Christmas in my memory is almost always cold and white. The sun is low in the sky, and hardly seems to have risen before it sets in a brief, icy, rosy dusk. Daylight dwindles to a mere sparkle. On bitter cold, clear nights, freshly fallen flakes of snow crunch under foot as I walk the streets of Plattsburgh; icy, crisp air sparkles in the long night of late December.
Christmas in my memory always involves my mother, who loved all the holidays, but Christmas most of all. December meant a frenzy of decorating—fresh greenery inside and out, a real tree that she delighted in decorating. All month long I’d come home from school to the rich scent of Christmas cookies baking, or to the rich, spicy aroma of applesauce cake that my mother would make for all neighbors.
Christmas, now, means remembering…
Christmas 1949
This is my first Christmas. I have no memory of it, but I do have photographs. Two smiling parents holding an infant in their laps. It's not hard to interpret this photo. They are clearly happy to have this child.
For my first Christmas my mother, who was never a knitter, has made two simple small yarn snowmen. They hang on the tree all through my growing up years and one Christmas, many years ago, were handed down to me.
The note my mother wrote for me, in her beautiful handwriting, simply says: “These were your 'very own ornaments on the bottom of the tree when you celebrated your 1st Christmas in 1949.”
A beautiful legacy that has seen 66 Christmases, and a beautiful reminder that I was loved and wanted.
Christmas 1954
This is the first Christmas I remember. We are living with my Uncle Francis on the corner of Broad and Helen Street. I am five; my brother is two. This is the year I started Kindergarten in Lakeland, Florida. This is also the year my mother had a break down and, so the story was told, informed my father that she was taking the children and moving back home. She did. In November. There are existing photos showing my mother thinner than I’ve ever seen her. We are photographed on board a boat crossing Chesapeake Bay. My father has given up his dream of living in the south
I have two, clear memories of this Christmas: Uncle Francis has television—something I’ve never seen before. The set is in a room at the side of house in a room heated with a kerosene heater. We sit in front of the small black and white set. For some reason I only remember the news and weather. We also listen to radio, and I remember sitting with my Dad as Santa reads letters from children.
Uncle Francis is a widower, his wife having died in the 1930’s. He’s a young man, early 50’s. We sleep upstairs. Downstairs, there are only three rooms: an icy cold parlor, his kitchen/den, and the TV room. The parlor, even years later, was never used, but this Christmas there is a small, fresh tree sitting on a marble-top table. This is magic, because it is lit with NOMA Bubble Lights. The parlor is off limits, and I only go in with my mother, father or Uncle Francis.
Christmas. Cold. A parlor with a tree I can still see in the dark shadows of memory.
Christmas 1955 or 1956
This I remember: it is the morning of Christmas Day. In our home my parents started a tradition that would last a lifetime. There was no opening presents until we went to Mass. What I remember is 6:00 a.m. Mass with my Dad. I am very young. And excited. Presents await. My mother is probably putting final touches to the morning.
But at church I am distracted by the stain glassed window on the west side of church. It's a beautiful representation of the Nativity. I am engrossed in it. I think: this is what happened today. This is the day that Jesus was born and this is what is looked like.
I do not remember the gifts, or any other part of the day. Only Mass on an early, dark and cold Christmas morning with my Dad. And a Nativity that still captivates me whenever I enter that church--even to this day.
Christmas 1957
There are two things I remember about this Christmas: the first is Christmas Eve day when it rained and rained. We were all disappointed. We were all skiers and this meant no snow. The other thing I remember is a photo taken of my brother on a bicycle. He's sitting on the bike, in front of the house on Christmas day. Was it a Christmas gift?
To this date, this is the warmest Christmas Eve and Christmas Day on record and after more than 50 years it's still not been broken.
When I look at photos I see ghosts. At dinner that day are my parents, my Uncle Earl and Aunt Kay, and my grandfather, Homer Boyer. Also present is Uncle Earl's mother and our Aunt Minnie--one of the most cheerful people I've ever met. There is a photo of Elaine Cranston, her mother, Mrs. Dumas and Elaine's daughter, Diane. Elaine appears sad. I know she was widowed and it may have happened just prior to this photo. All ghosts, all long gone...my mother the last.
But the photos and the memory make me smile. They connect me to the past, to the wonderful Christmases of my youth, of a mother who loved this holiday and generously shared it with others.
Christmas 1961
Christmas Eve. My mother always loved a bargain and that late afternoon she’d gone off in search of half-price Christmas wrapping paper and ornaments. Those were the days when little was on sale in December. If you wanted half price Christmas wrapping paper and ornaments, the hours before closing on Christmas Eve was the first place to start.
Shortly after 5:30 she came from Neisner’s, newly opened in a strip mall that’s been torn down for years. She has with her, among the many ornamental treasures, two “Made in Japan” plastic ornaments. The one I still have, and treasure, is a Japanese style globe with a top in the center that spun when one blew on it.
My brother and I happily added the new ornaments to the tree.
Over the years, he acquired one and I acquired the other. Mine hangs lovingly on one of my Christmas trees.
A simple act—heading to an early 1960’s department store to buy half price items, creates, over the years, an ornament that’s treasured into advanced age.
One of the wonders of Christmas.
Christmas 1962
I am looking back at photos from this Christmas. I am 13; my brother is 10. We have new bicycles. Presents lay heavy all over the living room. It is early in the morning and sun has not yet risen. I did not know it then, but I do now. My parents had recently purchased a new business the year before and there is probably, for the first time, a bit more disposable income. The sacrifice they made to raise two children.
Photos show family--all gone now. My Uncle Francis, my two aunts my Dad's sisters----Kay and Margaret and my two uncles--Jim and Earl. Everyone has a cocktail and three of them have cigarettes in hand. That would mean that my two cousins--John and Michael--were also at the house. In those days my mother would serve us separately at a large card table set up in the den. We didn't mind. We were still children and the Christmas table, never big enough, was meant for adults. None of us were adults in 1962.
Fifty years ago this Christmas and almost all of it is lost to memory, except for the bicycles...and the knowledge, now, that may parents made sacrifices were never knew of.
Love. Not only at Christmas, but all the year round.
Christmas 1963
This is the year my grandmother dies, three weeks to the day before JFK’s assassination. We are too young to be affected by this. She’d been sick for some time. She was old. She was dead. That’s how a 14 year old looks as things.
Three weeks after her death, my father lands in the hospital with the first of his coronary issues. I never made the connection until recently that the stress of his mother’s death could have caused the problem.
Just before Thanksgiving I go down to the Sears Roebuck catalog store and order my brother a Howdy Doody ventriloquist puppet. In 1963 the great department store catalogs would still come to the house. In September we’d get the 800+ page Christmas catalog. Plenty of time to surf through the pages to find gifts or make wish lists.
A few days before Christmas my friend David Heath and I agree to meet at my house at 11:00 pm. Grand Way, which just opened, is have a pre-Christmas “Moonlight Madness” sale. There is nothing we need to buy, but the idea of being out at 11:00 pm and walking to a newly opened department store at shopping at midnight lures us.
We return very late. The woman who works night on the Answering Service is still awake. We throw things onto the roof, then knock on the door and tell her it was Santa’s reindeer.
I am 14. David is 12. He was my best friend. Four Christmases later he would be lying in a cemetery, dead at 16 of leukemia. I realize as I write this that I have now lived four lifetimes to his one. For some things there are no answers. I have never forgot him, and still mourn the lost potential of that life.
I’m looking at photos of that Christmas—fifty years ago to the year I write this. My mother and father are dressed up. They are younger than I am now.
That Christmas my mother hosts a small open house on Christmas morning. Their business is 24/7 and they work even on Christmas, so it made sense for people to come to her.
We open gifts in the back office, a tradition that began two years earlier when it was built to accommodate the “board”—their answering service. My brother hams it up for the photos I takes. He seems to enjoy the puppet.
Christmas—fifty years ago!
Christmas 1967
It is my first year in college and I’m living in Troy, New York. It is December, and the dorm I’ve been living in since September has burned. I’m fortunate. I’m only affected by smoke. Others have lost everything. The dorm closes the first week in December and there’s still three weeks of school.
Four of us find an apartment a few blocks away. It’s totally unfurnished and only $20.00 a month. $30.00! We talk the landlord, who lives below with her family, into raising the rent to $80.00 if she agrees to pick up utilities. They must be desperate to take on four boys who’ll live upstairs.
I have no idea where we get furniture, but we do. The apartment has a kitchen a living room and large room off that that becomes out bedroom. Four beds are put in four corners of the room. The “bedroom” faces the entrance the Menands Bridge and is always noisy, but none of use seems to notice. Across the bridge is a grocery store, so one of us takes a grocery cart from the store to transport groceries back and forth. When not used it sits in the middle of the kitchen.
We’re all 18 years old and extraordinarily flexible as college freshmen can be. I can’t imagine living that way today!
One of use buys a Christmas tree and we put it up in the living room. We have no ornaments. At the grocery store I buy two boxes of glass balls. We hang candy wrappers, garter belts and empty packs of cigarettes from the tree.
In 1967 at Hudson Valley Community College, school did not get out until just before Christmas. I come home for two weeks probably.
That Christmas Eve we go to Elaine Cranston’s, my mother’s friend, for dinner. She had a new apartment—tiny—and has purchased a purple shag rug for the living room. The apartment is just for herself and her mother, Mrs. Dumas, who would die several months later. Together with Elaine’s daughter, Diane, they are constants at every holiday meal.
Forty four years later I still have a few of the glass ornaments I purchased that crazy December. Elaine’s fruit salad will grace Christmas dinner this year.
That Christmas still lives on, not only in memory, but in the tangible things created then that have lasted a lifetime.
Christmas 1972
It’s my second year of teaching. I’m 24 and living in my first apartment, sharing it with another teacher. It’s the weekend before Christmas, and my childhood friend, Mary, and I are making Christmas cookies. We have a basic sugar cookie recipe and are making variations with each batch.
We’re drinking white wine with white raisins in the bottom of the glass. We’re also smoking pot and are very stoned. My roommate, Tom, sits in the living room, stoned, too, and is totally disconnected to what we’re doing. Mary and I laugh a lot. The kitchen is a mess.
There are still Mom and Pop grocery stores in neighborhoods. We’re not prepared. We have flour, sugar and butter, but that’s about it. Every thirty minutes we realize we need something else: dates, raisins, more sugar, food dye, confectioner’s sugar, cherries, nuts. Every thirty minutes I put on my coat, walk across the street on this cold, mid-December winter night. The owner of the store is visibly annoyed at my constant entrance into his house cum store. “Uh, we need nuts,” I’d say. I’d pay up, leave, and return again a half an hour later.
In the end we have scores and scores of cookies—all sugar, but topped with different icings and toppings. We’ve lost track of the number we made. It’s way past midnight. We’ve eaten enough cookie dough to make us sick, and we’ve smoked way too much dope and drunk too much wine. We did that in those days.
It’s the middle of the night. We separate the cookies, let the pot wear off, drink more wine. I drive Mary home and sleep ‘til noon.
The memory lingers on. Sugar cookies, white wine with raisins, and Mary! They always went together.
Christmas 1970
I am Senior in college. That Christmas an early dinner is at my Aunt Catherine Keyes’ home. My parents and brother are there; my Uncle Earl and cousin John; my Aunt Margaret and Uncle Jim are there too. My cousin Michael is in the Navy. It’s a beautiful, sunny day and after dinner I step into the bathroom and step on the scales. I’m shocked. I’d not weighed myself in months. Weight gain had been slow and steady since starting college 3 ½ years earlier. That, coupled with some genuine mental illness, had packed on almost 60 pounds since high school graduation.
When I return to college (and those days it was right after the New Year) I went on a diet. It wasn’t a plan or anything. I simply said, I have to lose weight. It was draconian at best. Two rice cakes and a glass of orange juice for breakfast. A huge salad with Kraft Diet Italian dressing for lunch. A piece of meat and cans and cans of vegetables for dinner. At one point, I was eating three heads of lettuce a day.
I started student teaching, and maintained this food reg ime. One the way home from Mayville, I’d stop at a meat market and buy dinner and a small, pineapple sherbet ice cream cone. It was my only treat in the day. Once home, I’d run three miles or head to the pool on campus and swim a half mile. I was losing a pound a day. All the clothes I bought to start teaching in had to be jettisoned.
By semester’s end I’d lost 55 pounds. For the first time since high school I was wearing a size 36 pant. I felt great. No fat and no sugar in the diet gave me all sorts of energy. I told no one at home about this accomplishment.
In late May, when my parents came for graduation, my father called me from a pay phone off the exit to the Thruway. I purposely put on new jeans that hadn’t fit even a month earlier. I waited for them near the park when I lived and I will never forget my mother’s reaction when she saw me. She rolled down the window, mouth agape, staring at the new me.
There’s rarely a Christmas that goes by when I don’t think of that after dinner weigh-in. Over the years I have tried to replicate that weigh loss. To this day I can’t stand the taste of Kraft Diet Italian dressing and I’ve never been able to eat three heads of lettuce a day. For years I maintained that weight until I was put on a medication that put 15 pounds on almost immediately. Since then weight has always been an issue.
But Christmas 1970 was a watershed year. I was on the cusp of real adulthood and that day sparked a huge change in my life.
I wish I could succeed like that again!
Christmas 1973
I am in my first apartment on Brinkerhoff Street. Third floor walk up. A small corner of heaven. I’m high enough to see the lake and the Green Mountains.
During the fall I was living with my parents. My brother had moved in, too. It would be the last time all of would live under one roof. I am waiting for the apartment to open up sometime in November. My brother has left Saranac Lake. He’s in transition. He has his two lovable cats, Habit and Bones, with him.
By December I am in the apartment. One of my students reminded all his teachers that his family had fresh trees for sale, so one afternoon I meet him at his home, south of Mooers. We walk into the woods, a sea of balsam and spruce—all over twenty feet high.
“Which one do you want?” he asked.
"But they’re not Christmas trees,” I said. “They’re full grown.”
“That’s OK. It’s time to thin them out.”
So I pick one—a giant spruce that the boy cut down. We then cut off the noble top and it becomes, in my memory, one of the most beautiful trees I’ve ever owned—a tree full of hand-me-down ornaments, and the few that I’d already gathered into my collection.
Mid-December my brother and his girlfriend suddenly leave Plattsburgh, telling only my father and me that he is moving to Florida. My mother is understandably upset. Christmas, in her mind, is all about family, and now this happens. No explanations. Nothing. She is left with questions that neither my father nor I have answers to.
Christmas Eve, I being who I was, take labels off presents, and rewrite and reaffix them: “To Dad. Love, Dick” "To Mom. Love, Dick."
Neither of my parents is stupid and they realize what I’ve done. There is a hole in this evening that we could not have envisioned at Thanksgiving.
Christmas Day is quiet—not something anyone in this immediate family is accustomed to. I’ve been give a set of cross-country skis and spend my day skiing in the then empty, but now developed, second quarry, or lying on the sofa watching Christmas specials with my dad on television. For me it’s a very lazy day.
I have thought of this Christmas often over the years, and the older I get I’ve come to realize how short a time it is that young families are intact before moves or marriages alter the configuration. I’ve also thought of it often as one of the last quiet Christmases. There would come a time, a few short years later, when I would assume more and more of the dinner.
Life changes. People change. But Christmas, being Christmas, always has elements to it that remain unchanged from year to year, and even now, almost forty years later, I still see vestiges of those last quiet years when I’d experience the holiday as still a young man.
Christmas 1977
Forty years ago. I am looking at a photo of my parents and my aunts and uncles. Everyone is smiling. Happy. I was the photographer. The photo is obviously a picture taken just before they left the house. Was it after Christmas dinner? Was it after a small holiday party my mother would often host?
I was 28 and had no idea what I still had in life. Every person is that photo is gone. My aunt Margaret would be the first to leave us. Younger than I am now. My uncles later. My dad 23 years ago this week. I am the sole survivor of that photo and that is humbling.
There is also a photo of my Christmas tree at 134 Brinkerhoff Street. I loved that third floor walk-up apartment. My life was so much simpler in those days, so less filled with clutter. Today, forty years after that photo was taken, I still see ornaments on the tree that are with me to this day. Traditions. Memories. Good things.
It is also the last year that I am single. Six months hence I will meet Steve and this will change the course of my life forever. In a good way.
I do not remember that Christmas—only the memories I have through the photos. Forty Christmases have passed since then, and for that I am grateful.
Grateful.
Christmas 1978
It snows this Christmas. It starts on the evening of Christmas Eve, continues through the night and into Christmas. It billows out of the sky until, by mid-afternoon, we have close to 25 inches.
It rarely snows on Christmas, unlike the Christmases of Hollywood, and it’s come unexpectedly.
Christmas morning, my neighbor plows the parking lot of my apartment building. I get to my parents and shovel them out. No one can go to church. My mother, who’s invited her usual full house for Christmas, starts to get cancellations. She frets. Understandably. She had a massive dinner and has been preparing for two days.
Somehow I get us all plowed out. By hand. No easy task at 23 Grace Avenue. “Call them back,” I tell my mother. “Dad and I will take the car and pick them up.
Out we go. We first pick up ‘Liv, now widowed, whose husband was a dear friend of my Dad’s. They we slog over to the Long Apartments to pick up June Rippy. She always spends every holiday with us. But she is in a wheel chair, and getting her from her apartment to Grace Ave and up the snowy stairs is a challenge.
People leave early. It’s less arduous getting people home. My Mom and I take a Christmas night walk along the snowy streets of Plattsburgh. People have opened drapes so their trees can be admired.
This is the year I meet Steve. We have a small Christmas before he leaves for Long Island to spend the holiday with his family. He gives me a handmade ornament with “1978” glittered on to it. It is still one on my most precious ornaments.
Later, I drive home, but wander over to his apartment. His roommate, a female, is eating a late Christmas dinner of lasagna.
“What do you hear from Steve? I ask her.
“He was killed in a car accident,” she calmly tells me.
I am stunned, but don’t quite believe her. I track down his family’s number in Farmingdale and ask to speak to him.
He comes to the phone. My fears are relieved.
That night I go to bed happy. Snow! Christmas went off as planned. A lovely walk in the snow.
And Steve is alive.
Christmas 1980
This is the first Christmas that Steve and I spend alone. My parents have left for Florida earlier than usual.
Christmas Eve day it snows--a classic, lovely Christmas snowfall, with snow just falling gently out of the sky. I go to their home and borrow two sets of the Ladue family china, and that evening we have fondue. We walk to the Presbyterian Church for their candlelight service.
The storm front moves out and in its place an Arctic high pressure system moves in. The temperature plummets to -25. To date, it's the coldest Christmas temperatures on record. We spend part of Christmas Day shoveling snow.
Christmas Day we go to my Aunt Margaret and Uncle Jim's home for dinner. I think it is the only Christmas we ever spend with them. That night we watch Christmas movies on TV.
A quiet Christmas, but still remembered for two things--our first alone and then with an aunt and uncle we rarely celebrated the day with.
Christmas 1983
I’m 34. Middle aged, I guess. At least that’s what I tell myself these days. That spring I pull my back while running. I can barely walk for days. “Must be middle aged,” I tell people.
My mother loves having a table full of people for Christmas dinner. That year she invites the neighbors—the people next door and an older Polish couple from down the street. The Wojeck’s are in their 70’s and they’ve come from Poland to be with their son, a professor at SUNY Plattsburgh, but when he dropped dead of a heart attack, they find themselves alone in a strange land. We’d see them walking—everywhere. He in the lead, she several steps behind.
My mother walks up to their home, knocks on the door, and invites them for Christmas dinner. They do not accept immediately but, instead, go to the priest at St. Peter’s who clears my parents. They come.
By 1983 I am helping with Christmas dinner, and that year’s contribution will be a flaming plum pudding. After dinner, I take the pudding out of the oven, turn off the lights in the dining room, ignite the warmed rum, then walk triumphantly into the darkened dining room. Somehow I trip, but manage to stay upright. The pudding lands with a thump on the table, flaming rum spilling out the entire length of the table. People shriek. Glasses tumble. The table is on fire. But only for an instant. The rum evaporates, someone turns on the lights, and the table is a mess.
Hah! We clean up, and, because, the pudding is still intact, pour the lemon sauce on it and finish dinner.
Later, Steve and I walk the Wojceck’s home. They invite us into their home and open up a bottle of something. We know enough to accept, even though neither of us are drinkers.
Mr. Wojeck tells us stories of his time in the Polish Resistance, and how they escaped to get the United States. This was five years before the Iron Curtain will fall, and getting out was not easy. They left everything behind to start a new life in a new country at a time in their lives when they were definitely past middle aged.
We get back to my parents’ home more than an hour later. No one in the neighborhood has ever been invited into their home.
We never went back and we never shared another Christmas. Mr. Wojeck died a few years later and, after reunification, Mrs. Wojceck returned to Poland where she died. Much later I learned that Mr. Wojceck was a famous resistance fighter and that his name routinely showed up in texts exploring that period of Poland’s history. The things we don’t know about people.
I often think of that Christmas, the generosity of my mother’s Christmas table, and this one-time meeting of people we’d never dine with again.
Christmas 1985
I am on sabbatical, living in Albany, NY. My school district has given me a year off to pursue a degree in Library Science and I am a full time student. It's been a wonderful Fall.
During Thanksgiving I head to Chazy Lake, harvest a few small trees, and bring them into my small apartment in Delmar. I am living in a large studio apartment. I love Delmar and I love the cozy space I am calling home.
I gather up pots and plant three tiny trees in soil. I've brought down just enough ornaments to fill them. I string lights up a lamp pole.
That December it snowed a lot in Albany. I remember drifts of snow outside my apartment and snowy rides from campus to Delmar. Each evening I listen to a local radio station's “Hour of Christmas music.” Despite being away from home, I”m not lonely. I have my studies, and new friends on campus...and a small home to decorate.
We have sublet our home for a year, so Christmas I am at my parents' home.
This is also the last Christmas that Steve's parents will be in their home on Long Island, so he goes down. Two months later they will be living on Chazy Lake, far from the crowds of suburban NYC.
Shortly after Christmas my mom and dad head for Florida. I have a full month off and relish living in their home. I keep a fire in the fireplace burning throughout the day and night. I watch a huge number of movies I rent each day. It's cold, but each day I venture out for a long run. Grace Avenue to the Military Turnpike via the Tim Miller Road and home via Route 3 It's easily seven or more miles.
But I grow weary of the cold and get bored. Everyone I know has gone back to work, so I call my travel agent in Montreal who lands me a cheap deal to Cancun. This is long before Cancun became the Maya Riviera. I fly down, find a cheap hotel, and spend a week lying on the beach. The sun is weak and the days are, at times, rainy, but I think of my usual routine—school and teaching—and happily accept this alternative. A year hence I know I will be back in school.
My sabbatical Christmas—tiny trees in a small apartment in Albany then a week on a beach.
A perfectly different Christmas.
Christmas 1987
This is a year of transition. Indeed, most of the late 1980's is a time of transition. My parents, who have lived at 23 Grace Avenue since 1952, have moved into a condo. That summer my mother jettisons piles of things and the last thing anyone needs is a “gift.” Instead, I give them a new artificial Christmas tree and tell my mother she's going on a surprise December trip. I tell her to dress on the warm side, set a departure date and time.
The idea came from something I'd read earlier in the year:
“Tucked away in our subconscious is an idyllic vision. We see ourselves on a
long trip that spans the continent. We are on a train. Out the windows
we drink in the passing scene of cars on nearby highways, of children
waving at a crossing, of row upon row of corn and wheat, of flatlands
and valleys, of mountains and rolling hillsides.
But uppermost in out minds is the final destination. On a certain day
at a certain hour we will pull into the station. Once we get there so many
wonderful dreams will come true and the pieces of our lives will all fit together
like a completed jigsaw puzzle.
“When we reach the station, that will be it,” we cry.
'When I'm 18.”
'When I have paid off the mortgage.”
“When I get a promotion.”
“When I...”
Sooner or later we must realize that there is no station, no one place to arrive at once
and for all. The true joy of life is the trip. The station is only a dream...”
Relish the moment. Stop pacing the aisles and counting the miles.
Instead, climb more mountains, eat more ice cream, go barefoot more often,
swim more rivers, watch more sunsets, laugh more, cry less. Life must be lived as we go along.
The station will come soon enough.”
And so with that I decide to do what I'd talked about for a long time—take my mother to New York City in December to enjoy the City at its Christmas best. Why wait to arrive at “the station.” It's all about the journey and this is a journey I know she'd like.
On Thursday, December 10th, I pick her up. Along each step of the trip there are small gifts. The first gift simply says, “We're having dinner at Ground Round in Glens Falls.” We drive through the mountains, have dinner and Mom opens another gift: “We're heading to Gloria's.” We spend the night in Schenectady at her sister's then leave early the next morning. The gift given to Mom in the car is a train ticket to New York City.
From then on it's a whirlwind of a long weekend—two nights in a hotel, tickets to a “42nd Street” and The Christmas show at Rockefeller Center. We spend part of Saturday at the Church of Saint John the Divine and had lovely dinners in nice restaurants. We walk Fifth Avenue and stop into Tiffany's and St. Patrick's. We take to subway to lower Manhattan and I lose her at South Street Seaport. Two hours later, though, we reconnect.
On Sunday morning we take the train back to Albany and drive home from there. Unlike other years, this trip is snow-free and clear.
“Thanks for the memories,” my mother writes me later. And thank you for being you—the ultimate in generosity, thoughtfulness, compassion and love. Christmas gifts can be given and forgotten very quickly but this one will always be a part of me.”
It's a hard Christmas to top.
Christmas 1988
We are spending our first Christmas in our new home at 103 North Catherine Street. We’ve been there since May, but by December almost all the work is done. That fall I’d driven on the Lake Shore Road at Chazy Lake and found a discarded spruce tree that road crews had cleared out of the woods. I take it home, set it up in the dining room. The tradition of multiple Christmas trees has begun. By Christmas, there is a tree in the den, in the living room, in the dining room and the newly designed “Christmas room” upstairs. We’ve never had so much space! All the trees are real and it’s an enormous amount of work, but the house sparkles this Yuletide!
My cousin Lisa is with us. Her son, Landon, is only five. He still believes in Santa Claus. She is in transition, and has been living in Plattsburgh since summer. She joins us for Christmas Eve lunch at Arnie’s--a tradition that’s gone on for many years. Later, she, Landon, my parents and I go to St. John’s Church for Mass. Afterwards, we end up in the new house and bring in Christmas with dinner.
We put Landon to bed and my dad and I assemble a train set for him. I have never wanted children, except at Christmas. This is fun, especially sharing it with my father.
Christmas morning it snows. Not much. Just soft, gentle flurries. I take Landon to the window to share the magic with him. He’s excited with his toys—and the train. Mom and Dad join us for gift exchange.
That afternoon it’s Christmas in England. Roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, and a flaming plum pudding for desserts. I buy English crackers. We pop them, wear the silly hats, and enjoy a family Christmas dinner.
New Year’s Eve Lisa and Landon join us again. We sit in the living room, dance to oldies, eat up what’s left of Christmas goodies and ring in the new year—1989!
A happy holiday season.
Christmas 1990
I have begun fanatically collecting antique Christmas ornaments and the first tree is up by early November. Why not start early to display everything? Our new home on North Catherine St. is a perfect Christmas house with plenty of space for multiple trees.
But on November 9th we have a house fire. We have been shopping on a Friday night and come home to multiple fire engines in front of our house.
Fortunately, there was little fire. According the firemen, another minute more would have resulted in the house burning to the ground. Instead we have smoke damage.
We can not live there of course. We make our home at Howard Johnson's Hotel. Luke's description of the first Christmas bring the story close to home. There truly was no room in the inn for us. Thank God for good insurance. All through November and most of December work progresses. I refuse to give in to Christmas glum and decorate an artificial tree in the hotel room.
Even though the house isn't officially ready and even though we are still living in the hotel, we are allowed to move things back into our house on Christmas Eve day. We have purchased a new Christmas tree—a huge artificial one that fits perfectly into the corner of the living room.
I spend that morning assembling the tree and the afternoon decorating it. It seems silly of course, because we won't be celebrating the holiday there, but it will be ready for New Year's we will be back in.
I am thankful beyond words for all that has transpired. Very early on I was able to put the fire into perspective—no life was lost, the house was saved and we only lost a few things.
I was grateful for friends and a good insurance policy and that we were only “homeless” for less than two months.
Not all Christmases are Christmas card perfect, but all Christmases, no matter what it brings, is time to give thanks.
1990 was no different.
Christmas 1994
Friends Coy and Richard are visiting from California for a white Christmas.
My Dad, sick with cancer for almost four years, is losing more and more energy. None of us know why he has lasted so long. Two weeks earlier he and I are alone together. I tell him it’s alright to die.
“Do you want me dead?” he asks. This breaks my heart.
“No, Dad, I don’t want to lose you, but I don’t want to see you suffer any longer. We’ll be alright. It’s OK to go.”
I tell my mother later what I’ve done and tell her she, too, has to have this conversation with him.
Christmas Eve morning, while I’m preparing the house for that evening’s dinner, Mom calls.
“Your Dad’s not well. I’m calling Hospice. Can you come over?”
He’s in bed. Far more unresponsive than usual. I spend the afternoon. The party is cancelled, and I tell Coy and Richard to pack up the things and bring them to the condo. We’ll have dinner there.
Dad’s Hospice nurse finally arrives at dusk. She does vitals, knows what she is seeing. “He’s dying,” she tells us. “Not this minute, but his body is shutting down.”
We invite her for dinner—halibut in a pesto sauce. We try to celebrate Christmas, but the drama upstairs weighs heavily on us.
I spend the night. By morning, Christmas, Dad is worse. Steve calls my Aunt Kay, who’s been estranged from my mother for some time. While Mom is at Mass, Kay visits. This is her final remaining sibling, the man who faithfully watched over her after her husband died eight years earlier.
Coy takes control of dinner. He’s from Manila, and prepares a traditional Filipino Christmas feast.
It’s cold and clear—an Arctic front has moved down from the north, but I still take my annual Christmas day walk of the beach. Nothing is happening so fast that I can’t get of the house for an hour. When I return, Aunt Eleanor has arrived from Saranac Lake.
The priest on duty from St. Peter’s comes. All of us crowd into the bedroom for the last rights. It’s beyond surreal. It’s Christmas and this is not supposed to be happening. I’m angry, an anger that will linger for another five to seven years, that he’s dying on Christmas. It’s an irrational anger, because I know he didn’t choose this.
We eat. We keep vigil. Eleanor leaves. Coy and Richard clean up. We call my brother, Don and Nancy, Gloria. Those who need to know. Someone has called friends who come to the house to keep vigil with me.
Steve and I spend the night and we are up hourly. I give Dad more Atavan to ease the anxiety. He reaches out and talks to people who have come to help him cross over. I hear the words “Mom, Pop.” By five we are all asleep. I wake at six-thirty, walk into the bedroom. There is no heartbeat, but he is still warm. He’s died in the hour that we were sleeping.
I look at the clock, do some mental math, and realize that Christmas had passed the date line at 5:00 a.m.
What an extraordinary gift—the 26th instead of the 25th.
There is never a part of Christmas Eve/Christmas Day when I don’t lose some emotional control. I still miss my Dad, but the deep pain has long passed, and now I look back on that Christmas as one when two California angels, dressed in denim, descended upon us and spread heaven’s light upon us.
Christmas 1995
Months earlier we decide to run away from Christmas. There is no way I want to stay home and relive the events of Christmas 1994. We decide this in March.
It is a Christmas without cards, trees, carols. It’s all too sad. But we are excited to know that we will be in Cozumel, Mexico, where it’s warm.
We fly out on the 23rd. In five hours we're in the Caribbean, away from the familiar.
We spend the day of Christmas Eve touring the island in a car. It's a drizzly afternoon and not summer-warm, but we stop at isolated beaches and splash in water no Mexican we dream of swimming in. Years later I would live in this part of the world and wouldn't dream of swimming in the winter.
That evening we are invited to a house party. Both of us are keenly aware of the previous Christmas. I call my mother, who chose not to come, several times that evening. It bothers me that she is alone.
Christmas day finds us on another beach. That night, we have a late dinner on the roof terrace of a restaurant. I pay someone to sing Silent Night accompanied by his guitar. Even today I can hear him..."Noche de paz. Noche de amor. Todo el mundo derredor." We are eating outdoors, under a clear early winter's night. This is magic.
Through it all I remember our dear friends from a year earlier. I call them, say nothing, but recite a poem I'd written for them.
Other Angels
"And there were in the same country, shepherds, abiding in the fields, and keeping watch by night. And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shown 'round about them, and they were sore afraid."
But wait,
These angels were different that other Christmas.
We were keeping watch,
But the flock was a flock of one,
And the field was one of dying dreams.
Dressed in denim, they bore gifts
They never planned to give.
They didn't frighten us;
Instead, they took away the fear
And diverted, for a time, the larger issue.
No. Not all angels
Come to us in robes of white,
But all angels, even those in denim,
Shine enough
To see the Glory of the Lord within them.
Christmas 1996
Christmases are still difficult and the memory of losing Dad at this time of year is still too fresh. It will take five years to get past this. Christmases now are about new traditions.
Christmas Day we—Mom, Steve, Chris Dorsch and Don and Nancy Conger—bundle into two cars and head to Saranac Lake. When we arrive it’s snowing. This is my mother’s home town, and in her memory it was always snowing on Christmas. It couldn’t be more perfect. My “aunt” Eleanor prepares a wonderful dinner and we all bask in the warmth of friendship and family. Don and Nancy have become family since we’ve gotten to know them.
After dinner, we take a long walk through the snowy streets of the village. It’s quiet and a perfect way to spend Christmas.
I was reminded of other Christmases we spent in Saranac Lake—when I was very, very young and my grandparents still lived on Charles Street. One of my earliest memories is lying in bed, at Christmas, looking out at the top of a tall blue spruce. The sky is blue black. Snow is falling. I feel a great sense of peace. I couldn’t be more than four or five.
Long after dark we drive home, fully content in another beautiful Christmas, but still miss Dad.
Christmas 1998
I’m on the tropical island of Kho Samui in the Gulf of Thailand. It’s only the second Christmas I’ve ever been away from home. I’ve taken a leave of absence from my job and left Plattsburgh in September on a ten month around-the-world trip.
I’m not alone. I’m sharing the day with Michelle, who I’d met more than a month earlier in Nepal. When we separated there we both agreed to track each other down on this island. The beauty of the Internet.
Christmas Eve we “dress up,” as if we have anything nice to wear, and head to a hotel on the beach. They’re having a Christmas Eve Buffet, complete with an American band playing traditional holiday music. As hard as the kitchen tries, they can’t replicate an American/European Christmas dinner.
Nothing is traditional. It’s hot and humid, the food is good, but different, and half way through the dinner a tropical rain storm piles in and soaks everything.
But I am not dismayed. I love this…this new twist on Christmas.
As soon as the rain sweeps in, it sweeps out. By now it’s close to midnight and we walk down the beach to the center of town. There are fireworks at midnight, and people on the beach with sparklers and fire crackers. At 1:00 a.m. I call home. There’s a twelve hour time difference, and it’s still Christmas Eve afternoon in Plattsburgh. A group of friends has gone to the house, and one by one I speak to them over the great divide of 10,000 miles. I am still hurting from Dad’s death five years earlier, but am gladdened to hear their voices.
Christmas Day is white hot. There are white clouds in the sky, and whitecaps on the ocean. Michelle and I sit on white sand and agree that this is a perfect White Christmas. We splurge and have massages.
At dinner we order wine and a freshly caught fish cooked in tropical fruits.
That night I sit on my bed, writing in my journal. It’s hot and a fan blows air on my body. I swat mosquitoes.
The next morning, early, I call Mom and Steve. It’s Christmas Night in New York, and I call just before dinner.
I hang up. Another Christmas is over. I fly to Bangkok and meet Glenda, my dear, dear friend, who’s travelled through the holiday to spend a week in Southeast Asia. We travel, shop, and see 1999 in at a street party in Bangkok. An elephant walks down the center of the street.
We are both a long, long way from home.
Christmas 2009
December is a month of crisis. In November, my mother is classified as legally blind. This is too much for her to bear. She is already profoundly deaf. She is almost totally sensory deprived. She does her best, but as November’s light dwindles to December’s darkness, my mother loses more and more of her ability to cope.
We are not alone in all this. We have the services of a fine woman from the Agency for the Blind, and I hire a friend, Marita Boulis, to spend three days a week with Mom. This is hard on my mother. She is fiercely independent and to have to rely on someone is almost humiliating.
The days creep towards Christmas. Evenings, I call at 7 pm and no one answers. Mom is now coping by spending 15—18 hours in bed each day. I ask her to call me when she goes to bed so I know she’s OK.
One day I walk into the apartment and find furniture turned over. She has no idea this has happened. It’s obvious she can no longer live on her own. I rearrange the table and chairs, so this doesn’t happen again, go home, and when I return her friend Pat Ives is there. Something has happened. Pat is holding my mother’s shoulders, looks me in the eye and says, as lovingly as she can, “Your mother can’t live here anymore.”
By the 22nd, I am an emotional mess. I’m not coping. My blood pressure is soaring and my doctor doubles the dosage. I can’t sleep and am totally reliant on Valium. That night, after a day of simply not knowing what to do, I drive north to a party in Rouses Point. I have no intentions of staying, only to make a showing, hand over the food I’ve brought, then leave. But I am in the presence of friends—not friends in the casual sense, but Friends, who care. As soon as I see Steve I start to cry. I have been holding on for days, but today I lose control. This is in the living room. It’s a big house. Someone ushers others out, but the Friends remain. For thirty minutes I cry. I cannot stop. The Friends hold me, let me carry this through to completion. Only then am I able to stay and enjoy the rest of the evening.
On the morning of the 23rd I call the Victoria House, where my aunt lived for many years. Maybe they have a contact. They do! Not only do they have a room, but a room with a private bathroom. This is beyond miracle. I tell her I’ll take it and that we’ll come by on Christmas Eve to look at it.
That afternoon I break the news to my mother, who knows she can’t live at Lake Forest anymore. She’s delighted. She claps her hands and tells me it’s a good thing.
On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, Marita drives my mother out to Morrisonville. We all meet at the Emory House. It really is a nice room, and my mother says all the right things. I pay for the room in advance and tell the housekeeper that we’ll move in by the 30th. To this day we are not sure she really meant what she said, that simply appeared happy because she knew she had no other recourse.
By late afternoon, we are back in Mom’s apartment. There’s a small tree on the dining room table; I put on Christmas music and we open the gifts I’ve brought over. She really can’t “see” the gifts, but tells me she loves them.
I’ve purchased a tortiere in Lacolle, and we eat that and a salad I’ve made. There is plenty of junk food around the apartment for dessert. We leave, try to have a quiet Christmas Eve at home, but it’s difficult.
At 9:00 a.m. Christmas morning I wake to see the answering machine flashing. It’s 911. Mom had fallen in the middle of the night and they are alerting us. Steve is still sleeping, something he rarely does this late in the morning. I wake him. He intercepted the phone call, went to her apartment at 4:00 a.m., found her uninjured on the floor, and put her to bed. Knowing what I’ve been thorough all month, he lets me sleep.
I go over, tell her that she doesn’t have to spend any more nights alone. We pack a small suitcase and I bring her to the house for the day.
I don’t ever remember a Christmas without a proper Christmas dinner. This year I’m absolutely unable to do anything, so we go to the Jade Buffet. It’s packed! My high school friend, Chuck, and his son, are visiting, and I treat the five of use to won-ton soup and fried rice. We actually have a good time.
This is Mom’s last Christmas. We don’t know that of course. In less than four months she will be dead.
But if I had to assess it, I’d say it was a happy Christmas—a Christmas of comfort and joy, of knowing who your friends are and of finding a room in the inn when we thought they’re be none.
Christmas 2010
This is the first Christmas I do not have parents. Perhaps, in a way to lessen the pain, I spend half of Advent in Mexico City, living in the glorious sunshine of DF, thriving on the opportunity to experience la navideña in a city I’d started to call home. The days are in the mid 70’s, Christmas markets flourish on every street corner. From the roof of my apartment in Coyocan, I look up at the night cold night sky, stars burning brightly. One night I sing Oh Holy Night into the dark and comforting sky.
The Zocalo is full of Christmas—a huge skating rink, a snow slide, a place to make snowmen and, my favorite, a tiny snowmobile track. Alas, I do not know anyone under 15. That is the only way to gain entrance into everything but the rink.
Fresh Christmas trees are sold at every street market. Often, under the brilliant blue sky, I walk through simply to inhale the heady scent of home.
I fly home on the 13th and, a few days later, walk into the snowy woods of a local Christmas tree farm to cut down a tree. I start to cry, the only time I did it that season, mourning again the loss of my mother, 8 months gone.
Five days before Christmas I lose a dear friend. 61, dead of a heart attack. The next morning, long before sunrise, I can’t sleep and am at McDonald’s writing. It becomes her eulogy, which I give on the morning of Christmas Eve.
I am at the church early. There is only me, Ada in her casket, and the minister. It’s snowing heavily. Christmas lights in the church are turned on. There is something very wrong about all this. The snow, the lights, Christmas Eve and the body of my friend lying, dead, at the front of the church.
Somehow we all get through it. I come home and my friend Eduardo has come from New York to spend Christmas with us. Ed grew up on the east coast of Mexico and has been my friend since 2006. He’s a sweet, gentle man who is experiencing his first white Christmas. His presence is a great gift this year.
On the afternoon of Christmas Eve he comes with me to Redford. How can my mother not be part of this Christmas, she who gave us the best of all Christmases over the years? I have two bags filled with sand, and two candles. We place them on the graves of my parents, light the candles. I play Ave Maria from the CD player in my car. The candles burn all through Christmas Eve and into the morning of Christmas.
Ed’s presence doesn’t make it sad.
Even in death, we still want to do things for those we’ve lost. “Happy Christmas,” I whisper into the cold, clear Christmas Eve afternoon. “Happy Christmas.”
Christmas 2012
It's the first Sunday of Advent, but I'm not aware of it as I enter the only church I see in Varanasi, India. St. Thomas. I assume it's Catholic. It's only when I approach the church this early December evening and hear Christmas music do I realize that Advent has arrived.
I have a deep need to be in church, to be centered in the God that I know, experience the divine as I know it. There is nothing in the pantheon of gods and goddess of Hinduism that mean anything to me, and one is submerged in it everywhere in Varanasi. I arrive early, take a seat in the back on the right side. I just sit in silence, praying for those I love, thanking God for protecting me thus far. I sing Amazing Grace to myself.
"Through many dangers, toils and snares, I have already come...." And there have been many. I am just so thankful--for so much.
I expect a traditional service. Maybe Anglican. India was part of the Empire. People gather. The small church swells. Fifty woman sit on the floor in front between the pews and the altar. Five minutes into the service I look around. Some of the men are looking at me. I realize I'm the only man sitting on the woman's side of the church. I quietly slip over and they make room for me. Five minutes later I realize I'm wearing my shoes. No one else has theirs on. I take mine off. Cultural guffaws. I'm the only foreigner.
I stay for an hour. I think the church is Pentecostal. I understand absolutely nothing except the word Amen. That's not important. What's important is that I'm in a place where I can approach the divine.
A week later I'm in Delhi, flying home. I've been beaten by India and can tolerate no more. I go to Mass the day before at a church near the YMCA Tourist Hotel. I still need to be with God as I understand Him.
A week later I'm home. And home has never been so good. I did not realize how much I missed December, and snow and Christmas. I did not realize how much I needed to be home at this time of year, or at least in a place that celebrated Christmas. I needed to be with people I loved. India was not allowing me to transcend, to appreciate and fall outside of time. I was a stranger in a strange land.
And so I put up two trees and attend holiday parties and wrap presents and be with those I love the most. Christmas Eve morning it snowed. We go to the cemetery and light a candle. This is the third year I've done this and I feel sad approaching Redford. Buried there are the two people who ignited Christmas within me. But I know it's only their bodies and that they are elsewhere...having transcended their own time.
Christmas Eve Glenda comes for dinner by candlelight. I say no to helping out at First Presbyterian. Too many things have gone wrong there this year and I feel myself slipping away. Instead we drive south, to the little town of Essex and attend a candlelight and carol service at 11:00 pm. When we come out the night is clear and icy.
And it's Christmas once again.
Christmas 2013
I have long believed that Christmas is a state of mind, a season, more than just a day.
I’m excited. I start the “holiday” in Mexico City with Thanksgiving at the Casa. Sixty people for dinner. I make Elaine Cranston’s fruit salad, a dish that has graced our table for more than 50 years. There’s none left by dinner’s end. Why should there be? The oranges and bananas are fresh. Very little has been imported.
Mexico City is glorious as December approaches. The poinsettia trees are in full bloom. Azaleas are just beginning to flower. The days are warm and sunny. I spend lots of time navigating the Christmas street stalls, inhale the rich piney aroma of fresh trees trucked in from the altiplano or Canada. I find myself very happy, more and more connected to this city. December is exhilarating, but I’ll miss most of it.
On December 1st, the first Sunday of Advent, I’m in Acapulco. There’s not a cloud in the sky; the temperature climbs to 90. I’m plugged into my iPod listening to Christmas music as I watch kids surf, people walk the beach. It’s hot enough that I have to duck into the water every hour. Palms trees are decorated with Christmas lights. I love it.
I fly home December 5th. The month is a Christmas classic with grey, dreary days interspersed with cold Arctic fronts that give us below 0 readings. Five days before Christmas a storm front is locked in over the northeast and a classic mixed bag greets Christmas week. For three days we are bombarded with snow, ice and freezing rain. Almost everyone is house bound. When we finally do get out, on the 23rd, the traffic is horrific. It takes me 25 minutes to drive a road that normally takes two minutes. There is no pleasure is last minute shopping.
Christmas Eve day it snows—a light, fluffy, gently snowfall. The stuff of Christmas cards and movies. Mid-day I Skype with three Mexico beloveds—Sister Teresa of CAFEMIN, my dear friend Gerardo and Rachelle of Sydney, Australia, who’s in DF for the month. In a year when I’ve felt abandoned by family, these three are comforting friends at the end of a year that’s seen too much emotional turmoil and too many fragmented relationships. It’s too hard, it seems, to maintain the shallow friendships that have endured for some time.
We go to a candlelight service at the Methodist Church. One of the things to break this year is my relationship with First Presbyterian. Time for a new tradition.
Later, Glenda, Steve and I share dinner—tortiere, salad, real candles on the tree and the opening of early gifts. We light the candles on the Christmas tree—a tradition not done for some time. It’s a warm night with people I love and who love me.
Christmas day is cold a clear. I take a long walk. The air is brilliant and the four-day accumulation of ice on trees glitters in the low December sun. I stop often to take photos and comment to myself that this is an as-close-to-perfect Christmas-card Christmas—newly fallen snow, trees frosted and shining in the weak sun.
Friends and family come for dinner. By the time they arrive it has begun to snow, again--just a blanket. The time is special—a day set aside against all other days. For me, there is always a holiness about Christmas Day.
This year is no different.
Christmas 2015
This year, Christmas begins early. I fly to Amsterdam on November My goal: See Saint Nicholas arrive in the harbors of The Netherlands.
Two days later my friend Lomme and I walk to the center of their his, Hillegom, and watch the wondrous water parade of boats that escort the Saint into town. I'm as excited as the children, many of whom are dressed in Saint Nicholas outfits or Black Pete hats.
Small boats, all carrying scores of Black Peters, precede the larger boat that brings in the Saint himself. We follow the boats and land in the center of Hillegom where he's greeted by the mayor.
A day later we travel to Amsterdam where we watch the same thing, only on a larger scale. Here, however, the boat parade is larger. Bands playing American Dixieland jazz are on many of the boats. Later, after arriving in the harbor, there's a parade where St. Nicholas rides a horse down the street.
I've waited a long time for this, but it's hardly over.
A week later I fly to Prague and for two weeks traverse as many Christmas markets as possible there and in Vienna, Bratislava and Budapest. The days are cold but not bitter and there's precious little sun. It is one of the finest trips I've ever taken to Europe.
By mid-December I am home. As much as I like to travel, there truly is “no place like home for the holidays.” In the very back of my mind is the knowledge that I am the sole survivor in my family, my only brother having died seven months earlier. I refuse to let it dampen my mood, and the season is joyous. It's also the warmest December on record and on the afternoon of Christmas Eve we meet my dear friend Michaela at Arnie's for lunch. An old tradition that we no longer do annually. I am wearing shorts and tee shirt just because I can. The temperature is 72 degrees—the warmest Christmas Eve on record. Very few people are complaining.
That evening we meet Glenda in Chazy and attend the Chazy Presbyterian Church Christmas Eve service. This is becoming a tradition—to attend a new service at a new church each year. We feel like Christmas Eve travelers and are greeted very well by people we do not know. This year we meet our mutual friend, Sally. Four school librarians. After the service we invite her to dinner and candles. My niece, Tresa, and her boyfriend, Phil join us. I light luminaries. The night is almost balmy.
Christmas day we start at Phil and Tresa's. I sit in the hot tub for more than an hour. The temperatures are in the low fifties. Phil's daughter, Gaby, is there. Soon afterwards, Maria, Josh and Morgan, Tresa's children, arrive. Phil and Tresa make homemade bagels and sugar cookies. I eat nothing nutritious.
Phil lives five houses away from dear friends Heather and Brian and their daughter, Olivia, who are all in Florida. The deal with Santa is that he will deliver to the Plattsburgh house, but not Florida and the gifts will be waiting when they return. I call Olivia and tell her I know Santa came. “Olivia,” I tell her, “there was reindeer poop on the sidewalk. I cleaned it up, of course, because I knew Daddy wouldn't like it. But I did take a picture.” She's enthralled. A year hence she won't believe in Santa, so pump the magic for all it's worth. We all devise a way to make reindeer poop. We melt Hershey kisses and clump four of them together until we have a bunch of small piles. When they cool we all walk down to their home and leave a trail of poop on the pavement. Such great and wonderful fun!
Late that afternoon we head to Steve's sister's house and share a simple meal of lasagna and salad. Ed and Rita can't make it as Rita has fallen and is in a lot of pain. After dinner we all head to their home and try to bring to some Christmas cheer.
I have eaten far too much—not so much in quantity but in the quality of the food. I'm sick. I turn on all the Christmas lights when we get home, put on a soft Christmas CD and stare at the tree. I am flooded with memories of other Christmases, of all the ghosts no longer with me. But I'm not sad. It has been a rich and wonderful day, a day of new traditions and unusual weather.
We light the candles and give silent thanks for all we have and head to bed by 10:00 pm.
Christmas 2016
The Christmas season starts with a flight to Los Angeles the day before Thanksgiving. We spend a beautiful day roaming through Hollywood and its hills as well as Santa Monica pier. What a way to spend Thanksgiving.
But mid-afternoon I get a frantic phone call from Steve. Bob, our beautiful, sweet cat died of a heart attack. Some would say “it’s just a cat,” but Bob was the best we ever had. I’d said more than once that when he goes it will be very difficult.
We never expected him to go this way.
I just go through the rest of the day. Glenda is supportive. We go to Denny’s for Thanksgiving dinner, but my heart is hardly on food. That night sleep is restless. The next morning we return the car and get the NCK shuttle to Long Beach where we pick up a two week cruise through the Panama Canal.
Two weeks later we are home. That Sunday, the first in December, we bury this precious little animal. Phil and Steve had made a box for him and Steve had made a small Stonehengish monument for Bob.
We are consumed with enough sadness not to want to do Christmas in a big way. Instead, I buy a small, table top tree, decorate it with ornaments from the 1950’s and carefully placed tinsel. It’s quite nice. Not what we usually do, but it’s all I could do. And it was enough.
Christmas Eve Glenda comes for dinner. We are still Christmas Eve travelers and go to the Peru Community Church for their service. What is Christmas now without Glenda and the traveling? It’s become a precious tradition.
We are sad, but grateful. This small creature came into your lives but left too soon. Greater tragedies befall people, but the sadness was real nonetheless.
Christmas is quiet. Ed and Rita come for dinner. We are all in a funk because they loved Bob, too. But we all put it in perspective.
Christmas 2016. A bit dark. A bit sad. But light still prevailed and we were all grateful for the abundance that had come our way in the preceding year.
Christmas 2018
Christmas comes whether we want it or not. That year, the holiday was dark. There was no tree, no cards, no gifts, no baking, no decorating. Nothing. Steve, who grumbles a bit with the entire Christmas machine, was bereft.
Thanksgiving weekend he brought in a small artificial tree and made me decorate it with him. It meant nothing to me. Christmas Eve was Hollywood classic. It snowed, lightly, all day. At noon he insisted, rightly so, that we go to Arnie’s, a tradition we’ve kept for more than 35 years. But there was no joy in the lunch at all. It was a struggle even to order.
That evening, trying to maintain some sense of “normal,” we walked in the newly fallen snow, to the Methodist Church where we attended services. I was terrified I’d run into someone and could not wait to get home.
Late Christmas morning, Glenda came bearing gifts, a cake, other food, a party. I went through the motions but was glad when it was over. That afternoon we went to Ed and Rita’s for dinner. I could do nothing but watch as they labored away at carving a ham and getting food on the table. I was glad when it was over, and we were home.
Fall had been equally dark. Eleven days in the hospital at the beginning of September. Months recovering. Christmas came and went. December turned to the new year. By February I was venturing outside for controlled walks, interacting with people. By the end of the month I was a new man.
I will never know what caused the break down and I will never fully understand the recovery. By early March I was ready to drive again. Winter turned to spring. Easter was the most joyous one I’d ever experienced. I fully understood resurrection.
Not all years are glorious. Fortunately, the Christmas of 2018 was put into the past. A new life was born out of the chaos.
For that I am deeply grateful.
Christmas 1920
COVID Christmas
It’s been a year. Christmas could not come soon enough for most everyone. Trees were up early, Christmas store-stock was sold out. People needed a diversion, something affirming and fun, an excuse to feel good.
An agreement was reached that no one would get together either for Thanksgiving or Christmas. That meant delivering gifts and dinners. For Thanksgiving it was dinner for ten; for Christmas it was diner for eight.
Christmas Eve day we made the rounds. We went to Pt. au Roche to deliver dinner to Karen B,, then walked the trails with here two dogs, Finn and (can’t remember name). It was a lovely warm day. Then it was on to Glenda’s where we opened gifts and reminisced about past Christmases we’d spent together.
That afternoon we went to Ed and Rita’s and hustled home. I’m still having a very difficult time with people I know who voted for Donald Trump. I know we are called to love, but this is a tough one.
At 4:30 we went to an outdoor carol sing/Christmas Eve service. It was wonderful. I told Phil that there are only two other Christmas Eve’s I remember as being different: Cozumel, Koh Samui and Christmas Eve in the parking lot of the Methodist Church.
My heart has been full for some time. COVID has not affected me as it has others. Something happened within me that made me aware that the Kingdom of God is right here. That bringing dinner to someone is heaven on Earth. Goe among us.
I was so glad that Christmas was just the two of us. I don’t think we’ve ever had a Christmas just for the two of us. Ever. At dawn it was 60°; by 2:00 p.m., when we took a long walk in and around the Saranac River and the McDonough Monument, it was 57°. That is not normal, but it was just fine.
Dinner was lackluster despite all the planning. That night we lit the candles on the tree, watched them for maybe 15 minutes. I tried to look at photos of past Christmases, but it got too sad and I started to cry. “All gone,” I said. They are. All dead.
Ghosts stayed close those two days. Even my brother’s. Where are they? I thought at 71 I’d have all the answers. Hah!
Maybe I should ask Santa for that for next year.
Christmas 2023
One Christmas runs to the next. A year begins, then ends in a flash. Time is running out. Christmas memories span almost three-quarters of a century. It is more than humbling.
On the day before Christmas Eve, Dustin and I are at Subway. I admire a woman’s crochet work. She leaves her table, and returns with a hand- made shawl and places it on our table. I am stunned. A random act of kindness.
I use it as a teachable moment, how a single act of kindness can have ripples effects. We go to Dollar Tree. I shop for what I need. Dustin shops for two friends. I ask why he has two coffee cups. “I’m doing an act of kindness,” he says. All of this makes me supremely happy—his visit, my cousin Lisa’s visit, Christmas was family.
Steve’s family is just miserable, and it’s no fun to be around either of them. A year ago Ed died. Rita still grieves the loss of her husband. L simply grieves for so much lost in here lift. Christmas is not an easy time for many.
Christmas Eve, we gathered together. Family. Glenda. Steve. Lisa. Dustin. Everyone was too lazy to go to Christmas Eve services. Christmas day was relaxed. That’ ok. Gone is the buzz. We gathered once again, most of us a bit wounded with what life has brought us over the years. Normal. I felt the presence of my mother, Eleanor Cranstoun, her mother, my dad, Ed. All those who have gone before us. Ghosts of Christmas Past. We will see each other sooner than later, but I’m in no rush.
Dinner was joyous, Each person shared a Christmas memory. It turned into a conversation. I think people enjoyed that. Glenda came. We choose our families as well as be born into them. Rita lingered. How many more years?
I find myself grateful beyond words. This was my 75th Christmas. That is humbling, too.
A Christmas memory. It is close to Christmas, and it’s snowing. I still go to First Baptist. It’s the annual party upstairs. A woman who went to the church walked downstairs, opened the door, looked out at the falling snow. She seemed to be there a very long time. Her birthday was Christmas Day, and this was to be her last. I like to think I’d be happy thinking about them, but who knows.
The season draws again to a close. I am grateful and happy.
