The End of Christmas

My mother was the mayor of Christmas. She got paid to decorate other people’s homes and businesses because she was a master at it—an artist with an eye for all that glitters and true love for the season. She made handmade wreaths and yards of pine swag, complete with gorgeous handmade bows. Her hands stayed swollen and bloody for a good month after from all the toxic sap pricked into her fingers. She lit up an entire beach town with Christmas lights that she hung using bamboo poles. No one could do it like her. She wasn’t precious and twee like Martha Stewart. She was bold and Dickensian in the way she brought the holiday to life.

After my parents divorced when I was three, we lived with my grandparents for almost ten years. Even as Mom created a wonderland for others, in my grandparents’ house, it was their Christmas. Their home was filled with big colored lights and plastic mistletoe balls of the 50s. Plus my grandfather, who had violent dementia, and an aunt who was mentally ill and prone to holiday meltdowns. All those years we spent there, Mom bought and hoarded ornaments for a future tree, one that we would put up in our own home when we could finally move out. Our mother used all that decorating money to give us the best Christmas she could, but there was always an air of disappointment. We often got hand-drawn IOUs for things that never materialized. And screaming and yelling and chaos. It wasn’t our home or our tree, and there was always grandiose talk of the Christmas that would materialize when we finally got our own place.

We finally got our own house when I was a sophomore in high school. In those first years, it was magical. Mom put up three giant, fully decorated trees filled with white lights and giant clear, blown glass balls from Germany and wreaths and swag for days. There still wasn’t a ton of Christmas under the tree, but as we got older and got jobs, me and my sisters starting filling in the presents where my mother fell short. But somehow it was never enough, because even though we escaped a childhood home full of dysfunction, we were steeped in generational trauma, making our own unique brand of holiday woe.

Even as adults, my sisters and I always spent Christmas with my mother, diligently buying the plane tickets home with money we didn’t have, using up one full week of the precious two week vacation that is the reality of most working people.

We would arrive home every year, and mom would still be decorating, even deep into the days after Christmas. The decorating was almost like the fourth child, an entity to be competed with for attention, just like my two sisters. Mom would sometimes disappear for most of the day to places unknown, leaving us stranded in a giant drafty house with no heat and no car and only a tiny handful of places within walking distance and return with armloads of smilax to hang over every mantle in the house. So much of her attention went into creating this magical Christmas for us that she often didn’t stop long enough to actually be able to enjoy it.

The first year I didn’t spend Christmas at home, I was 30 years old, and in New Zealand on the first leg of a seven-month, round the world trip. I remember being terrified to tell my mother I wouldn’t be coming home, and for good reason. She was hurt and furious and held a grudge for years over it.

A few years into having my son, I stopped going to her home for Christmas at all. I really wanted him to be able to wake up in his own bed on Christmas morning. I wanted to be able to create my own traditions as a mother. I wanted to recreate Mom’s tree, but add a good amount of suburban normalcy and food and comfort that wasn’t part of our tradition. I wanted my son to have all the magic my mother tried to create for us, but with an added amount of stability.

I know this move hurt my mother tremendously, but at that point, I was trying to break free from what was always built up to be this incredible thing that was always a letdown. Every year having to negotiate what the holiday looked like was expensive and stressful and was never good enough. And I needed to focus that negative energy into positive memories for my son.

When my mother passed—and maybe even before that—I took up the mantel of making Christmas for my sisters. It takes a tremendous amount of work, and I’ve enjoyed it, but it’s a minefield. My sisters… we all love each other, but, like so many other families who’ve survived trauma, that shit reverberates. Even with our best intentions and carloads of presents and food and all the things we never had growing up and genuinely joyful moments and thoughtful gifts, the circling shark of the past eventually breaks through and gobbles us up wholesale.

This year, my son asked us to break the Christmas morning tradition, and instead of going straight to presents, we all went for a swim in the river. Almost nobody liked the idea, yet all of us stuffed in the car laughing, whining, and loud. It was 8 am and not really chilly here in Texas but cold enough, and on Christmas morning, the rest of the masses were either home with family or still in bed. The world was quiet and full of peace. We swam and felt the ice-cold water fill us up with something other than expectations.

It was perfect.

Until it wasn’t.

So for next year, I’m rethinking what Christmas looks like. And that’s terrifying and sad. Letting go sucks, but I have to make room for whatever Christmas my son will make for himself as he grows into adulthood. And then find the sweet spot where my husband and I still fit while still allowing him to make his own traditions.

I have to reimagine a holiday where me and my sisters can feel loved and seen without continuing to cripple each other. To honor the best parts of the past without regretting the present and damning the future. Without hurting each other. Without hating each other.