The lighting ceremony for the 2016 National Christmas Tree. (photo: Alex Brandon/AP)
24 December 16
t
is hard to believe that the Creator of our universe with its billions
of galaxies could have sent Himself to this little blue blip not so long
ago in the form of an infant born to a virgin, to be first worshiped by
illiterate shepherds where He lay in a feed trough, livestock peering
down at Him, Eastern potentates following a star to the site. But here
we are again, singing those songs, so we shall see.
My mother loved Christmas with her whole heart. With
six children and no credit cards and my father ever watchful for
unnecessary expense, Christmas was a mountain for Grace to climb,
requiring endurance, planning, stealth and skill, but she brought it off
to perfection every year, until she was in her 90s and then she coasted
on her memories.
Her mother died when my mother was 7, and Mother had
no memory of her, which troubled her deeply. She looked at photos of her
mother, tall, haggard, from the early 1920s, and tried to dredge up
some recollection, anything at all, the sound of her voice, what she
cooked, what her hand felt like. Grace was third from the end of 11
children, the 12th having died with the mother, of scarlet fever, and
Grace was raised by her older sisters, Marian and Ruby and Margaret.
Complaint was not encouraged in that family, and mental health was not a
topic for discussion, but clearly Christmas was a shining moment of
gaiety in a family of modest means and strict decorum.
When I was 19, my older brother asked me to look after
his house over Christmas so he and his young family could drive out to
New York for a week. His house was in the woods, and I, intoxicated by
Thoreau at the time, was more dramatic than necessary and announced that
I would spend Christmas alone out there “to figure things out.” A poem
of mine got in the college literary magazine, with the lines:
The ice is thin and deep is the dark
Below, green lights in the trees and red,
Winding my way into the winter mist.
Coat open and the silver blades are sharp
And that long long bend ahead
Will take me out and away from you and all of this.
Which was about skating, but a girl I knew thought it
was suicidal and she came out to the woods to visit me and bring me
dinner from her mother — turkey, candied yams, cranberry, in tinfoil. We
lit candles and sat and meditated on the mystery of life, and it was
pleasant to have someone be so concerned about my well-being. At the
time, I thought of suicide as poetic, an artistic choice stemming from
great emotional depths. Two months later, her boyfriend Leeds was killed
when a drunk driver pulled out of a parking lot and into his mother’s
car coming back home from a play at the Guthrie Theater. Twenty-some
years later, sunk in depression, my friend filled her pockets with rocks
and paddled a canoe out to the middle of a lake and capsized it and
drowned.
Life is good. On a winter night, looking into a fire,
our dead are around us, testifying to that. The books on the shelves,
the young people around the table, the carols on the radio in the
kitchen, the shining snow on the hill that looks out at the Mississippi
River.
As you get old, you gain a stripped-down life, minus
the clutter and hullabaloo, the excess food and alcohol, the meaningless
gifts, and it is quite satisfying to sit with your true love in
candlelight, a plate of cookies on the table, and let memories come and
go. My mother is there. It’s 6 a.m., still dark out, and I’ve come down
the stairs in my pajamas to the darkened tree, a note from Santa, the
crumbs of the gingersnap I left for him, and I hear the padding of bare
feet on the stair, and suddenly the tree bursts into light, and my
mother is standing there in a raggedy robe. She missed her dead mother
and found her every year in making Christmas for us.
Even after she moved to Florida, she flew back for a
proper Minnesota Christmas with frost on the windows and wind in the
chimney. What you do for children is never wasted: This Christmas will
live on and nourish them long after you have faded away.
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