December 25, 2009
Montville, New Jersey
I was 16 years old
Christmas was nice. Always good to see everyone. Jillian looked fierce, as usual. Shiny cardigan, red shirt, black skirt, studded heels, hair done up with a Bumpit. Gotta love Jersey style! Bob, Nana’s new “manfriend,” joined us this year. He’s nice. Quiet, didn’t really say much. He found mom hilarious. Cute to see someone who isn’t fed up with Kristine…yet.
Lindsay told Aunt Patti she wasn’t coming. Aunt Patti was all upset, saying this will be the first Christmas in 20 years that she wouldn’t spend with her…only for Lindsay to sneak up from behind and hug her. Tears ensued. Of course. All in all, a nice time. I just hope it won’t be too long until the next time we’re down here to see everyone.
December 22, 2021
Wilmington, North Carolina
I am 28 years old
I had this roommate in Boston, another Emmanuel girl living among the rest of us Emmanuel girls in our first post-graduate apartment, who I felt, and often, would singularly bring about my undoing. And, as always, for only the stupidest reasons. She’d walk away from kitchen cabinets without closing them all the way, put glass jars in the trash can and food scraps in the recycling bin, keep the apartment one degree Fahrenheit warmer than I would have preferred, and leave a dish in the sink long enough for her oatmeal dregs to resemble the ancient Roman recipe for cement. Etcetera. But, really, what bothered me most about her is that she was friendly and curious and, in ways my other roommates and friends dared not to do, felt no qualms calling me out on my shit. When I was waxing woeful one day about still needing to dog walk after spraining my ankle in a desperate bid to catch the 57 bus so I’d make it to my other job on time, she generously reminded me, “Well, you did say you wanted life to be interesting!” But it was during our first holiday season together that my rage felt most acute, seeing poinsettia-red when, like some Ebenezer Scrooge of Allston-Brighton, I said that I find Christmas to be a deeply depressing holiday. Laughing with disbelief and disapproval, she whipped her head in my direction and said, “What?!”
Scared of my own capacity for cruelty, I just agreed to disagree with her. But, in my two-sizes too-small heart, I still find Christmas to be something of a bummer. I love Christmastime, I should stress that. Most everywhere I’ve lived, I loved the most during the month of December. There’s usually snow on the ground already in New Hampshire, annually living up to the picturesque promise that Yuletide is supposed to deliver. And there’s no place in Boston more beautiful than the Commonwealth Avenue Mall once they’ve strung up all those lights in the trees. Walking down its center paved path, lit so heartbreakingly from above by all those yellow-white bulbs, that muffled quality of cold winter air making everything feel so soft and silent and sweet—I mean this completely: it’s heaven on earth. But then there’s New York at Christmastime. In general, winter is my favorite season in the city. I think New York is most itself, its most cinematic and romantic and character-building once the weather gets very, very cold. But watching couples haul six-foot Christmas trees on their shoulders down 1st Avenue, feeling like a veteran on the other side of SantaCon’s deluge of bridge-and-tunnel drunkards, getting glimpses of decorated apartments proving so wonderfully visible from the sidewalk now that the sun sets at 4:10 in the afternoon…sing it, Andy Williams! It is, indeed, the most wonderful time of the year.
December 25th, however. Scratch ever so slightly at any given Christmas song and there, just below the surface, is a bedrock of deep, deep sadness. So I’m aware, as usual, that this isn’t an especially original line of thought. All that build-up for a day that just comes and goes seems tailor-made for a special kind of gloom. Because despite our move to New Hampshire when I was in middle school, we still went down to New Jersey every year for Christmas. Which meant a six hour-long car ride on the 24th, which meant opening up presents on the night of the 23rd. My mother is the first to admit that she’s not an especially gifted gift giver but it’s a shortcoming she takes personally. I think of those pseudo-Christmas mornings and I cringe. Each of us taking our own polite spot in the living room—as, with any luck, Jeopardy though, far more likely, TMZ played on the television—to open up presents that none of us really asked for, swallowing the guilt of our ingratitude while its sour taste pinched at our faces. It never took long for the first dark clouds of Noël to settle over my mom, frustrated that she could never think of good gifts, resentful about the hours she spent shopping for nothing. It’s hard to explain that I’d be happier getting nothing than something I didn’t want without sounding like a brat. But really: a Christmas spent calmly and brightly together is always first on my list, a day without any silent seething, without the gut-punch of unwrapping a book of Annie Leibowitz’s photography and understanding that, surely, this must have felt like the perfect gift for me, in the world where it was Annie and not Fran Lebowitz who I actually loved.
Those Christmases in New Jersey, though, did have a way of becoming a new tradition all its own. As man-without-a-country as it might have felt, waking up Christmas morning on a living room couch with no presents to open, my Aunt Karen always managed, consciously or not, to make it feel as special, as ceremonial as the holiday is supposed to be. She hosts every year so we’d stay at her house and on the 24th, after that long drive south, we’d always go to the same restaurant. It’s called Don Pepe and, while I think it’s technically Spanish, that seems beside the point, given the hordes of north Jersey’s finest Rossis and Rizzos and D’Ambrosios sitting at twelve-top tables for Christmas Eve dinner. Every year, I felt further away from this New Jersey of my childhood, becoming not more New Hampshire but certainly less everything I’d see on dazzling display in Don Pepe. The fur coats and Rolexes and Marlboro-ravaged voices, the pushiness, the cologne, the displays of affection and machismo—it was Shakespearean but it wasn’t mine and that was okay. I’d sit at our table, remaining just present enough to catch a question about how school was going, but giving most of myself to these other families around us. Watching “blonds'' tap French-tipped nails against empty wine glasses at servers passing by. Little Nicolettes and Angelinas telling aunts about their commercial casting calls in the city. Silent grandfathers shoveling ziti in their mouths and sad-eyed grandsons doing much the same. Like some wretched street kid in a storybook, rubbing away frost from the window pane, I saw what else the holiday could look like. And coming back to my own family, to my parents and my sisters and my aunts and uncles, if I felt even a little sad, I knew I’d have time for that later. Christmas wasn’t over yet.