Is This the Right Way to Do Christmas?
On trying too hard.
The biggest closet in my house is the Christmas closet.
Tucked under the basement stairs, it’s packed halfway to the ceiling with cardboard boxes and plastic storage tubs filled with ornaments, wreaths, lights, garlands, bells, and snarls of the small wires that attach things to artificial boughs. It contains enough holiday gear to decorate a village. (And we have one: quaint faux-Victorian dwellings snaked together with untrustworthy electrical cords).
How much Christmas stuff can one family accumulate over four decades? I can’t give you an answer. My husband had a woodworker’s gift for dovetailing things into compact shelving arrangements. When he died twenty months ago, he took those schemas with him. After last Christmas, I shoved everything back in there. I could close the door. That was enough.
It’s a Sunday in early December. Turkey-and-wild rice soup is simmering on the stove. I’ve boiled the Thanksgiving turkey carcass to a rich broth, added the leftover meat and root vegetables, and am now adjusting the seasoning. Course-correcting, tacking between thyme and herbes de Provence, I’m in my warm, salty element.
By the time they — my son, daughter, and daughter-in-law — sit down for dinner, they’ve set up the tree and unpacked four bins. The ornaments are triaged. The first group: no arguments, everything goes on the tree. Group Two: random, if there’s space. Group Three: If my fourth-grade picture shows up again this year, your tires get slashed.
“Mom. This soup is amazing,” my daughter says.
Silence. I fiddle with my napkin.
“It’s terrific,” my son adds.
I look up and smile. They’re right, and I know I should acknowledge their praise. I have a gift for cooking, as I do for writing and many other things. I’m thinking of the lost years, when my husband— their dad — carried almost all of the household weight.
“Really, really good.” My daughter-in-law makes an incredible Pavlova.
At that moment, I can only think of an excursion to the Goodwill outlet store where clothes are sold by the pound. It’s where I bought the cashmere sweater I’m wearing. A tiny splash on the cuff, probably from when I filled the bowls.
But I was so good at it. The silk blouses. Handbags: Fendi, Prada, Louis Vuitton. Glorious tissue-thin scarves. Beaded dresses. Suits. A Burberry raincoat. Five red blazers.
“I’m glad you’re enjoying it,” I said.
Five.
Most of these garments are gone now, given away through Buy Nothing, an organization I’ve renounced. The gift economy works both ways. Too much temptation. And they use “gift” as a verb.
I clear the dishes. My son pulls up a Spotify playlist, “Punk Christmas.” It’s loud, generic, grating. Even Mannheim Steamroller would be better. What I want to hear is “A Very Special Christmas,” from 1997. But I still can’t figure out how to access the music library my husband downloaded. Even if I could locate the CD, there’s no player downstairs and no guarantee it will work in the Bose next to our — I mean, my — bed.
“ ‘I’ll Have a Blue Christmas Without You.’ Who sang that?”
“Don’t remember, Mom.” My son fastens a pewter snowflake to a branch, as firmly as if affixing it with a screwdriver. Dad bought that for me on our honeymoon, I don’t say. I’ve probably said it dozens of times.
“You’ll have to take those off, you know.” It’s important, but not critical. Not like in the Fraser fir days, when the tree got hauled to the alley for pickup and I’d run out in the snow to comb through it one last time. Still, what’s the point of a permanently decorated tree?
My daughter-in-law stands back. She’s learned from previous years that decorating this tree is a two-person operation.When she hands her husband an ornament, he grabs it as if it were the baton in a relay race, and rushes to hang it. When his back’s turned, my daughter rearranges. She’s swift, with a designer’s eye. She yanks off the pewter snowflake and tucks it under the tree skirt.
“ ‘Oy to the World?’ ”
“No Doubt,” they respond in unison.
It’s one of my favorites. Oy to the punks, oy to the skins, oy to the world and everybody wins. Or is it Oi? Of course it is. However spelled, the song is so embedded in Christmas that I know it will be — and I hate the word — tonight’s earworm.
Whatnot, I think, groping for words to push that one aside. Mistletoe. Cardamom.
“Here’s the manger.”
My daughter pulls out the rustic wooden structure that her dad cobbled out of scraps from the dollhouse he built for her third or maybe fifth birthday. Or was it for the corresponding Christmas?
“Where are the figurines?”
While they rummage for the Holy Family and their entourage, I head to the kitchen to make hot chocolate. Fortunately, I have milk. Sadly, the only chocolate I have is ersatz: Swiss Miss. I start the teakettle and shake one packet of gray powder into each of four mugs. Cobalt blue, the color that melts my heart. Because I use them only for holidays, I have the original eight, all in pristine condition after more than forty years.
As I carry the mugs to the table, I hear laughter, Adults, giggling like kindergartners.
“We improvised,” my daughter says.
The tableau is their childhood, recreated with ornaments. The Three Wise Bears. Baby Paddington in a sleigh, flanked by Bernard and Bianca from The Rescuers. Hello Kitty, angel on high, pink bow at the rooftop. Canoe and stuffed reindeer, more suited than camels to our climate. Baseball. Toy horse. Santa Lucia in her long white gown and crown of candles, carrying a tray full of sweets.
My eyes sting. I open the liquor cabinet.
“Amaretto?” I say. Four children, now grown beyond legal age, add alcohol to our pale, pretend-chocolate drinks.
“Skol,” we say, clinking my favorite mugs, the ones that forty years ago, for reasons lost to me, I decided to use only for holidays.
“To Dad,” I say. They nod and murmur. To Dad.
Amaretto.
After they leave, I go into the kitchen to wash dishes. I pull open a drawer to grab a towel. A nutcracker scowls back. The largest of our nineteen nutcrackers, he’s the size of a rolling pin. In another drawer, nestled among the flatware, I find a spoon-sized soldier. Hanging from cabinet knobs, three more. Next to the salt shaker, like one of those outsized pepper grinders waiters intimidate you with. Tucked into a teacup. Lying flat in the wine cooler, next to a bottle of pinot gris. Nutcrackers, the indispensable kitchen utensils.
I text my daughter a string of emojis: laughter, hugs, hearts, a pine tree, stars. She responds with those hearts that leap upward on the screen like soap bubbles or balloons. I find another one, a chimney sweep, in the refrigerator behind a carton of milk.
Nineteen nutcrackers. What was I thinking?
My husband and I came from radically different Christmases. Mine was a Christmas of stockings my mother made for me and my three brothers out of red and white felt, sawtoothed around the edges with pinking shears. She stitched our names onto them so that Santa wouldn’t get confused, even though Santa never came to our house. Before Christmas, four stockings were tacked to the front door. After Christmas, they were taken down.
My husband’s Christmas was a wall of presents, with more under the tree. When you come from an empty-stocking Christmas and marry someone from a wall-of-presents Christmas, it’s as if a fully-loaded sleigh has crashed through the door of the very small house you grew up in. The empty stocking with my name stitched on it was bottomless.
I could argue that getting caught up in the holiday obsession of the eighties and nineties, a time of excess and Martha Stewart, drove my urge to give my family a perfect Christmas, at any cost. Or that I grabbed the low-hanging fruit of my Scandinavian ancestry. Both statements are true. But they’re inadequate to convey the intensity of my longing.
My dad’s parents came from Norway to a desolate part of western South Dakota. They raised six children, ranched sheep and cattle, and spent long winter nights doing what Scandinavians do best: thrive in dark, cold places.
My mother’s family, Swedish immigrants, made a similar life in northern Minnesota. Their poverty was greater, but my grandmother did everything she could with flour sacks and embroidery thread. Christmas had special bread, rice pudding, and homemade presents.
My parents brought attenuated sets of Old World traditions from their difficult pasts. Age and therapy have brought me understanding and forgiveness.
Before these temperate winds blew in, however, there was a closet filled with hundreds of ornaments, and Santa Lucia with her breakfast tray.
Santa Lucia was a young woman martyred in the fourth century for — you guessed it — protecting her virginity from a rapacious suitor. She was also guarding her dowry, secretly spending it on bread for Christians hiding in the Roman catacombs. To light her path, she wore a crown of candles. The suitor snitched to the authorities. I’ll skip the gruesome part except to say that her eyes miraculously reappeared in her face before she was given a Christian burial.
Her saint’s day, December 13th, marked the solstice in the Julian calendar that predated our modern one. This date is celebrated throughout Scandinavia by dressing up young girls — eldest daughters, typically — in long white gowns with red sashes. Crowns of candles adorn their heads. They get up early and serve hot saffron buns to their families.
I had a daughter.
Enough said.
The gown was a nightgown, white, sashed with a red satin ribbon. I bought the crown at Ingebretsens on Lake Street, where the line to buy lefse, blood sausage, lingonberries and lutefisk stretches around the block on the Saturday before Christmas, if you’re fool enough to wait that long. (I am, and I have. Many times).
The candles were battery operated. The crown, plastic, adjusted like a watch band to fit all head sizes except for my daughter’s. She was too young — she’d just turned ten — to be roped into this deranged performative fantasy of her mom’s. Instead of saffron buns, I made Pillsbury cinnamon rolls from one of those cardboard tubes you knock against the counter to open.
In TV commercials, the Pillsbury Doughboy springs out, bright-eyed and cheerful. But not that morning.
I looked over at my unhappy daughter. At my son, his eyes darting from one parent to another. At my husband, thinking — God, what must he be thinking.
“Let’s get rid of that crown,” I said.
It didn’t end there.
Glass baubles hand-painted on the inside; Smithsonian carousel animals; tiny harps and violins, lighthouses from many shores —
But it did end. Nineteen nutcrackers, and not one more.
Tonight is the winter solstice. My cat, Mini, sleeps on the oak window seat that my husband built over the radiator in the dining room.
I sit in a chair nearby, stroking her back. When it’s time for her dinner, I carry her to her dish and sit watch against the predators cats fear when they reach the impossible age of twenty-two.
What I remember about those rolls is this:
You have to pay attention. There’s a fine line between doughy and done. They come with a packet that you drizzle over them when they come out of the oven.
They weren’t burned, and there was icing on top.
Thank you, dear readers, for making 2024 the brightest and most joyful of my life. Special thanks to
and the brilliant Conscious Writers Collective for their inspiration and assistance.May your holidays be blessed, and may the New Year bring peace.
Mary xo
If you like what you’re reading, please hit the heart button, comment, or restack on Notes. Better yet, share with a friend. These are ways you can help in bringing my writing to the world. Sharing builds community.
Writer, interrupted is a Substack Featured Publication with nearly 3,000 subscribers. If you find value in my work, and have the means to do so, I hope you will consider a paid subscription. Now through December 31, annual subscriptions are 25% off my current annual rate of $30. Because the year is ending, but Writer, interrupted is not. My rates will go up in January, as I bring in some great new features. Subscribe now to lock in this price.
All subscribers have access to my regular posts and archives. As a thank-you gift for paid subscribers, I will send out a bonus short post — sweet. funny, serious, surprising — twice a month. And if you join as an Angel, you will get everything offered with a paid subscription, plus an original poem hand-written for you, on the subject of gratitude. Because I am grateful to all of you, and for all that this year has brought.
The right way to do Christmas is in any way you can manage.
Indeed it’s the right way because it’s your way. Allowing an abundance of wiggle room and grace to switch things up if we feel called to. I have a dear friend who orders pizza 🍕 and watches movies all day snuggled under her cozy comforters. I say, “Way to Go!” She’s one very happy camper! Lovely read, thank you, Mary. ❤️