Unintended Holiday Memories

The real magic of Christmas

Starting decades ago, Santa Claus and Christmas trees took center stage as the symbols of holiday magic and there are no signs of the madness stopping anytime soon. Flying reindeer and an enchanted, jolly fat man with a cookie addiction who delivers presents around the world in one evening, at a speed of 45,833,333 km per hour, is unrealistic magic. Yet each year parents willfully make themselves crazy to live up to those moments.  Once children discover the ‘Santa fraud’, the magic leaves, never to return. And once they have children of their own, it’s their job to create the magic, just as every generation of parents did beforehand.

Since the Catholic church assigned December 25 to be the holy day that recognizes the birth of Jesus Christ (hence, Christmas) it’s only fitting to use birthing as a metaphor for holiday magic. The pain associated with labor is harsh, and as it happens, there are two essentials the mother-to-be wants when the moment comes: powerful drugs and a vacant womb. But something happens once the baby is born and placed in her arms. The pain is over and quickly forgotten. Similarly, creating holiday magic is like birth, except the labor pains last a couple of months before the big delivery, Christmas Day.

A lot of strife and pressure comes along with planning Christmas for the Santa believers in the house. I remember when our oldest child was three and Santa was visiting my husband’s military base. Our job was to pick out a gift and wrap it up in advance so Santa could pull it from the sack and call his name. A magical moment in the works. That year we bought our son a large, red fire truck from Kmart. I remember him lighting up with excitement as he opened Santa’s gift. And without missing a beat, he looked at us and said “Look! Santa shops at Kmart too!” It’s no surprise that by the time he was eight, he called us out on our Christmas shenanigans. That Christmas Eve he took us aside and said he knew we were pretending to be Santa.  But since he had a younger sister, I threatened to take his presents back to the store if he squealed one word about the farce to his little sister. He kept his word.

The threat might not exactly be my most proud parenting moment, but I had to think on my feet. Some day he will become a dad and have to recreate the Christmas magic for his children. And that is when he’ll understand real memories are created under pressure, and many are unintended. I am speaking from my own experience as my parents also had a knack for creating Christmas memories that have lasted a lifetime, though none of them are Hallmark moments.

With five siblings, and sixteen years existing between the oldest and youngest, our Christmas experiences were quite different. My two oldest sisters, Chris and Pat, remember Christmases with grandparents and cousins at our house. As the youngest, I remember Christmas morning with just the other two siblings, Linda and Mike. Our grandparents were no longer living, and our cousins never came to the house when I was young.  Though we might have completely different stories to share about our Christmas mornings, the chaos that ensued when it came to erecting the tree remained strikingly similar. It was one of those unintended Christmas memories I have come to appreciate with age.

Picking out the Christmas tree was not a family adventure. In fact, it was my dad’s sole job for the entire season. While some families preferred the long, luscious green needles of a Douglas Fir or the lighter-colored Blue Spruce, my father opted for ‘the Charlie Brown’. I am not sure if it is a real species, but I’m pretty sure that is the non-technical name for the trees with short stubby needles and a mix of bald branches that my dad purchased each year.  

When Dad arrived home with the sickly tree, it signaled the calm before the storm. My father would bring the tree into the house, to our excitement and my mother’s disappointment. He had been gone for five hours and the best he could do was bring home a tree that left a trail of needles from the front door to the corner of the room. Dad inserted the exposed trunk into a metal stand, but not before a few expletives of Christmas cheer were shared as he attempted to keep it straight and steady.

Once the tree was stable, Dad’s job was complete. The anxiety that came with tree decorating was apparently too much for him to bear, so he walked four doors down to Kulage’s Tavern and commiserated with the other dads unfit for the task. My father had an internal clock that told him when it was safe to return home, which was always when the tree ordeal was completely over.

My mom’s job was to turn this Charlie Brown plant into something that resembled a Christmas tree. We knew it was better to stay away from her as she prepared to pull off this feat. The smell of fresh pine that began to linger through the house was short-lived. It was quickly replaced with the stale scent of a Pall Mall Gold cigarette burning in the kitchen ashtray. My mom had her own vice to ward off holiday anxiety.

To understand the difficulty of pulling off operation “Charlie Brown” one must consider the logistics and supplies she worked with each year. We lived in a house with a “shotgun” layout. The first floor had three rooms directly in a row and a person could walk a straight line from the front door to the back of the house, passing through the living room, a bedroom, and ending in the kitchen. The bare tree stood in the living room, logistics took place in the bedroom, and access to Christmas supplies flowed through the kitchen and down to the basement. Standing in any of those rooms without an assigned task meant being in the way and possibly getting yelled at for it.

Mom would retrieve the dusty boxes and lay them out on the bed in the middle room. Worn-out silver garland and a box of large colored light bulbs laid across the mattress, literally giving meaning to the term “bedspread.” The objective was to get the lights on the tree evenly and without knocking it over. It also required someone tall enough to wrap the lights around the branches, from top to bottom. Since my two oldest siblings were married and busy starting their own Christmas magic, Mom was down to a crew of three. Mike was the tallest person, so by default, he got the job.

Making it a little challenging was the fact my brother is autistic. He was misdiagnosed as mentally retarded because that is what they labeled children born with mental abnormalities in the 1950s. But, without any formal training, he taught himself to build radios and bikes. Mike even fixed cars, though he never would get a license to drive one. While he was mechanically gifted, and a perfect selection for untangling Christmas lights and replacing bulbs, he struggled to understand Mom’s abstract directions to evenly string the lights through and around the tree. He also yelled a lot, not because he was mad, but because that was his usual conversational voice.  He responds to questions like a sports announcer calling a world-series ending walk-off homerun—loud and animated. The first phase of Operation Charlie Brown was always the most intense moment of the evening, but between Mike and Mom, the noise was tenfold.

I still remember Mom’s wild wavy peppered frock flowing like a mad scientist and a face wrought with frustration. Some people sing when they hang lights, but my mom groaned a lot. We sat on the edge of our seats waiting for her to have a complete meltdown if one more thing went wrong. But finally, the miracle happened, and the tree was lit and still standing on its own. If she had only yelled “It is alive” it would have captured her Dr. Frankenstein persona perfectly. Instead, the sudden silence signaled phase one had ended and phase two, hanging the ornaments, was about to begin.

My grandmother’s ornate, delicate German ornaments were completely off-limits for us to touch until we were much older. I remember they were fragile, and on occasion, an ornament would slip off those cheap metal tree hooks, fall to the floor, and break. This of course led to more grumbles and a call to the kitchen for one of us to bring her the broom and dustpan.

I am not sure if she used official tree hooks to secure the ornaments. It’s possible they were actually attached to fishing hooks because my dad was an avid fisherman, and my mom was depression-era frugal. She stored the Christmas heirlooms in an old department store clothing box that still had the original tissue wrap. Time and smoke yellowed the paper, which offered no protection to the ornaments that loosely rolled around the box when it was taken to and from storage. Yet, we were not allowed to hang them because we might break them.

My sister and I would occasionally step into the living room to check on their progress, waiting for our turn to wrap the sparkled cotton cloth around the tree base and set up the manger scene. The new silver tinsel was the only fresh holiday décor in mom’s Christmas arsenal.  The tinsel played a vital role in filling in the bare spots. It was the one job reserved for us kids at the end of the evening. When we were done with it, the tree would eventually look like a 1920s flapper girl bearing shiny, horizontal rows of silver strings. It was perfect.

Me and the Charlie Brown Tree.

I would be lying if I said my most cherished memory from my childhood Christmas was opening Santa’s gifts and seeing my favorite toy for the first time. Christmas morning marked the day the magic was over, at least until the following year and eventually when I learned Santa was a fraud. Watching my mom lose her shit each year trying to make a swan out of an ugly duckling was always the day the magic began, and the one that makes me laugh when I feel the angst that comes with the season. It is not a traditional Hallmark moment, but sometimes the best Christmas memories are the ones that parents didn’t intend to create.