The way it should be. I actually lived the idyllic Christmas seasons of greeting cards, the Never Never Land of nostalgia of Hollywood stories. I could show you the preserved celluloid eight-millimeter procession of eight children and one waggy Labrador staggering down the steps to a tree lording over a room strewn with gaudy gifts, rubbing our eyes at our father’s blinding moose rack of pre-video-ear floodlights, our cheeks round and red as sentiment itself.
The house was heavy with the drug of real pine sprays we plucked, and mulled wine, hot spiced cider, as logs snapped in the fireplace and carols crackled from the hi-fi. Gingerbread scenes depicting the entire family, from my half-brothers and their families right down to the pets and our bric-a-brac Not-eve-a-Mouse, decked the dining room sideboard. Our mother, a creative genius, made it so—when I was little—even reading Dickens’s Christmas Carol for a month and finishing on Christmas Eve, which she’d polish off with the nativity from the Gospel. Sometimes there were great parties, themselves Dickensian in scale and flavor—eggnog-loaded neighbors full of foolish good will as we kids looked on from the stairway or under the chairs, as neighborhood stories and memories, legends, were stretched and born; other times we’d sit in the dark and admire the enormous tree, laden under all the glitter eight children could heap in tinsel, lights, and colored glass.
Life can be rich and good, and those things are real. But equally really, people live and breathe and breed and die, each in their season.
The way it is. Children grow into these cares. Santa Claus becomes the vestigial comfort of a friendly old story, the tree a rite to remembered and ordered joy, Christ a point of contention, as family—as life—flowers into complexity, opens and confronts you with a challenge that is not yet beautiful, for its newness. I mean awareness of growth and change around you—that siblings leave, that parents bicker, that money and success count more than good will in most people’s daily lives. There are real problems and darknesses. Promises are broken. Nothing makes you safe.
And so you react. There’s preservation and denial, going over the top insistence on the holidays and recapturing feelings forever changed, diving into the colored plastic balls of commerce wed to sentiment, then doing it all over again for the young ones. Or you might rebel, mock the treachery, the phoniness. I always inclined toward the latter. Thus began our bold, tragic forays out of protective childhood and into flirtations with a riskier kind of knowledge, say, someone’s parents’ liquor, or into the buttons and clasps of like-minded girls, and worse. What season more than the Christmas holidays brings out nostalgia for innocence, rhetoric of peace and religion, and the lure of excessive behavior?
At nineteen, I wasn’t a bad person but I was a naughty kid, willing to break rules and dubious about the received world, dying to free myself from disintegrated family, dangerous friends, hopeless love for an older, married woman—my ex-teacher. A high school dropout with a job or direction or a clue as to how things worked, I joined the Navy to the shock and horror of everyone but my parents. Christmas of `76 came two weeks before my assignment to boot camp.
That Christmas Eve was a night of goodbyes, so we partied. With a vengeance. As a parting gift, all the girls smooched me (I had yet to split up with my love in Boston, this self-imposed exile the nearest alternative to death I could think of. Her gift would be a copy of John Donne’s “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” handwritten in calligraphy.) All the guys hugged me. Some suggested it was what they secretly always wanted to do. Others, my close friends, shook their sloppy heads and repeated “Why?” We drank and sang and everything went hysterically hazy.
Few times in life do we have the chance to know so well the lines delineating its changes. That night, which would end as an unexpected but nevertheless cleansing nightmare, began as a wild hallucination (that this could be happening!) and I embraced it with passion, for I saw that everything I knew was passing away—I’d sold my soul and would soon wake up in another world, dark and foreign. I’d leapt and was now reaching back as I fell.
Goodbye Ira and Ando and Sally and Susie and Mom and Dad. Goodbye. Goodbye Westchester and New York and USA. Goodbye solid earth. Goodbye love and comfort and friendly old haunts. Don’t believe I’ll be back. Goodbye world that never really was what it used to be. Goodnight moon.
So I laughed the teenage madman’s laugh. The laugh of backward looking irony. The laugh of false bravado. An experienced but ignorant laugh. “Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. Kiss kiss. I always loved you, never told. Oh girls, old buddies.” A freefall-from-the-face-of-the-earth, pupil dilated, face flushed, atomic-mushroom-death’s-skull-can’t-stop-grinning laugh. When the laughter died to a hollow chuckle and the drinks failed to lighten my head, when the sadness returned and the girls turned their faces back toward the land of the living, I knew it was time to go.
I had no way home. The party had been in the next town, and my ride was incapacitated. I set out to hitch, or walk if I must, in the sobering frigid silence and darkness of newborn Christmas morning, the way lit by blinking red and green lights on houses like bobbing buoys along New Rochelle’s affluent North End. Two shaggy young men in a VW bug gave me a ride to Beechmont Lake, a mile from my Larchmont home. I suppose they were strange, doing their own hissy kind of laugh, but then, what was I? They offered me a joint, and being polite, I took a small hit. They insisted I have another, “take it all man. Christmas special.” I handed it back to the passenger. “Suit yourself, man. Happy returns.” He put the joint out and hissed.
Wow, strong stuff. Now my head felt light indeed. My body too. In fact, my body felt lie nothing at all, just an electric current humming along a sleeved wire. I looked at my hands—so very far away. Stepping from the car back to the road I summoned two words to my mouth that I hoped sounded like “thank you.” The door slammed and they sped away.
My jaw dropped. The curb looked somehow awfully distant yet too tall for my feet to climb. I lifted a foot as high as it would go and stepped up, almost falling when it hit nothing but air. All right, be careful. This is something different. Don’t panic. Just remember how to walk. You can do it. Parallel reality, here. You can crawl if you have to, just follow this thing home. Before me the familiar street stretched like a tongue to hell. Oh god, I am tripping. What have I done? Where am I in the world? Hostile territory. The houses rose and arched over me like great hatefull bullies, their angry x-ray eyes fixed on my rotten guts, their breath the odor of snow. It was as if my conscience, my fears, suspicions, and self-loathings had formed a landscape out of dear, placid Larchmont. “You can’t fool me!” I shouted. “I know you.”
But I also knew I’d been drugged—angel dust? Acid? I recognized nothing about this place where I’d lived for nineteen years. Couldn’t name the street. Couldn’t place in my mind any of the homes or families I’d seen a thousand times, known all my life. Not a doorway or a dog bark. Each step I took felt backward as the distance grew farther; then a treadmill, as each house seemed to replicate the last. Was I walking in circles? Have I been doing this for hours? Wait, where did those guys drop me? Maybe it’s a trick, somewhere other. Maybe I should knock on a door and get the cops, an ambulance. I could be freezing to death and not fell it. No. I know I know this place. I looked to the sky and imagined navigating by the stars. A corner of my brain assured me, “you are insane right now. They have drugged you. Never mind your senses. Never mind your thoughts. Your feet will take you home. You are walking home.”
Colors became vivid. Too vivid. The colors were red and blue and yellow with haloes that streaked as I walked, red and green, these mocking Christmas lights, the colors of every promise, of every comfort, winking, winking, from the lovely, luscious spotlit homes and lawns, spitting on me, screaming at me, screaming at my intrusion, my failure, my strangeness—alien! Your passport, please. Your pedigree. We know what you want with our daughters. Loser! You’ll never know our warm insides.
I stopped walking, with the odd sensation they’d entered through my mouth—it was their electricity that was humming in my bile—these strings of bulbs and anthropomorphic porches, slipped down my throat like spoiled oysters and there let loose their poisoned words, and I puked them back all over the star sparkling sidewalk—the lights, the homes, the words, the laughter, the leaving. The world slowly came back to me in dull, workmanlike browns.
From Chatsworth Avenue I turned onto my street and again wondered at the houses. How did a man get there? My father? What greatness would it take and how did it feel? To have such things?
At home my parents were in bed. The perfunctory tree stood over some unopened boxes. My younger brother slept in a chair before the TV (the other sibs all gone). A horror move about the devils breeding babies cast his face in blue. I wept until dawn.
For the next four years Christmas would mean standing watch and manning radios while the married men saw to their young. I didn’t much mind. It was their turn; it was for them and theirs. I’d had it with such crap. Not bitter, not disillusioned, just, not me. And so for years to come.
Now it has somehow come to pass, it has snuck up on me in the ambush of years, that I have made my own family and modest home, a late hatch of little ones. We’ve suffered the deaths of parents, a brother, a son. (I learned while writing this piece that a friend just died. Goodbye this Christmastime and always, Kate. We’ll miss you.) And now I have students of my own, about the same age as me on that dark night. The clock has brought me around. So let my children and my students’ holidays be special and fun and spiritual (this from a lapsed Catholic, my wife a lapsed Jew), but let them also be part of a continuum of deepening understanding and celebration and accepted change in the face of a heart-breaking world. May they never feel so removed from the possibilities of the past and future as I once did.
Let the holidays be what they will, each to each: religious renewal, family reunion, commercial opportunity, oppressive imposition of kitschy culture, bit of fun and color in the depth of winter. Today my wife reminds me that I again love stockings on the mantel lumpy with tangerines and boxed chocolate, that I’m insistent on atavistic family rituals in the decking of the fir. Still, I’ve made my terrifying leap into life. For me, the holidays are no more of a reminder than every other singular day, that the only thing, the only possible thing that can matter above all else, every day, is love.
This article appears in December 2018.
