Steadfast Branches -- some Christmas Memories

December 24, 1974.

The old living room in the ranch house is festooned in red and green.  Uncle Fitzhugh has a wreath perched between his horns. (Uncle Fitzhugh was shot on great-grandfather’s orders in 1919. A “pet” buffalo, he had become overly familiar to the point of aggression. His taxidermized head has hung above the fireplace since the final unhappy days of the Wilson Administration, and his glass eyes have witnessed many a Christmas Eve dinner.)  There are perhaps twenty-five of us from three generations, at three different tables.

We have turkey, we have ham.  We have cranberry from a can, decanted into a porcelain saucer. (You know you’re at a WASPy holiday party when cheap store-bought cranberry sauce arrives at the table in heirloom serving dishes. Presentation matters more than provenance.)  We have small children already drunk on sugar and anticipation. My brother and I are the smallest. He is four, I am seven.

My Uncle Peter excuses himself from the head table. His eldest son, Dean, a college lad, follows. A few moments later, a sudden bang on the roof. Two more thuds, the sound of hooves above us, and then a second later, bells.  Ho, ho ho! cries a distant voice that I will someday recognize as my uncle’s.

Dean rushes in. “Santa’s here! I see him on the roof!” he shouts.

My brother, Pip, collapses to the floor, crawls frantically under the table, curls into a ball.  He will tell us later he is sure the reindeer will burst into the room any moment, Dancer and Donner blitzening and cometing the whole room and trampling everyone and everything. Against his will, he is retrieved, and we follow Dean out into the cold and dark.  Dean points to the sky – “There he goes!” We follow Dean’s finger, but Pip and I, we are too slow.

My grandmother peers at the roof. “I can’t quite see… can someone get a flashlight? I think Santa might have left something.”

The flashlight is procured, and then a ladder, and then another uncle climbs – and produces a huge red burlap sack.  There is a present within for every guest at the dinner. The remainder of the gifts will be opened the next morning, but on Christmas Eve, we each get one.

A few days before Christmas, 1996.

Oh my God, show me again what your brother did when he thought the reindeer were coming!

Tracy and I have been dating for a month. She was my student this past semester and will be again in the spring. Tracy loves Christmas, and this day, I have helped her decorate a five-foot noble fir, encrusting it in white lights and ornaments from Target.  She has made cocoa, we have had Chinese food delivered, and we are sharing stories of our childhood Christmases.

Tracy grew up poor. She describes the Christmases of her girlhood as “festivals of drunkenness and disappointment.” As soon as she could, she started accepting invitations to spend the Eve and the Day at friends’ homes. As a teen, she wanted nothing to do with Christmas, but now – a wise twenty-one – she has decided she is reclaiming the holiday, giving herself as a young adult what she never had as a girl.

I am twenty-nine, going through a period where my family is exasperated with me and worried about me. I will go home to see my mother this year, but there will be no great gathering at the ranch, no “ho-ho-ho” from a baritone uncle while he tosses a sack expertly onto a roof. No sound of reindeer hooves manufactured by a resourceful cousin, drumming sticks of kindling against the eaves.

I imitate my brother crawling under the table again and again, making Tracy laugh to the point of tears. I know Pip wouldn’t mind.  A gentleman is expected to mine his past (and that of his loved ones) if it amuses the woman he’s eager to charm.  When the mirth subsides, Tracy and I debate: Which is harder, at Christmas? To have unhappy memories from which you wish to escape?  Or to be haunted by memories of childhood Christmases so wonderful that the present appears bleak and impoverished by comparison? 

There can be no winner, we decide. Earlier that day, before we got the tree, Tracy and I went to Blockbuster, and secured a VHS copy of Scrooge – the 1951 version, the best version, with Alastair Sim in the role of a man who learns about the dangers of letting the past haunt the present.  Now, the tree finished, Tracy makes me something called “Snowman Soup” (hot cocoa with melted peppermint sticks and marshmallows), and we watch the story of someone who figured it all out, at the last possible moment.

A few days before Christmas, 2013

The safest and quickest way to ride a bike from the Culver City halfway house to the children in Pico-Robertson is to take Bagley up from Venice Boulevard. The traffic is light, but the hill is steep, and I am made fat and slow from a cocktail of psychotropic medications.  I dismount, push the bike up Bagley, worrying that the sweat will make me repulsive to my children.

They are still shy with me – it’s only been a few days that I’ve been out of the hospital, and after so many months of not seeing me at all, David has forgotten me entirely. Heloise hasn’t – she’s four and a half, after all, the same age Pip was when he dove beneath the table – but she is leery.  Her father simply disappeared one day and when she saw him again months later, he was fifty pounds heavier, slow, and unsteady and sad.

I don’t have much money – hardly any – but I have enough to buy a cold water at the corner store. I drink half, and press the bottle against my face and forehead, willing the perspiration to cease. I chain the bike to the apartment railing, knock on the door.  I hear the patter of little footsteps, and the “Just a second!” from the woman who is now my fourth ex-wife.

Eira and I had eleven Christmases together as a couple, from 2002 to 2012.  The last of these was the only Christmas we had as a family of four, before my choices and compulsions brought shame and scandal and heartbreak.  Eira still wants me with the children, reminds me endlessly that I need to live for the children, promises me again and again that we will be “co-grandparents together someday.”

She cannot stay with a man who has betrayed her as I betrayed her.  She can work like hell to make sure he stays for her children, and tonight’s invitation is part of that work.

The door opens. David looks up at me, solemn and unsure, and then raises his arms. He hasn’t asked me to pick him up since I’ve been back, and I scoop him into my embrace, willing myself not to hold him too tight.  Heloise waits, patient, until her brother is lowered. She extends a single hand, my self-contained and thoughtful child, and offers a smile.  “Come, abba! We have a tree, but we waited for you to decorate it!”

Money is tight. I have plunged myself into disgrace and Eira and the children into near-poverty.  There still must be a tree, though, and a squat but full, four-foot Douglas fir sits in the corner, boxes of ornaments next to it. The children lead me over, and their mother and I open the boxes, showing the children the ornaments we have, soliciting suggestions as to where to place them.

Some of these ornaments are very old, gifts from my mother, shiny balls and glittering curiosities that have hung on family trees for generations. Others are newer, bought by Eira and me on our travels before we had children.  Ornaments from Moscow, from Buenos Aires, from Dubai, Vienna, Cape Town, Edinburgh, Paris, Christchurch, Bethlehem, and Bogota. We lived extravagantly, and these pretty baubles are the only tangible reminders that we were once carefree, curious, spendthrifts.

I have no passport. The court has taken my driver’s license.  The man who once visited seven continents in seventeen months is no more, replaced by this humbled hulk, this broken person who cannot allow himself to break further because it will break others.

We hang lights and ornaments until the children get tired. 

“What’s that song you sing when you finish decorating the tree?” Eira asks.

“Sing, abba, sing!” Heloise is excited. There will never be another Christmas where my first-born asks me to burst into song, and somehow I know that, and I realize I need to stick around long enough to embarrass her at some future Yuletide.

I take a child’s hand in each of mine. Eira holds David’s. We stand and face the plump and perfect little glistening bush, and I sing, my voice cracking in my father’s native tongue.

O Tannenbaum, o Tannenbaum,
wie treu sind deine Blätter!
Du grünst nicht nur zur Sommerzeit,
Nein auch im Winter, wenn es schneit.
O Tannenbaum, o Tannenbaum,
wie treu sind deine Blätter!

In this ode to the Christmas tree, the second line and the last line repeat.  Wie treu sind deine Blätter! “How steadfast are your branches.” 

It occurs to me, holding the hands of my very small ones, that I have never been so unsteady in all my days. But my branches, they are steadfast, and that is enough.  It is more than enough.

December 23, 2023

Eira and the children have a new apartment, just a mile from my (also new) place in Miracle Mile. It’s been a busy week – I’ve got work to finish for clients and publishers. There’s moving to be done. My son has now sprained his ankle and is on crutches. This requires adaptations.  The heating system in the new place won’t work, and the repairmen are on the way, but staying home to meet them on this Saturday morning means Eira won’t have time to buy the children a tree.

I volunteer to go, and my ex-wife accepts. We set a budget, and I help David into the car. Heloise and her best friend, Grace, clamber into the back. At the usual lot on Olympic and La Cienega, we find a surprisingly fresh selection for two days before Christmas; the girls pick out an elegantly symmetrical six-foot noble.  The lot boys lash it to the roof of the Mazda, and as we drive away, I offer to sing. David covers his ears.  Grace, who is the politest of girls, says she wants to hear it.  Heloise promises Grace that she really, really, doesn’t. My offspring win.

The girls carry in the tree. I supervise the lame boy, a sturdy Tiny Tim too muscle-bound to sit astride his father’s shoulders, and get him settled back in the house.

“I’ve got some work to finish, but I’ll be over tomorrow. Take pictures of the tree when it’s finished,” I tell the kids. 

I am out Christmas shopping ninety minutes later when a text comes from Eira, the tree already lit and gleaming, our children standing proudly beside it.  I zoom in, and recognize an ornament from my mother’s trees, and one from a long-ago honeymoon in South Africa. 

They did a great job! I text.

We taught them well, their mother replies.

Eira and I had eleven Christmases as a couple. This is now our eleventh as co-parenting exes. The branches are steadfast, indeed.

Twenty-seven years ago this week, that same night we decorated her tree and drank Snowman Soup, Tracy told me something about Christmas that I’ve never forgotten. “I guess I got tired of waiting for Christmas to happen for me,” she said. “I’m tired of disappointment and resentment. Now, Christmas is all about what I can make happen for someone else.”

I try, very hard and very imperfectly, to do the same.