The Ghosts of Christmas Past and The Grief in Christmas Present

I get a lot of sympathetic head tilts when I mention working on Christmas Eve or the days between Christmas and New Year. I think some judge the adultiness of a job by things like not going to work for two weeks at the end of the year. I appear to have the job of a real adult, so nobody thinks that maybe I’d rather save my vacation time for summer when it’s nice outside. In all honesty, I love this week at work. It’s so quiet. The expectations are low. I can wear jeans and eat leftovers and nobody asks me for things, unless it’s to eat this piece of cake. This is the week when I organize my office or rearrange the file room.

My office, during the days after Christmas, is a place where I can decompress without looking at the tornado of toys that currently inhabits my living room. And bedroom. And the kids’ bedroom. And the bathroom. You get the idea. Decompression feels more important than ever, this year — the first Christmas after my dad’s death.

I went into the day with curious trepidation. I wanted to enjoy Christmas, I did not want to spend the whole day crying on my sister’s couch or avoiding everyone. So, I compartmentalized. The morning was relatively easy  — navigating the first Christmas as separated co-parents might have been more difficult if I hadn’t had the rest of the day looming.

For the rest of the day I made the conscious decision to imagine my dad in the 1980s and 1990s, back when his presence at Christmas was a dinner-only appearance. Maybe stuffing my feelings down was not the healthiest way to approach it, but it is what I needed to do to make it through. I can’t even write this post as well as I would like, because to write well you have to confront the feelings and I just can’t right now.

As children, our parents would wake us up, all bleary eyed and cranky until we remembered it was Christmas. Then, my sister and I treated the top of the stairs as a starting gate waiting for the ok to go down and ravage the presents. No time was taken to watch each person open a gift one at a time — a tradition I have come to prefer. We ripped and opened, with the occasional “thanks!” punctuating the proceedings.

Exhausted, we would eat Moravian Sugar Cake or cinnamon rolls until the sugar rush practically lifted us into space. My dad stood in the doorway that separated our living room and den, adjusting his tie. The adjustment of his tie is such an indelible memory of my father. It said, “ok, now it is time for me to be more serious,” though he’d still work to annoy you if he had a free minute; I think he considered that a second job.

Then he would be gone, leaving us to nap or cook or watch TV until it was time to go to my grandparents’ house. At my grandparents’ house, we would eat fondant and fudge and cookies until we wondered how we were going to have room for dinner, which was actually served around 1:00. A few minutes before the last of the dishes were set out on the peninsula in the kitchen, my dad would show up, loosening his tie as he walked through the house. He always sat at the kid table with us. After dessert, he might hang around for a while before readjusting his tie and heading back to work.

He ran a movie theater, and many years the extended family would all traipse down there in the evening, where my dad would have told the box office person to just let us all in. We’d probably see him for a minute or two there, as he walked around looking so official. I can only think of a few times that he ever actually sat in a theater and watched a movie, and when he did he was usually alone.

We would head back home and crawl into beds, and he would come into our rooms around 10:15 and say goodnight to us in our sleep. I have no idea if this last part happened, I just like to think it did.

For childhood Christmases, my dad showed up, but he was never a big part of the day at large. It wasn’t weird for him to not be there, I guess is what I’m trying to say.

And that’s what I wanted to feel last night.

I let my brain believe he was at the movie theater, despite having left that business half a dozen years ago.

Still, the setting was different enough to draw me back to reality on a regular basis. We were at my sister’s house with the next generation of family opening gifts and playing with my nephew’s toys. That’s where I kept seeing him, sitting on the couch or the ottoman or down on the floor, wrestling with my nephew, being silly with Lorelei and Rowan. Playing with their gifts, making them talk or pretend to attack. I avoided my Facebook Memories yesterday, because I could not bear to see the pictures from last year, of him outside playing soccer and going down the slide and pushing the kids on the swing.

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It felt like a sob strangled in my throat. A grief and pain that rose up and had nowhere to go, because I did not want to deal with those feelings right then. It hit me, wave after wave of this lurching sensation.

It’s been drowning me a little all week. The New York Times piece opened me up to the pain of what could have been, and Christmas held it open with the pain of what was. I have wanted to call my dad a million times to talk about the NYT piece. To get his advice. Sometimes it bordered on mansplaining, but I didn’t care, I just took what I wanted and ignored the rest. I cannot even think the words “he would have been proud” without the dam threatening to break. So I won’t go into that here, on my lunch break. But he would have been.

I think that’s it. That’s where I miss him the most. The places where I can see him in the past or the places that I can imagine his life and mine intersecting today or in the future.

Overall, Christmas was nice — just incomplete.

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