I was twenty-four when my older son was born the week before Christmas. I had no practical household skills. I did not know how to cook, how to order my time, how to clean. And I most definitely did not know how to make a major holiday happen.
My stepmother could pull off a holiday feast, but I joined that household late enough in childhood that I was otherwise occupied while she did the work—ballet, music lessons, movies with friends. We would come home from school one day and POOF! The house was transformed, fully decked out. I learned how to set the table, but I never had a sense of the entire list of duties. And, let’s be real. This preparation business is so much work. I was overwhelmed.
My husband’s family traditions were very different from our family’s non-traditions, and the hubs and I were not able to band together as a team to make the holidays happen. I mean, the boys had a grand old time. Their father made it work for them, and he loved it. We had gifts and food. But I was unhappy, adrift, lonely.
When I finally happened on a New Yorker piece a few years after it was published, I understood. Speaking about her father, Carrie Brownstein writes:
His sphere was borderless, and the sense of nowhere made me feel alone, unbound. I’d often felt that around my relatives, but now I felt it anew and acutely. Like the first time my dad bought Christmas ornaments and I realized that after wanting to celebrate Christmas for so long, it wasn’t about having a tree, it was about having a box in the basement or attic or garage, something that we could return to over and over again, something that said, this is us and this is where we were last year, and this is where we’ll stay, and this is where we’ll pile on memories, over and over again, until there are so many memories that it’s blinding, the brightness of family, the way love and nurturing is like a color you can’t name because it’s so new. And then my father went out and bought cheap ornaments and we took them out of boxes and plastic and I realized it wasn’t Christmas that I wanted. What I wanted was a family.
Carrie Brownstein, No Normal
For many years, I had also felt borderless, and I felt a keen sense of wanting to make a somewhere. I didn’t know how. I didn’t know yet that it was not about menu or the decorations, but opening a wide and welcoming and particular somewhere space, safe and warm, where the piling on of memories could happen, and joyfully. Or, I sensed it, but was overwhelmed by physical clutter and my own indecision.
***
We are divorced now, but my ex and I are still family and celebrate holidays together. Neither of us has relatives nearby. We are it, the whole shebang.
Our family of four became five when we acquired our honorary daughter—when our friend Jane died, she left behind the niece she had raised. And then, immediately, the three children acquired partners, so now we are eight.
My house is an adorable eleven hundred-ish square feet, so it’s a tight squeeze on feast days. This past Thanksgiving, I swapped the living and dining rooms, so we could get everyone around the table without injuries. (See? Work.)
And it was that weekend my younger son reminded me that this was likely the last year he would have both Thanksgiving and Christmas free. Like my dad, he is a pilot. (Unlike my dad, he is not mentally ill or an asshole.) He is currently racking up hours as a flight instructor, and recently signed a provisional contract with an airline. Next year, he will be a very junior airline pilot.
I finally realized that the work, the job description, for creating the space for the holiday memory pile is not static. The job description will change, but we’ll keep the memory-triggers. Like the silver that the children love to hate polishing. And Eli and Becca, at some point in the day, will place the silver on the table and, in hysterics, re-enact the scene from a few years ago:
“This is nice stuff! Fancy.”
“Yeah. Now we can pretend we’re the Obamas!”
And someone will remember Seth’s giant nutcracker that used to have a place at the dining table. He liked to announced himself in a roar, this nutcracker, wooden mouth clapping away: “MY NAME IS ODIN… THE… SECOND.” Which then meant that he had to be reminded to use his inside voice.
Why did it take me so long to understand? The holiday trappings are not important in and of themselves. They are the containers. They hold the memories.
***
I’m listening again to A Gentleman in Moscow. It comforts me. This morning after a mostly sleepless night, I heard the scene where Rostov makes a discovery: “…a voice only half his own reminded him that in the Metropol, there were rooms behind rooms, and doors behind doors….”
Who has not dreamed of finding a hidden space, a room that was there all along, but we did not know? Rostov, on house arrest, finds that actual space, a room behind the back of his closet. A Russian Narnia.
For if a room that exists under the governance, authority, and intent of others seems smaller than it is, then a room that exists in secret can, regardless of its dimensions, seem as vast as one cares to imagine.
In these two years since my health crisis, the whole business of living for me has been about breaking out of constraint—my physical symptoms began not with pain, but with a sense of constriction in my rib cage, a feeling of not being able to move. That same feeling caused me the only panic attack I’ve ever had, one day a year later when I was first laced up in my costume bodice for the Christmas Revels. That bodice constriction was too similar to the constriction I felt with the pulmonary embolism. It’s no accident that on my most recent reading of Gentleman, I strongly identified with Rostov plotting his escape. Healing and plotting. Same-same.
Last week, as soon as the semester was over, I went down with a nasty stomach virus. For three days I was nauseous. For three days wore PJs, sipped tea, let myself wallow in grief over the loss of a particular friend, and watched one episode after another of Chuck.
Yesterday I emerged from my gloom and hit the grocery stores early. The Christmas music, the crowds. Disorienting. I soldiered on. Then I cleaned the house and, under the close supervision of the cat, wrapped gifts.
Ready. This is the first year I feel prepared, the space open and warm. The physical space, yes, but also the space in my broken little heart.
Tomorrow we will pile on the memories. The timing seems kooky, considering I have lost so much memory since the health crisis. But humans are kooky, connected in such mysterious ways to the rhythms of the turning year, the solstice, to the returning light. We continually invent and reinvent our selves, our connections, our family.
However you celebrate this turning of the year, I hope you are able to make or find space, vast and unconstrained and filled with joy.
I will think about this for a long time.