It’s Christmas. My kids have been teens for a while, and gone are the ridiculously late nights of assembling toys and secretly wrapping the presents from Santa. I miss the Christmas mornings of waking to the squeals of excitement and little voices, pleading with me to “get up! Get up!” because “Santa was here!”
One of my biggest goals since the girls have been young has been to create great Christmas memories for them. I want them to remember Christmas fondly.
Creating a magical holiday looks different for each of us. I was always struck by how my favorite holiday of the year could fill me with so much stress and guilt. I know all about the “reason for the season” and the famous Dr. Seuss sentiment of Christmas being about more than the store, but that never helped me to feel less guilt or stress. In fact, it may have added a layer. Knowing full good and well that I myself only remember a handful of gifts from my own childhood (my white roller skates with the pink pom poms with the jingle bell in the middle of them will probably never be trumped, to be honest), I want every Christmas to be better and more memorable than the last, which is probably the reason I rely on my kids to talk about Christmases past; I’m afraid of conjuring up ghosts.
Magic was a holiday requirement, not a choice. I had to give the gift of magic to my kids because, at times, I didn’t have much else. The first year I relied on a social service organization to help with gifts was humiliating for me. There I was, in a line of poor people wrapping around the building, standing in the cold, waiting my turn. I remember standing there, trying to not make eye contact with anyone, and watching the faces of people leaving. There was no joy in their expressions. In fact, they looked more tired after walking out of the church than they did walking in.
The ghosts of Christmases Past want me to remember because it’s painful, but my emotional brain only allows me to hear a man barking, “Pick up one roll of toilet paper and work your way down the line. You get one of each.” I remember that the kids received ridiculously large stuffed animals that seemed perfectly selected to represent the scarlet letter, and I couldn’t lift my head up walking to the car, beaten down by the fact that a church actually felt charitable and impactful by gifting me one roll of toilet paper. I was impacted; I never accepted their offer of help or their version of Christianity again.
The quest for Christmas magic grew more important each year when my kids were younger. I did all the things I could do, like buying a blue blinking light to hang in the window on Christmas Eve so Santa could find us. We wrote letters to the bearded man and mailed them, and he always wrote back. A gift from a family friend had my kids hunting for the Elf on the Shelf. I’d like to add that I sucked at being that parent. Remembering to move the little imp every night was a monumental task within itself for me, but coming up with creative ideas for his mischief at the last minute proved impossible. The last year he joined our family, he spent a week in bed, calling Santa on an Obama phone with his nightly report because he had fallen and broken his leg. What? Don’t judge me.
I used to wrap each item individually so the pile under the tree would look bigger. Though I’ve never been one to post photos of such things on social media, photos from others helped to prompt that holiday gift wrapping tradition. A couple of years there I even wrapped stocking gifts as a way to cope with my desperation for gift giving. But instead of feeling proud when the kids would reply to folks with, “I got so much stuff that I don’t remember (what I got),” I always felt ashamed. And although I wanted to explain that statement to people, my fear of the ghosts of Christmases Past talking to my kids always kept me silent. Creating a magical Christmas sometimes felt as if I was creating an illusion rather than a memory.
The kids are teens now, and Christmases are different. I wrap what I can together to save time and avoid waste. I am also the first one up, begging them to “get up! Get up!” because “Santa came!” The ghosts still whisper to me, but they gave up on me when I refused to. And I bought a 12 pack of toilet paper yesterday.
Happy Holidays,
Amy Jo
