Christmas is the day that holds all time together.
- Alexander Smith
Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate it. And blessings and tidings of great joy to those of you who do not. If you'll both indulge me for a moment, I'd like to reflect on what Christmas means to me, in both the historical and metaphorical senses. Along the way, I hope that I can share something that brings you a sense of hope and joy, which I think are the true 'reasons for the season'....
I am a Christian both by upbringing and, now as an adult, by choice. Hence, in my youth, mine was a typical Christian Christmas experience: we celebrated the birth of our Savior by being rewarded by Santa Claus. Now, having developed into a bit of an idiosyncratic Christian(-Buddhist-Taoist), my experience of Christmas is, well, anything but typical, I suspect. But I digress....
As a child, Christmas was my favorite day of the year ... and I loved the holiday season, too. It always began with a joyful celebration of Thanksgiving with my father's side of the family, the Bookers (and usually somewhere in or around the family seat in West Medford, Massachusetts). The Bookers were a typical (African-)American family in many respects - for example, most clung tightly to the lower rungs of the middle class in largely well-paying and often union blue collar jobs - and were also in many ways, I came to learn, quite unique: for one thing, they were extraordinarily close and though this proximity usually leads to friction from time to time, there were few if any conflicts and they were unfailingly genuinely loving toward one another.
(By contrast, in my mother's more prosperous, largely white collar side of the family, though they did love each other, there was typically a feud going on - usually between two or three of my great aunts - and my mother had to play the role of peacemaker because she was seemingly the one relative to whom everyone spoke irrespective of whatever calumny was then extant. From them, I learned that the Shivers clan loved each other very much but often couldn't get along. Mostly that made me sad for my relatives who chose to isolate themselves from each other but it also made me appreciate the Bookers that much more.)
After Thanksgiving came my birthday a couple of weeks later and, for the most part, I avoided the dreaded pitfall that affects many of us with December birthdays: the exasperating 'two-fer' gift - you know, where a well-meaning but misguided (or just plain cheap) relative or friend sends you a gift that arrives by your birthday but carries with it an admonition to wait until Christmas to open it. And an understanding of a universal rule about such two-fers was soon visited upon me: the ones that you have to wait for invariably suck ... I mean, are disappointing (read = really, really suck). :-)
About two weeks after my birthday, Christmas would arrive. When I was quite young - say, in the single digit years - we celebrated Christmas Day far more than its Eve. As I aged, Christmas Eve became a more meaningful occasion, including because my beloved mother would cook a new dish and/or cuisine for dinner. She was such a good cook that I can only remember two of these meals: most were so good as to be unremarkable - she was always such a skilled and joyful cook that great meals were the norm - but two were not. The first such misadventure involved Red Snapper that was prepared while my father was off skiing that day. I haven't eaten that particular type of fish since (though at this point in my life I could easily become a pescatarian ... as long as sushi counts, too) :-). The other unfortunate foray was Cioppino - effectively an Italian variation of Bouillabaisse - from a recipe that she'd discovered on a plane flight back from visiting her parents earlier that year. For months she savored the Christmas Eve feast to come - and paid an inordinate share of our household budget to acquire the very best/freshest of its numerous seafood components - for what turned out to be a real dud. Even she thought so, though my father and I had been too kind to say anything as we sat there forcing it down. When she finally suggested that we stop - she was truly a humanitarian - we were all relieved and the colossal failure entered the annals of family lore. Until she died, at Christmas we would rarely fail to share a laugh about the "Great Cioppino Disaster of '78" (though, truthfully, I don't remember the year exactly, nor does this matter...).
Christmas was especially wonderful in my single digits because I was an only child. There are few feelings as purely joyful as entering the living room, observing Santa's beneficence and screaming to yourself that "It's all mine!" (Of course I couldn't express this verbally 'cause my mother raised me better than that.) :-) Though I never wished for a brother and sister - after all, I had one of each in Paul "Bobby" Thompson and Maria Woodruff, who are a cousin and family friend, respectively, who were so close when we were growing up that we still consider each other siblings to this day though we are technically only children - I was especially thankful for not having them when harvesting Santa's bounty. This embarrasses me now - my mother raised me not to covet also - but I can say that it's one of the most indelible experiences of pure joy that I've ever had in life. In fact, I wish that everyone could have that feeling ... and then get even more joy from giving a bounty to loved ones as I do now....
As I grew older and - Spoiler Alert! - discovered that my parents were Santa Claus - which I began to suspect at age 6 when I noticed that Santa's thank you note to me in appreciation for the milk and cookies was written in handwriting that looked quite similar to my Dad's :-) - our celebratory focus shifted to Christmas Eve over its following day. Truth be told, this saddened me - no "It's all mine!" epiphany to come - including because Santa's 'passing' took some of the magic out of how I understood Christmas then. It was just us, my parents and me ... and as a teenager, even though I loved and appreciated my parents, I always wanted something more - truthfully to recapture that youthful 'receiving epiphany' experience. Now that both have long since left me physically, of course, I would give anything to have it be 'just us' again ... which is further proof that youth is wasted on the young and that wisdom comes at a meaningful - and often painful - cost. But I digress....
The rest of the Christmas day ritual stayed the same for the dozen years or so from ages five to seventeen: after reveling in the fruits of having been an especially good boy during the preceding year, and after Christmas brunch with my parents, I would head down to my best friend Michael Coble's house and we would compare our bounties while trying to avoid his older brothers who were generally nice guys but loved messing with us. Many joyful hours were spent playing with our new Hot Wheels sets and/or our electric race car sets and/or the latest board game or, when I was thirteen, my new air hockey table ... or imagining how much fun it would be when the Michigan winter passed so that we could ride our new bikes, etc.
After this purely playful and joyful interlude, it would be time to get cleaned up and go to some relative's house for Christmas dinner with my mother's side of the family, most of whom also lived in Detroit. Truth be told, in my double digit years, my mother hosted a disproportionate share of these joyful gatherings because she was such as good cook, as did my (and her) cousin Paul Thompson (Jr., Bobby's father) and her best friend Vera (Champion) Woodruff. Paul was a gourmand and fantastic chef, so gatherings in his home were about some adventurous twist on a Christmas meal staple and his wife's/my cousin Sandy's bubbly hostessing. No one left the Thompsons without the -itis and a bellyache from laughing. Dinner at Ms. Woodruff's was also a joyful celebration, though it tended to start a little more formally - she favored Handel's Messiah over the Thompsons' non-seasonal predilection for The Fifth Dimension - and usually ended with some fantastic dessert in addition to all of the tasty staples that one would normally expect. Even now, my heart warms as I think of sitting alone in her living room listening to Handel's majestic music (and occasionally some Wagner) as the women of the family cooked in the kitchen and the men told stories 'n' lies - OK, if you prefer, very tall tales - in the den nearby.
The decade before, the hosts of these feasts had been members of the previous generation, and most often the matriarch of the family, my maternal grandmother's eldest sister, Bertha. Aunt Bert was something: warm and loving ... and alternatively scary, especially when she was shooing you away from her fresh-out-of-the-oven rolls. Ah, Aunt Bert's rolls ... they are truly one of the Top 5 food experiences of my life. So much so, in fact, that one of my few regrets in life is that I couldn't duplicate them for my own children as they were growing up. I have tried her ancient recipe a few times, but, honestly, other than my sister Maria, no one in my generation has her baking gift. To conclude this memory, I will simply share an analogy: Aunt Bert's rolls are indelibly recorded in my soul because, I would come to realize, they were my greatest childhood food orgasm. They were so light, so fluffy, so wonderfully tasty in their buttery deliciousness that we would literally squeal with delight as we devoured them and repeatedly and graciously thanked the elderly lady who feigned being scary but would always cook an extra tray of rolls just so she could sit back with a wide smile on her face and watch us kids could go crazy gorging ourselves on Christmas....
And then I went to college, so Christmas meant one of the four or so annual trips home to visit with my parents, who, I noticed, began to age after I moved away as well as to be less celebratory of holidays in general. Christmas Eve was always a nice, quiet dinner with the three of us, though after that Cioppino debacle my mother rarely ventured from the classics for this special meal. We'd exchange gifts, go to bed and then I would awake early like that wide-eyed five-year-old but have no bounty to survey and explore. I decided then that Christmas as an adult was decidedly less fun though I have to admit that my lucrative post-college professional career afforded me an inkling of what was to come: in my 20s, Christmas became an opportunity for me to return the favor and spoil my parents for one day a year. Even though I missed the more robust celebrations of my youth, I can say that watching the delight in their eyes as they opened the handful of gifts that they each received made my long, stressful hours at work totally worth it. In my Top 10 pantheon of the gifts that I've given, being able to buy my mother a fur jacket from Jacobsen's with my very first bonus check ranks up there. She was positively giddy and wore that jacket proudly until her death a decade later.
(It's funny, but after he retired while I was in college, my father began to recede from life and atrophy, so it became a real challenge to figure out a meaningful gift to give him. What I remember most about our last decade - from when I went to college until my late 20s - is that we would sit together and talk. Well, not talk actually - he wasn't that kind of guy, really - but we would listen to the tapes of my college radio show that I had sent him. It always made me chuckle that this was so meaningful to him, so I would sit there and listen as he supplied the play-by-play and color commentary for each show - to which it was clear that he had listened many, many times - as if I weren't familiar with them. Truthfully, it makes me a bit wistful now: my father and I had a difficult relationship for most of my young adult life - truth be told because he was a difficult man, haunted by his demons but too forceful in his approach to me in the attempt to protect me from what he feared would be my downfall, too - but listening to those tapes of my radio show were some of the sweetest moments that we ever shared....)
In my 20s, I didn't come home every year because I got married for the first time. Suffice it to say that this initial union only lasted a couple of years, so there were few happy memories for me, but the Christmas celebrations were one of these. (And also taught me an important lesson: don't ever sit in the front row at a comedy show with your in-laws, unless you want to be compared to the cast of the movie Cocoon. For those of you who are too young to remember this flick, let's just say that the implication was that we were a bunch of old-looking fogies.)
In my 30s and early 40s, I had remarried and had children, so Christmas focused around playing Santa and delighting my children. My favorite memory of this time involves a playhouse that was so large that it had to be brought into our living room in the box and assembled - over the course of more than four challenging hours long past midnight - in which the kids played for about 10 minutes on Christmas morning. A few weeks later, the playhouse had to be disassembled to get it out of the (double doors of our) living room and was then reassembled in their play area in the basement (which only took three hours this time) ... whereupon they literally never played in it for a single minute ever again (and, a half-dozen year later when we were divorcing, the disassembly and donation of the playhouse became a point of contention in the contention-filled proceedings). After that, assembling the go kart was easy, though I remember being thoroughly put out by being informed at 3 or 4 in the morning on Christmas about a drum set that needed to be assembled and about which I concluded that I was purposely kept in the dark until zero hour. Those damn drums led to my first - and only - Christmas all-nighter ... and then the appalling hours of joyful, atonal banging that they provided my children have only salved this wound a bit....
And during this time, Christmas dinners were usually spent with my then-in-laws and the kids, so I remember them less as mini-reunions and more as in-group gatherings that, while joyful, were also familiar in a less than fulfilling way. To put it differently (and perhaps to clarify the point a bit), I began to miss the larger family gatherings of my youth and realized that one of the 'costs' of our mainstream success was that we were geographically separated from our relatives that relegated the whole-family holiday gatherings of old to history....
And so, a decade since, Christmas has ironically become an even more joyful celebration for me, though, truth be told, it's also become a more difficult one. One of the unavoidable outcomes of divorce is 'kid-sharing,' so holidays become split: one year you're with your kids on Christmas Eve and the next on Christmas Day, which inevitably means that one of these occasions is a bit lonely. And if you have a 'Brady Bunch' family as my new wife and I now do, it gets even harder: you have to coordinate these on-off alternations so that you can have all of the kids together for at least one of these celebrations ... which means that inevitably one or the other is cut short as the stepsiblings have to be shuttled off to their other parents. This is certainly a bummer, but it also forces me to savor the few undisturbed moments with our children that we do have.
Christmas will never be a 'double holiday' again - our respective divorces insured that they will be forever split - so this makes it all the more imperative that we celebrate as fully and joyfully as we can in whatever time we have with our children during the holidays. This year is a perfect example: thanks to the never-ending struggle with my ex-, I saw my sons for only four hours on Christmas Eve ... and my youngest stepdaughter was able to share this with us but was then picked up on Christmas Day. Now we have our eldest with us, a twenty-something (understandably) primarily focused on catching up with her longtime friends, but the reality is that, our joint celebration now concluded, she's in and out of the house at her whim. Guess my Beloved and I will have to focus on an impromptu Christmas Date Night....
So what does Christmas mean to me now? From a familial perspective, it means that I have to cherish the few(er) moments that I have with my children on either its Eve or its Day and also that any celebrating I get to do with my extended family happens on other holidays. (At least the Bookers still gather on Thanksgiving....)
It means that I may only get a few hours to revel in the shared memories that are such an important part of the familial bond, whether those be historical ones that we share with a newly expanded 'nuclear' family or new ones that we create through various new traditions like our annual family pajama unveiling. Many years from now, I'm sure that our grandchildren will be regaled with tales of how their father/uncle Max always complained about having to get into costume, so to speak, whether the design was cool - the Elf costume of 2014 (with matching Elf movie hat, of course!) was such a hit that several folks attending the Knicks game were photographed in theirs (sans the hats but nonetheless to Max's grudging approval) - and this year's imitation of the ubiquitous Ugly Christmas Sweater - complete with FaLaLa-themed pants - are proving quite comfy and may even be worn again, out in public and not on Christmas Day.... :-)
It means that Christmas is more internal now because it is abbreviated. Accordingly, I'm forced to savor the memories and carry them with me as I no longer have the luxury of time in which to create them.
And it means that, as I/we age, another stage approaches: for now our children are all single and childless, so we're still hosting Christmas ... but that era approaches when we'll be present-bearing guests more often than hosts, so we have to prepare for this. It'll be a bittersweet joy, I suspect: while we'll be enjoying our revenge as we watch our own children deal with the chaotic wonderment that their children will inevitably produce - especially as we bear sugar-laden gifts that encourage, er, activity :-) - we'll also have to hold back the wistful memories of long ago when they were driving us crazy and we were loving every minute of it.
What Christmas means to me now is simple: it's a few hours and possibly a day to let go, love wastefully and revel in every moment with those whom we treasure most. But I can't help wondering why every day can't be Christmas Day ... or at least be approached in this same expansive way....
Christmas, my child, is love in action.
Every time we love, every time we give,
it's Christmas.
- Dale Evans
