fuck Christmas. Fuck warmth. Fuck coziness. Fuck red and green. Bring on the pastels of spring, for the love of all things good, please!
For years, starting in August, I would gripe about the impending doom. I put a moratorium on ANY and ALL things Christmas. There would be no decorations. No tree. And no God damned carols. Not in my house.
I’d put my head down and just try to plow through until blessed January 1. Then, and only then, would I rejoice.
Then one year it dawned on me that the holiday season lasts from October 31 through January 1. Two whole months. One sixth of the year.
Did I really want to be agonizingly miserable for one-sixth of the year EVERY YEAR? Did I really want to do this to myself?
That year, I played a few carols one evening when my then-boyfriend was out and I was all alone in our apartment. I sang along a bit and it felt…ok. Nostalgia mixed with sadness mixed with rage. I could sit with that.
Then the Hallelujah Chorus by Handel played. I was instantly transported to the joy and magic I felt around Christmas as a child. I sat alone in my living-room and cried. Then I felt the sudden need to go to church.
Not because feelings of “belief” were flooding me, this isn’t a story of rekindled faith, at least, not in that way. It was because I felt joy in something I had lost. The familiarity was comforting.
I grew up singing in an Episcopalian choir. Around the Christmas holiday we would perform “Lessons in Carols” at our church, and “Christmas Pops” at the Center for the Arts.
After the last “Hallelujah,” rang out from our stereo, I grabbed my jacket and ran out the door to the church around the corner.
I was going to sit in this church! And think about the magic of Christmas! It was going to be beautiful! Awe-inspiring! It was going to connect me to my childhood innocent sense of wonder!
But the church doors were locked. I walked around and tried several different entrances. All locked.
Through a crack between the main doors, I could peer inside. There was not a service in session, but candles were lit, burning peacefully, warmly. Cozily.
I stared for a few minutes and then made my way back to my apartment.
“I want a Christmas tree,” I told my boyfriend when he got home.
“Really?”
“Yeah. Really. And I want to listen to carols. I want to love this fucking holiday again.”
So we got a tree. We decorated it. And through December, it was all Christmas carols – ALL. THE. TIME.
I felt a little like Chevy Chase at the end of “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” when he is trying to keep his shit together and salvage their nightmare of a Christmas, and says, “We’re going to have the hap hap happiest Christmas since Bing Crosby tap-danced with Danny fucking Kaye! And when Santa squeezes his fat white ass down that chimney tonight, he's gonna find the jolliest bunch of assholes this side of the nuthouse!”
But wouldn’t you know it? I loved Christmas that year. I guess you could say my heart grew three sizes. And all the Whos down in Whoville…oh wait. That’s another Christmas story.
Now, each year around Christmas, I am indeed a jolly asshole. I look forward to the holiday each year instead of dreading it. I start quoting Christmas movies and singing snippets of carols in November (and my husband chides me and yells, “Not til after Thanksgiving!”).
Today, to me the holiday is about redemption, humanity, magic. The fact that adults (and now I am one of them!) string up lights on their houses, sing awful, cheesy Christmas carols, watch movies with plots that suggest Santa might just be real, all of this is wondrous.
Each year I cry when George C. Scott as Scrooge buys a goose for Bob Cratchit, when Kevin’s mom makes it home just in time for Christmas morning, when Thurman gives Bad Santa a blood-stained wooden pickle.
I love these stories of redemption. I love the notion that there is good in all of us, and that Christmas, the darkest time of the year in the Northern hemisphere, is a time to meditate on that, to believe that, even if it seems impossible throughout the rest of the year.
I love that I was able to reclaim this holiday. That I FORCED myself through the power of thought to love a thing that had caused me pain. It feels like a small miracle that I can love this holiday again.
And isn’t that what Christmas is all about - miracles, small and large?
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