December 3, 2004
Friday
This will be the twenty-ninth Christmas I’ve spent in this house. It was built in 1976, and my first husband and I moved into it when we’d been married only six months. I’d been brought up in a traditional Catholic home, but I was in my agnostic years then and had married a man who’d had almost no religious upbringing. Worse, his parents and brothers, now scattered across the country and rarely in touch with each other, were less a family and more a collection of people who all had the same last name and had once occupied the same house. Neither of us had a religious attitude about Christmas, and he lacked a set of family traditions and rituals that might connect him even to the secular aspects of the season.
Nevertheless, those first few years we put up a tree, decorated it with ornaments I bought from museum catalogues, and exchanged gifts, not one of which I can now recall. After a while we didn’t do the tree anymore because we never had guests and the whole exercise seemed pointless. Even when I began to reclaim my spirituality and discover a faith for the first time, the traditional Christmas was not a part of my life. In 1980 my parents moved to Florida and I felt like something of an orphan. Ironically, that was also the year that all of my husband’s brothers managed to get “home” (or at least this city, where their parents were then situated) at Christmas. My in-laws put on a lavish commercial Christmas, complete with gifts of sweaters and the latest electronic gadgets, a silver foil tree with twinkling lights and an angel on top, and a catered turkey dinner on the big day.
One of the gadgets his parents gave my husband was a transistor radio that also received television audio. He discovered that if he strung the flexible antenna along the wall and taped it to the window with a Johnson & Johnson Band-Aid in what was then a spare bedroom (the window I’m sitting in front of now, actually!) and flipped on the VHF tuner, he could pick up neighbors’ conversations. This amused him all winter, and he began sleeping in here, eavesdropping far into the night. It took me years to get the adhesive marks off the glass.
When I married Ron in 1983 I got interested in Christmas again. I had an active and enriching faith by then and the idea of Advent as preparing for a change engaged me. I also found a renewed interest in the traditional myths and holiday rituals that I had enjoyed as a child. Ron’s extended Italian family provided a delightful set of “things we have to do a certain way,” such as eating squid in sauce for the Christmas vigil meal, Midnight Mass, Uncle Flash’s gathering of old men at his Christmas morning open house, and dinner for 70 or so with a first course of spaghetti and meatballs at one of the restaurants the family owned.
Christmas really got off the ground for me when Lynn was born in 1985. Ron’s mother gave her a Lenox teddy bear ornament and I bought a different Lenox ornament for us. I decorated the house and bought a crèche. When she was baptized on Gaudete Sunday (December 15) I gave what became the prototype of my Gala Open House Extravaganza. Through the years I acquired many Christmas items, each with its own story and special place in the decorating scheme.
This is the first year that Lynn is not with us throughout the whole Advent season. On November 27, the evening before the first Sunday of Advent, we had our traditional soup and bread supper, put up the crèche and the tree, and had the ceremonial watching of the 1953 Christmas episode of Dragnet. She went back to school the next day.
And I’ve done little since then. I haven’t put up the banner over the piano nor the display of Lynn’s pictures with Santa Claus nor the second crèche in the fireplace cavity that represents the story of Amahl and the Night Visitors. I keep thinking that everything I get out I will have to put away.
“Not every room in your house has to say Merry Christmas,” advised a stress-reduction article I read once. Right now there’s a fully-decorated tree and an Advent wreath on a tall plant stand in just one room, and that’s it. Can that be enough?
To be included on the notify list, e-mail me:
margaretdeangelis [at] gmail [dot] com (replace the brackets with @ and a period)