The Christmas Elephant

I love Christmas. I love picking out a tree, pulling the ornaments out of the boxes, hanging up a wreath, putting lights on the house, wrapping packages, getting together with family and friends.

It’s always been the holiday in the family. Every year, going back to the early 70s, my mother had a huge Christmas Eve party – kids running around, old neighbors dropping in, lots of wine and cheese, many different cookies, a five pound bag of pistachios. Eddie, the Joyce scholar from down the street, bangs out Christmas carols on the piano and everyone sings, gathering steam for a blockbuster belting of O Holy Night. Stragglers hung around until the wee hours, drinking scotch and telling jokes, until finally stumbling home, leaving us to clean house so as not to awaken on Christmas morn to too many half empty glasses and scrunched up cocktail napkins.

And my mother did Christmas right. Everything had a place – the Christmas tree always in the same corner, a garland over the living room fireplace, another over the hall mirror. Presents – perfectly wrapped in a palette of green, red, silver, white, gold – spilled across the room. My mother made appliquéd, embroidered, felt stockings for everyone – first for the core five, then with additions for cats and spouses and grandchildren and the siblings-by-temperament who’ve joined the family, like David, who was clearly our brother in another life. There are so many stockings now that they have to hang doubled up on the hooks along the mantel. She has enough ornaments for an enormous tree, almost all of them old and glass and fragile, but some of the plain little gold balls ended up on a permanently lit and decorated tree, an artificial tree that spends 11 months in a box in the attic, awaiting its turn in the dining room window.

This year, that little tree is just about the only sign of Christmas at my mother’s house. Oh, there’s a garland around the front door, and one over the hall mirror, and a forest of tiny trees on the mantelpiece, but there’s no big tree, because my mother’s living out her days in the living room.

I’m so at odds. It’s always been that we go to her house for Christmas, to be there for Christmas Eve, and the Christmas morning present orgy, and a big Christmas dinner at the end of the day. And then, we disperse, on the 26th or 27th or so, to spend time with other parts of the family. I’ve never woken up in my own house on Christmas Day. It’s not that I don’t want to – it’s just that it’s never been that way. It’s been Christmas at my mother’s house. Period.

We’re still working out when we can get together with my siblings and their spouses and Mir’s cousins. It’ll probably happen a day or three before Christmas, and then everyone but my brother and his wife will stay with my mother through a quiet Christmas, unlike any other. And then he’ll leave and my sister and I will return, to care for our mother while her aides have some off time.

On Christmas Eve, Mir will go to sleep in her own bed, and Santa will come down our chimney and tuck presents under the tree and eat cookies and milk, and we’ll work on inventing our own Christmas traditions, but still, a part of me is dreading Christmas a little.

Because there’s an elephant in the room where the tree should be.