Holiday

I wish I could skip right past Christmas this year. Move ahead to March. A benign month, no depressing holidays to negotiate, there are no memories of March that torment me. Of course, the notion that one can just skip Christmas is ridiculous, Christmas is everywhere, it is in my car, in my grocery isle, wrapped around the local coffee kiosk like an absurd, well-lit shawl. My daughter, who is just beginning to collect her own Christmas stories, is forcing me to reconcile mine: the good, the bad and the ugly, all carefully packed like ornaments in boxes. I imagine Christmases to be unwrapped and lined up on the mantle, each one telling a story of a year on its way out.


I have these memories of Christmas that haunt my mind each December as soon as I spy the first string of white lights of the season. He was a Christmas fanatic. Really, he loved the holidays, the tree, lights, he would arrange boughs on our fireplace mantle for days, moving out one, adding another. I would watch in amazement, in awe really, all the while growing more and more frustrated with his wacky technique of stringing the white lights on the bottom of the tree, with the color coming out on top. Some of our biggest fights revolved around Christmas lights, infamous winter storms that trapped us, frozen like monsters beneath a thick sheet of ice and we would sit and wait for the thaw to reunite with our honeymoon selves. It is because of all this that I find Christmas to be utterly worth skipping, year after year. It is more painful this year than last, because he is circling back to the man I once knew, the thoughtful, festive, bough designer. I try to make Christmas something else now, morph it away from the past, snapshots of years when I was happy, full of joy. Last year there was no joy. I was mortified each and every day with the knowledge that my husband was using his creative edge not for decorating fireplaces but for discovering new ways to stay warm during one of the coldest and snowiest winters in recent memory. Last year was my worst Christmas ever. I could not realize joy knowing my husband was hunkered down in a sleeping bag on the porch of an abandoned house, not sleeping, ever. Last year I shifted like sheets of ice between his situation and mine. His: homeless, cold, hungry, reused Starbucks coffee cup, to the point of it nearly falling apart into a pulpy mess. All for a quarter refill. I will never forget the look on each and every barista's face as they shifted their gaze from his pathetic cup, to his dirty, scroungy pile of belongings in the corner, to the two year old girl who proudly held his hand, then finally to me. Me? Hurried, flustered, emotionally spent, beyond judgement, almost. I switched our meeting grounds from yuppie coffee shops to the anonymity of a fast food restaurant. We met at a KFC just before Christmas so he could see his daughter and give her the presents he had collected for her. A few stuffed animals, donated clothes, some strange knickknacks that only a two year old could find magical. For me: a new pair of Columbia tennis shoes, donated. Carefully selected by the husband for the wife who walked out six months earlier with all of her shoes in a plastic garbage bag. Lotions, a scarf, more tokens of his kindness for wife and child. A wife's gift for her estranged husband? Divorce papers, a Starbucks gift card, a plate of pity with a side of rejection. My husband? Marched on with his pride, his dirty sleeping bag, while his past loaded up a car with shame, sadness and depression and drove on. Two poles pulling further apart. Spinning on the same axis, but ending up in different worlds.