I hear you. So much of what Christmas means to me is the memories of my family, so much of which altered forever after my mother died. Our little broken family limped along that first December, just going through the motions, just trying to hold on, to make a “nice Christmas” for my brother, to not see my father putting up the tree in tears. Nothing was ever the same.
My grandmother, never the most motherly of women, tried to fill in the spaces left by my mother’s passing. She was wonderful for me to have in my life when I was younger, but by this time I was a teenager and my brother was almost. She never really “got” my brother. He was his own person even as a twelve year old; he marched to a drummer only he could hear, and he shut out all others—an easy task for him, as he was pretty much deaf in one ear and chose to sleep on his good ear, closing out the world as he chose.
Thus we stumbled around at holidays, making family meals and giving presents, continuing to hang the Christmas cards on the living room door on ribbons, just as my mother had done. The visits to and from relatives fell off as so many of those occasions had been arranged by my mother, and my father just didn’t follow through most of them. Maybe seeing these people was just too painful without her at his side.
The warmth and good cheer remembered—can’t get that back. No big family gatherings for me—as I said, broken family did a number on me. My brother too, I think – I was surprised when he did finally have kids (wife #3) –he’d always said he didn’t want to put kids through what we’d been through (losing a parent.)
Well, he did have kids—a boy, named Rod (after my father) Hunter, and a girl, Callie. And he left them all too early, at the same age that my father left us, by the same means. I never had children, by choice, and I am my own family now, just me, with the memories that I keep that only I remember.
When I was married, I was an adjunct to my husband’s family—an insular New England family in which just about everyone grew up in the same town, went to the same school, and seldom left the state. Dinnertime conversation tended to be about who had died, or been in the hospital or arrested. I knew none of these people. My mother-in-law never really “got” me; my father-in-law, “Pa” as he was known, did, but it was a secret knowing between the two of us. We humored the others.
They never asked about my family or my upbringing, schooling, or career.
No one was unkind, in fact my sister-in-law was, despite our very different life choices, a kindred spirit in many ways, but with that one exception, I never felt a part of their world. I did embrace the great State of Maine and to this day long to go back to the “camp”, as people from Maine call their waterside cottages, to sit on the big rock and gaze across the bay at BlueHill, breathe the salt air and watch the seals head upriver.
Most of these people are gone now. The family-by-marriage, my nuclear family, only memories held in my mind. My father throwing handsful of tinsel at the tree—my mother stopping him, laughing, pulling it all off, starting over. My brother with his Roy Rogers six-guns, me with my Sweet Sue walking doll,
our dog “Louie” sitting under the tree, my Uncle Tom and Aunt Kay, themselves childless, bringers of the best presents.
So I write this on the night of the Winter Solstice—not quite Christmas, but in an ancient way, a more meaningful marking of the season. Perhaps this was because, on the longest night of the year, we might, for just a few minutes, take the time to reflect on the time of the year, the swing of our planet in the sky, the meaning of the season–not in a religious way, but in the response of our buried primitive selves to the long night, the crisp air, the dark skies. So I wish you not Merry Christmas, but Happy Solstice.