Christmas Things

A time for memories, changes, endings, and new beginnings.

Author’s Note: This post began as a written essay, then became an audio recording, then turned into a video. It was written Christmas week, 2023, and the references to “last week” or “this month” were left in as the work slowly progressed, even though it’s now January. I recommend the video version, embedded just below this note and above the post, though the text is the same in both the video narration and the essay below.

The whitest Christmas I can remember happened in 2002. I had just moved to Virginia the month prior, chasing the young woman who wasn’t going to wait around for me to figure out if I was going to marry her or not. On Christmas Eve, we drove together in my 1990 Pontiac Safari 6000 station wagon, the one with the dissolving midnight blue paint and the 2-by-6 board wedged behind the driver’s seat to keep it from reclining all the way back, to midnight Mass at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC. In tow was her five-year-old daughter, the one who referred to that basilica as “The Long Church,” not because it was one of the largest churches in the world, but because of how long it took to get there from their condo in Reston, especially on public transit, which they sometimes had to take on account of not having a car of their own.

The first flakes didn’t start falling until we crossed the Potomac. By the time we’d made it to the parking lot off of Michigan Avenue, there was a dusting. Under the bright white of the metal halide lights, the flakes were distinct and clear, falling slow and steady through the night. I’d grown up in Upstate New York, but with all the snows of childhood, even I couldn’t remember the last time we’d seen it come down on Christmas like this.

I don’t recall much about the Mass that night. I do remember praying fervently for guidance, so that I could get over whatever nagging doubts and anxiety and fear of commitment I was working through and figure out, before it was too late, if this was the girl I was supposed to spend the rest of my life with. It was a big decision, and I had no idea how to know if I was going to screw it up. As we left that night, driving around the city to take in the fresh coat of snow, now several inches deep, I didn’t have any greater clarity in my mind than when I started. But a week later, driving to work on New Year’s Eve morning, I felt something shift in my gut in a way that seemed definitive. I bought a ring that day. On January 10th, 2003, I proposed, kneeling in front of the tabernacle of the crypt chapel in that same Long Church where we’d spent Christmas eve, listening to the joyful chorus of the schola as the world was blanketed in white.

These days, resigned to the apparent inevitability of living in the desert, I’ve given up on white Christmases, though I do still love them. So, too, have I given up on spending Christmases doing the thing they’re actually about: observing, by way of liturgical action, the occasion of Christ’s birth. I don’t know what to think of Christ these days, or of Christianity. My cradle Catholicism-turned-hard-earned skepticism — or is it cynicism? — has me firmly at arm’s length from all of it. It doesn’t mean I don’t think about it quite a lot of the time, only that I no longer am able to identify with it as I once did. And really, by “identify with it,” I mean have it act as a substitute for having an identity of my own. I don’t know who I am without it, so in retrospect, that means I didn’t know who I was with it. I just thought that I did.

I started therapy again this month for the first time since 2019, before my world imploded and every relationship I had was stress tested to the breaking point. Before I publicly walked away from my successful Catholic media startup and whatever placebo version of religious faith I thought was real that drove it. In a very short time, I lost or damaged everything that had ever mattered to me or given me purpose, and I’ve spent every moment since trying to stop the room from spinning and get my feet back under me so I can start moving forward in a straight line again. My therapist told me that with so many things to address all at once, we had to find a strategic plan of action to start untangling the knots. The first step, he said, before dealing with anything else, was to start figuring out who I really am. I told him that it seems impossible that a man could get to his 45th birthday and not have an answer to that question, but he assured me that it was common. I’m going to have to take his word for it, because I feel like an idiot. Forgetting to figure out who you are isn’t like forgetting to grab a gallon of milk while you’re at the store. One of the main reasons you forget the milk is because you’re probably in a bit of a rush, not milling around the store for over four decades.

Someone asked me the other day what we do for Christmas now that I’ve walked away from all that stuff. I told him that we do the same thing we’ve always done, just minus the religious bits. It might seem stupid to believers, but I’ve always loved the cultural, and yes, even the commercial aspects of Christmas. I love the secular songs, the shopping, the decorations, the festive moods, the feeling in the air. I love giving gifts as an adult almost as much as I loved receiving them as a child. Every Christmas eve I stop and take a photo, somewhere around three or four in the morning, after every last present has been placed under the tree, with a feeling of concerned satisfaction that we spent too much and probably spoiled the kids again. I shake my head and say we’re crazy, but I’ll do the same thing again next year. I love it. I don’t ever want to stop loving it. It’s the place where my battered inner self comes into genuine contact with the spirit of generosity and a love that asks for nothing in return, and I don’t ever want to lose that.

The funny thing is, it’s the exact thing that told me, probably more than anything else, that my father loved me. My memories of him from my childhood are of a man who was often angry and aloof and critical and hard on me in particular, but on Christmas, he turned into someone else. My parents never had much, and were always money conscious, but dad made sure our Christmas mornings looked the way I now emulate in my yearly photos of the tree: neatly-wrapped packages spilling out in preposterous piles from beneath the lower boughs. I remember the indescribably exciting feeling of coming into the living room in the morning darkness, lit only by the bulbs on the tree, to discover all the presents that had mysteriously appeared there overnight. I think of the year we got the red plastic toboggan that was way too big to fit. The Christmas where we got a bunch of action figures from Return of the Jedi, including a Rancor and a speeder bike that exploded into pieces with the touch of a button. Or that time I found an Atari cartridge of Joust! in my stocking, and played it in the pre-dawn hours until my parents woke up. My mom, who would use Christmas as an opportunity to give us boring things we needed like socks or flannel shirts, always seemed a little reproachful about Dad’s relative prodigality when it came to buying gifts he thought his kids would love. And maybe he even wanted to be a kid with us, as eager as he was to get a turn with some of the toys under the tree. Christmas seemed to light up his wounded soul the same way it does mine. And I suppose, in that way, it connects me to him now, even though, to my great sadness, our relationship has been strained once again by certain recent events.

My wife, who has always been even more invested in the festivities than I am, has a different kind of memory of her father on Christmas. As a Chinese immigrant with no religion except his version of the American dream — making money and gaining status — he treated Christmas day like any other. “I gotta open the store. Gotta go to work.” And off he’d saunter. She didn’t know what Christmas even was until some of the kids at school finally explained to her that it was Jesus’s birthday. We’ll have been married 20 years this summer and I really only just had it sink in for the first time this week, how every Christmas for my wife has been bittersweet because of this association. She used to hide it better than she does now. We’re in a season of our lives where we just don’t have it in us to pretend anymore.

“Weddings, funerals, and holidays,” I told the kids, wondering why their mother looked so sad just before Christmas dinner, “are the hardest times of the year for a lot of people. They’re the times we connect most strongly with family, with memories. And they’re not always positive.” The lack of sleep and the lubrication of holiday libations also help to loosen our death grip on our daily poker faces. So we smile through tears and eat our feelings like meaty bites of delicious, rare Christmas prime rib, and distract ourselves by watching a movie or playing a game while the latest mechanical wonder-toy goes whizzing by our heads.

I understand why the real message of Christmas is so important to people, even if I can’t bring myself to really believe in it these days. We all know what it feels like to be in need of a savior; we all know that deep-seated need to feel loved enough that somebod y who truly cares about us and maybe even has the power to help would go out of their way to come for us and rescue us from that need. There’s a lot of theological baggage that complicates this beautiful message in ways I’d rather not go into at the moment, but it eats at me. Maybe my disbelief, too, is a season of my life, and the page will turn once I’ve done whatever it is I’m supposed to be doing at this point in the story. Maybe it won’t. I can’t see the answer from here.

I do know that I’m becoming ever-more aware of, and sensitive to, the reality of our mortality. It’s so cliche it almost feels embarrassing to say it out loud, but I am. Having turned 45 last month, I’m aware that I’m very likely more than halfway done with my earthly voyage, and I’ve only just recently started to unpack the stuff that really matters, almost too late in the game to make it count. A recent (treatable) health discovery has deepened this awareness. Something that, had I continued to procrastinate about it, might have brought my story to an end considerably sooner. Why is it that we come to wisdom so late, when it’s needed so early — not just for ourselves, but for the people we love, especially our children, who could benefit far more from the experience of grandparents than the stubborn mistake-making of the young and carelessly fertile? The fruit of our child-rearing experiments doesn’t become clear until they’re old enough not to benefit much from our attempts at self-correction. If it’s a joke life plays on us, it’s a cruel one. We only really know how we should have raised them once they’re grown.

As this year draws rapidly to a close, I find myself reflecting on all these things, wondering about the words on the next page, anticipating the adventures in store as the chapter number is increased yet again by one. I have an intuition, though I can’t be certain, that next year is going to be a better year than last year for the first time in quite a while. I don’t know if that’s wishful thinking, but I certainly intend to make it true, whether I have to drag it kicking and screaming or not.

Merry Christmas to you and yours. Here’s to a better and brighter 2023.