A Perfectly Good Christmas
My kids are four and six. As far as I can tell, it’s the worst possible age for a pandemic. They have lost all the meaningful structure in their lives and are almost—not quite, but almost—old enough to understand why. They know there’s a virus. They know there’s a person in charge of doing the work our country needs done, and they know that he has done everything wrong, and that it has made the impact of the virus more severe. They know his name, technically, but I don’t like to hear it come out of their sweet mouths, so at home we call him The Villain. The pandemic and The Villain have taken so much from them. They could not take Christmas.
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The first Christmas I remember was 1981, the year I turned seven. My parents had divorced in the spring, when I was still six, and my father had married this horrible woman three weeks after it was final. She stood in the back yard of the house where we had lived in a filmy ruffled gown printed with giant brown flowers—it looked like a couch—and took my family from me.
She didn’t, of course. But that’s how it felt. I had already learned by that time to blame the other woman just as much as I blamed the cheating man.
So this woman and her son, who was two years younger than me and whom my father adopted, lived in my house where we had been happy—or seemed happy, or I had been happy—and cooked in my mother’s kitchen and drove my mother’s car and lived my mother’s life. Meanwhile the apartment we had moved into didn’t have a refrigerator or stove for several weeks, until a friend of my mother’s found someone willing to give us both. I moved away from my beloved school to one I hated, where my new teacher stood over me shouting as I cried silently over a timed math test I could not complete. I had been vibrant and lively, the class social butterfly; now I was very small, inside and out.
At home with my mother there was almost nothing for Christmas. My mother’s tips waiting tables at Waffle House and at the clerical job that followed didn’t allow for much. But at my father’s house, where I went on Christmas afternoon so that everyone could say they had fulfilled the court order, the living room was so full of wrapped presents that you couldn’t walk into it without stepping on one. It looked as though a Christmas display at a department store had been knocked over, scattered over every inch of carpet. Most of the gifts were terrible: day-of-the-week underwear in the wrong size, ugly clothes bought at cheap stores by the ugly new wife. But also the newest Barbies, complete with accessories. Gift after gift, until we were buried in discarded wrapping paper. Even at seven, I knew it was wrong. I knew that someone was trying to prove something: Look how happy we are now.
What I mean to tell you is that I knew the danger here. I knew that we couldn’t unmake a catastrophe in the toy aisle at Target.
The question, then: What does plenty look like? My oldest son’s sixth birthday was less than two weeks before, and we go a bit bigger on birthdays than Christmas. And yet we felt a strong pull to buy them everything they asked for: a Grogu doll. Baby Anna and Elsa dolls. Books. Legos. Funko Pops. Plush dinosaurs. A few shirts. New pajamas. We did: we bought it all. I wrapped it all in beautiful paper, with beautiful ribbons. And still, feeling that we’d done everything they wanted, it looked like this. Not like an exploded capitalist nightmare. It fit solidly under a modest tree. Everything they had asked for was not much more than enough.
I fucked up the cheese soufflés I made for dinner. I nearly fucked up the chocolate custards, but did not. We ate both anyway, and the children liked the botched soufflés, or at least were polite enough to pretend to, so I guess, after all this, I’m making some pretty good children, too.
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I wrote about that lost, broken Christmas in a short story in grad school. It used certain details of my parents’ divorce—purple lipstick on a cigarette butt in the ashtray of the Chrysler Cordova my mother loved so much—interplaying with a front story about busting up relationships anew, and I read it for my thesis reading in front of a full auditorium, as the opening act for Jane Hamilton, as was my program’s ritual. My mother and my best friend had crossed the country to visit. At the moment when I read that line, my mother shouted from her seat, “THAT REALLY HAPPENED.” She meant that it had happened to her.
I thought it had happened to me.
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I must’ve said fifteen times heading into this holiday, “This is probably the first Christmas they’ll remember.” I even said it to them. They’ll remember all of this: the virus, The Villain, the terrible weeks of school on tiny screens that only work intermittently, the handful of weeks in actual classrooms, the teachers the four-year-old can’t quite bond with behind masks because small children need to see faces. Hopefully, too, the drives after dark to see Christmas lights, the waffles with whipped cream and chocolate chips on Christmas Eve, the donuts from my favorite donut place on Christmas morning, the books, the dolls, the presents—not that many, really, not too much—answering their wishes. I hope I will remember them, too.
As Robert Sapolsky explains in Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, the human brain doesn’t un-learn fear. The synaptic response to a fear trigger does not become extinct. What happens instead is that we learn, over time, non-fear: We develop a different brain response to the same stimulus that caused us to be afraid, a response that tells us we are not afraid. I like to think that’s what happens to those of us who learned that we couldn’t trust familial love, that we couldn’t trust the fleeting seconds of happiness that came packaged with hurt. That we learn something new when we give our kids, or our friends, or our chosen families access to shared joy. I like to think that we are making our own selves anew.