Dear Lori,
The tree is up, although with fewer ornaments than you would have liked. On the other hand, we didn’t break any. There are lights in the windows in the living room (and in Lenny’s windows too). We are doing our best to celebrate your favorite holiday without you.
When we started to get really serious, when we tried to figure out if we could have more than a mad love affair and build a life together, you were willing to sacrifice Easter, but Christmas was a non-negotiable. You loved everything about it and did nothing halfway. On our honeymoon in Italy you haunted the pop-up Christmas markets in old Roman racecourses. In Philadelphia, you prowled the shops of Germantown Ave and the downtown stalls at City Hall. We tried a variety of Christmas services before you found the Mennonites in their 17th century meeting house around the corner. You loved the plainness of the hall, the lack of pretension, and the wonderful singing.
You would listen to Christmas music year-round (being careful to check I wasn’t around of course) and started building your Christmas mixes in July, listening to hundreds of songs to find just the right ones for CDs, and later digital dropboxes. I cannot lift the plastic tub, that houses all your Christmas music it is so full.
You were patient with me when I complained about buying too many gifts that were useless: the plastic birds that talked to each other, the CDs and concert tickets purchased because I said I liked an artist one time, stocking tchotchkes that would break by New Years. And then you put socks in my stockings every year because you knew I wouldn’t buy them for myself.
You let me make Christmas dinners. There was the ill-fated goose on our first Christmas in Ann Arbor together when you indulged my New York Jewish fantasies about Dickensian yules. More recently it was turkeys or beef tenderloins with chimichurri. You handled the roasted root vegetables, including the various many colored beets, your favorite food discovery from meeting me. Breakfast, however, was your domain. Your family’s bubble bread recipe (never to be messed with) and various egg casseroles as your palate moved away from lil smokies and towards chorizo and green chiles.
You loved all your old family traditions and you loved the new ones we invented together. You loved the fact that it was a family holiday and that we always found some folks to celebrate it with, even if we couldn’t be with our own families.
You loved that if it was a warm year, we could sit on the porch after walking home from services and listen to the church bells from the Methodists over on the Avenue and then the Anglicans up the street. You loved driving around and looking at the lights, the more garish the better. You loved wrapping presents and making fun of my terrible jobs and you always enjoyed watching other people open presents far more than you enjoyed opening your own.
But you rarely told people why you were such the Tiny Tim. You only explained it to me once, in that first conversation. But once was enough.
Christmas hadn’t always been happy for you. There was a Christmas season, maybe thirty years ago, where you thought you didn’t want to wake up on Christmas morning. You thought it might be easier if you just skipped out on the whole thing. Your teen years were rough, far rougher than mine and you’d had enough.
But.
Instead of acting on that terrible impulse, you went and sought help. You “went away” for a bit, and only dropped occasional hints about what happened on “the inside.” I know the walls were green in the hospital, and lots of people smoked, and you were always grateful that your dad worked a good job with spectacular health insurance that allowed you to do the in-patient stay that saved your life.
And so Christmas was a non-negotiable. It was your yearly affirmation that when you made the choice to live, that you’d chosen correctly. It was your celebration of life, and the fact that you were here for another year.
Well, who could argue with that? And so I became a Jewish boy who celebrated Christmas, but what I really was celebrating was the fact that in choosing to live, you eventually chose me and the life we built together. You chose a city you loved, a house you adored, a job you took great pride in, and a family that you loved deeply and well. And every Christmas, I was reminded of how much we had done together how much your choice before I ever met you changed me for the better. And I threw myself into it.
And now I’m telling the story again. I’m telling it to convince myself to embrace the season, to get up in the morning, to grade papers, and do dishes. I’m telling it because I don’t want to do any of those things. I’m telling it because listening to the radio in the car these days is a fraught exercise in dodging songs and phrases that have me fighting back tears when I’m driving. And I wasn’t exactly a good driver to begin with.
But I’m also telling it because I know there are other people that need to hear it. There are teenagers and adults that are despairing. And you were the proof that things got better. You were in a place so dark, that you wanted to extinguish your light forever because the flickering seemed in vain. And over the next thirty years, you nurtured the tiny candle that almost went out into a raging fierce bonfire of love. The hurt never went away completely for you, but you managed it and every year you celebrated. And every year your fire burned brighter. And even though your fire went out far too soon, it burned thirty years longer than it could have. And so every Christmas, I’ll remind myself to celebrate that.
But I won’t lie to you, Lori. It’s a struggle. People keep asking me what I want for Christmas, reminding me that I need gifts too. And I’ll answer with a bottle, or movie tickets, or chocolates. But there’s only one thing I want for Christmas, and it’s the one thing I can’t have.
David