Family Christmas

[rps]

Saved in the 80’s

            My mother and father were well intentioned people who loved their children. They came from different backgrounds that had dysfunction in common. Father was raised as a poor depression child without a father. He escaped the lead and zinc mines on a football scholarship. His mother was upset when he left Commerce, Oklahoma as it left no one to take care of her. Mother was raised by an aunt and survived an alcoholic uncle who died by gunshot in front of her. Pretty and popular, her values were based on status and appearances. How they came to marry and survive as a couple is the stuff of another tale. After we three children were born, mother and father decided Christmas would be special for us and look like a Norman Rockwell painting. With no background on which to rely, they did the best they could. The holiday became a torture. I was nearly forty before I ever enjoyed Christmas. Before then, I always wondered why everyone else seemed to go crazy.

            The first Christmases I remember were spent in El Paso. For several years before I was ten, mother and father loaded us in the car and drove thirty hours across Texas and New Mexico to grandmother’s house. Aunts, uncles, cousins and others all arrived to play roles in a macabre drama. Grandmother directed the soap opera complete with confrontations, betrayals, excess drinking, and slammed doors. One Christmas, my present was twenty stitches from a thrown Christmas tree ornament. The next year my sisters and I received socks from grandmother while the cousins all were given toys. My father declared no more that year.

            After that we stayed home, and my parents tried to establish their own traditions. Mother read magazines and developed color themes for each holiday. Father became obsessed with the largest tree. The weeks before Christmas were studies in manic preparations. The night we decorated the tree became known as fight night. If the tree even fit in the house, father could never seem to set it up straight. One year he finally set an eyebolt in the ceiling and hung the tree. Mother insisted the ornaments graduate in size from the top down. The packages had to be artistically arranged.  The fight wasn’t over until we stood in front of the tree for the annual picture. When I left home for college, I was sure Christmas was a synonym for self-delusional hell.

            After I married and our children reached the age they would look forward to Christmas, my attitude began to change. By then I had a stocking that said Bah Humbug, but I at least had a stocking. I watched Nancy buy paper and ribbon at after Christmas sales to save it for the next year. I began to attend the Nutcracker each year to watch my daughters be mice. Finally, one year as Nancy came to bed at three in the morning Christmas Eve, I realized something. Christmas is the time of the year when people go out of their way to show they love you. I was forced to admit I needed to stop keeping myself from enjoying Christmas.

            I still hate Christmas carols in elevators, especially before Thanksgiving, but on Christmas morning every year I’m happy. I always get the same present and that’s just fine with me.

[Daryk Campbell Sr]

Not to the same level, but,  I understand.   I'm thankful for my parents' trying.  We were "adopted" by the school lunch lady who I became friends with.   She somehow learned of my mom's situation of 5 kids.   That is honestly my best memories of Christmas.   They would deliver toys wrapped in newspaper comics.   Beautiful people, Rosa and Joe.