christmas sucks

Christmas sucks. And anyone over the age of 10 who refuses to
acknowledge the obvious truth of that is either a liar or a fool.
Dishonest is what they are and I don't know how they sleep at night or
look at themselves in the mirror in the morning. Christmas is a hoax, a
wretched forced march through the holiday season. I enjoy some parts-
mainly the food -but I used to dread Christmas. It was a terrible black
time of year in our house. Christmas didn't bring twinkling lights and
carols but a deep, deep depression that seized my mother like a
kidnapper, holding her for a ransom that I could never pay. Oh
Christmas was hell in our house. We were both held captive in the dark
hands of depression and grief. It had a hold over our entire house it
seemed. And anyone who stepped into it could sense it, smell it in the
air. Once the depression started coming for the holidays, everyone else
stopped. And whatever the depression dictated was the rule. It didn't
matter if it made sense or not. Sense?? Well who was the judge of what
makes sense? Just because everyone else says you have to do something
doesn't mean that we have to do it, does it now? As Christmas grew near
the windows in our house stayed dark. The colored lights and shiny
ornaments stayed in their boxes down in the basement. Sometimes I would
take out the one or two ornaments that I really liked, ones I had made
in school or that were given to me and I would lay them out on the
coffee table and sit and look at them. It seemed like a crime for them
to sit in the basement during Christmas. Better to have them be out
where I could enjoy them a little. There was no tree to hang them on.
Mom refused to get a tree because it just made a mess. The needles and
stuff. One year I pleaded and whined so much that she relented and
bought the ugliest fake tree she could find. The horror. This "tree"
was made of two green metal rods with holes in it that were supposed to
fit together to be the tree trunk. Except the rods wouldn't stay
together and one constantly slipped inside the other, leaving a trunk
that was about 3 feet tall. Once you were able to rig the trunk to a
standing position you were supposed to hook the bendable green metal
"branches" with green plastic needles on them into the holes. You could
customize your tree by bending the branches however you liked. The
problem was that there were never enough branches and you could either
have a tree that had a few branches distributed evenly or a tree with a
bunch of branches in the very front and none on the other 80% of the
tree. I chose the latter. After wresting with it the first year I just
left it in the basement. Since I had begged for it I had to put it up
by myself in the freezing cold, dark living room and I couldn't do it.
So I pretended I didn't care about the tree. Trees are stupid and a
waste, I said. What's the point? But I knew the point. I also knew that
if I even let myself think about the truth I would crack just like her
so I just didn't let it matter. You're probably wondering, if you don't
have a tree where do you put your presents? Nowhere, that's where.
There is no mounting anticipation as you walk by the twinkling tree,
its branches sagging with tinsel and base crowded with gifts wrapped in
festive paper with bows and ribbons. No, your presents are stuffed in a
closet or in the trunk of the car until Christmas morning. Then they
are brought out, handed to you, unwrapped, in the boxes they came in.
You wake up, open your presents and then mom goes back to her room and
shuts her door and that's it. That's Christmas. After a few years I
just shrugged my shoulders at it all. Nothing fazed me anymore. The
rest of my family was another story. My mom is one of 10 children in a
lily-white, German Catholic family. They are like thousands of other
German Catholic families in Wisconsin. They celebrate Christmas. More
specifically, they have a large family gathering every Christmas Eve at
someone's house -never ours- where there was lots of eating and
drinking and gifts were exchanged and kids ran around crazy and
everyone generally had a pretty good time. When my mother announced her
refusal to celebrate Christmas my family was outraged. Not celebrate
Christmas?? Why, that's crazy!! Oh, if you only knew, I would think to
myself. My aunts took on the challenge, convinced that they could bring
her around. They argued with her in shifts, relieving each other when
they became too exhausted or frustrated to go on. They would persuade
other na?ve, more distant relatives to call my mom to find out her
reasons for refusing to celebrate this joyous season. After the initial
small talk my mother would explode with an angry tirade about "them"
and "having to do with they wanted". If she was fueled by a few glasses
of wine, which was usually the case, this could go on at length. Pretty
soon my mom put an end to these debates by taking the phone off the
hook and eventually getting our phone disconnected. 'We don't need a
phone', she said. 'There's no one I want to talk to.' But that was
later on, after the depression started to seep in way before and linger
on long after Christmas, until it consumed the entire year. Out of
desperation my aunts played their final card. 'What about Lisa?' they
cried. 'Do you want to deprive her of seeing her cousins and family?' I
knew it was coming. I knew it. I knew it. It always came down to this.
'Lisa doesn't care', my mom shouted back. She turned to me, 'You don't
care do you?' I was silent. 'Do you?' Silence. Everyone stared at me.
Oh god why. Why. Make it stop. Finally I choked out, 'yeah, I want to
go.' 'Fine', my mom spat,' but I'm not going'. My aunts were overjoyed.
Yes! Victory! Let the celebrating begin! They worked out the details of
who would pick me up and when, a job that they would develop a rotation
system for over the coming years, and resumed their frenzied holiday
activities. Yeah, I thought, fine for them, they didn't have to go back
and live in a home so tense that hostage negotiations would feel like a
summer day at the beach. I was now a traitor and the cold bite of anger
that was usually reserved for our family and any friends who had
happened to piss her off was now aimed solely at me. Oh the wonders of
the Christmas season and the surprises it can bring! I tried to explain
to her, well to her bedroom door because she wouldn't open it to talk
to me, that I wanted to see my cousins and that I was lonely and that
it could be fun. Of course Christmas Eve was sheer misery and I berated
myself for going the entire time I was there. My mom's absence was the
topic of every conversation and I felt a strange mix of shame and anger
and freedom. It was a feeling that I would become very familiar with. I
stopped going to the Christmases and birthdays and other family
occasions a couple years later. It wasn't worth it. I never felt that
my family's fight over Christmas was ever about me. It was about
something else. I think that in a way my mom was just trying to
preserve a little bit of herself by withdrawing. My family, who now
treated me like any other niece or Grandchild, had disowned my mother
when she became pregnant with me. My father, her lover, was black, 17
years older than her, worked the line at the A.O.Smith plant and was
married. They traveled down to Milwaukee from their tiny towns in
northern Wisconsin, horrified, beside themselves with disgust and
shame. They couldn't accept it. She would have to have an abortion. Our
family warned her that my father would abandon her. They reminded her
that he was already married, that he already had a black family that he
was responsible for. They told her that he was just using her, that she
was na?ve and young. She was ruining her life, they all agreed. What
would she be able to do with her life as an unmarried white mother of a
mixed-race child? After a few months of this arguing, my mothers'
sisters and brothers and parents cut her off. They couldn't condone her
actions. And so she had her baby alone. And for six months after the
baby was born she learned to take care of herself and the baby alone.
Because, of course, everything that they had said would happen
happened. My father did abandon my mother. And even though my parents
reconciled when I was a baby and stayed together for the next 3 or 4
years, my father did eventually go back to his black wife and his black
children. My mother and I remained a hidden compartment in his life,
illegitimate by every standard. My mother did struggle as the unmarried
white mother of mixed child. But I think what ate away at my mom the
most, what drove her over the edge of reason, was that they had been
right. These cynical racist small-minded miserable people had been
right. And she was reminded of this every day, in small ways and large.
But there was something about the artificiality and the fake caring and
kindness of Christmas that was too much for her to bear. She knew what
they really thought of her. And of me. And she would rather live with
that cruel truth than live a lie. Which one is worse? Which one gnaws
away at you?