Keeping Christmas

My parents knew how to keep Christmas, despite all their other vices.  They pulled together for the holidays, ensuring a huge tree and a few presents their girls genuinely craved.  As I grow older, I realize why Christmas meant so much to them.  They both grew up with so little, save education.  Food was scarce in their childhood houses and they wanted to ensure their girls had toys at Christmas.  We were middle class growing up, with enough food, Catholic school education and a few outfits not our uniforms.  Still others had more.  I remember asking my mother why Santa bought some kids so many more presents when he only gave me two.  She looked pained, then told me that Santa only gave each child two gifts and that the wealthy parents bought the rest.  My mother would have crying jags at Christmas, because of the emotional strain of wanting it to be perfect.

I grew up with the need to make things perfect in my own way.  I wanted the decorations just right, the meal perfect and to shower the less financially fortunate members of my family with gifts.  A check would've been a better choice, rather than expensive books or clothes.  I wanted to be Santa, to feel bigger than big.  I liked gift-giving.  Then a few years back the financial woes began - the shrinking salary and our unwise decisions coming back to bite us in our asses. 

This Christmas, we have been snowed in and my husband has not been able to make money as a contractor.  My eight-year old son asked "Will Santa have money for presents?"  I had to order the gifts on the 21st, because the tires on my car are bald and can't handle snow.  The gifts from Santa did not arrive in time, due to "weather delays."  I told the kids that Santa's sleigh got stuck in Michigan, but that his elf ran on ahead and delivered the pair of laser guns.  They believed it, or pretended to, and are now happily tearing around the house, giggling and roaring in glee.  I was so stressed last night and they are such joys. 

It has taken me this long to see what my parents went through and how they struggled.  We almost lost our house once.  My mother suffered alcoholism and extreme panic attacks and my father incested me and could be vicious at times.  Money was tight the time I was nine and he told my sister and I, that Santa's sleigh had collided with a passenger plane and that all were killed.  He laughed as I wept and wailed.  I so wanted that jolly old elf to be true, a symbol of goodness in the world.  I believed even when the other kids at school jeered at me, even when my sister ceased believing.  My mother, always the intercessor between me and my cruel father, told me that Rudolf had been found alive, floating on an iceberg in Baffin Bay.  I imagined him being air-lifted to safety, the shining of his deformed nose, a comfort to all.

As I grew older and more things went unfixed at home, due to the disintegration of my parent's brains, I found comfort in a hole in the screen window of my bedroom.  I would push out the things I no longer believed in - little dolls - fairies - even bits of paper with writing.  I wonder if the people, who bought our house, found these things at the bottom of the hill - a strange collection of dolls, wrappers and writings buried in the ivy, clinging to the fence.