Happy Non-Denominational Holiday Season Wish!
After years of hating Christmas, its packaging and its pressures, I gave up on my hatred the first Christmas I spent without my grandmother. As a young adult, to me the holidays had always represented gifts, wrapping paper and annoying relatives. It was only after I was finally free of all that garbage that I realized how much I had, and how little I had appreciated it.
Pulling up in my grandparents’ driveway a few days before Christmas was always tempered with mixed emotions. As a child, I couldn’t wait to get out of the car and race inside to see what was under the tree, and sit on my grandfather’s lap as he told me all about Christmas in Kansas as a young boy. My brother and I would get Shirley Temples at the bar in my grandparents’ den, overdosing on Grenadine and trying to push each other out of the bar stools. It was also the only time of year that we got to see a real live fire in a fireplace: such things are a rarity in Texas.
But as I grew older, and began to notice (as most kids do) all the bizarre emotional dysfunctions in my family, Christmas became a strain and a duty instead of a holiday. My aunt (by marriage) is Canadian, and one of those bizarre Canadians that insists on saying “porridge” and treats Southern Americans like little lambs that haven’t ever really known winter since we aren’t big on 20 feet of snow. She is stuffy and sheltered, and yet finds a way to dominate each and every event she’s introduced to with her boring stories and total self-absorbtion. She’d sit perched on the edge of the couch with her tea, rambling about a sewing team or little Katie’s gymnastics tryouts as if the entire family was her audience. It drove my siblings and I nuts, because we had to out-do her for the affections of our grandparents. Throw two blonde-haired cousins into the mix, complete with pink frilly church dresses and nasal voices, and you have a typical holiday at the Snider’s.
It’s not hard to imagine why once-a-year family get-togethers would be annoying for the children involved, but as I grew older, and found myself forced into adult conversations, I realized how stressful it was on the adults, too. I could feel my father cringe as my grandmother critiqued his decision to not go to Midnight Mass, and I felt my mother’s skin crawl a grandmother slid her a back-handed compliment.
“Your hair looks much better this year than it did last year, Linda.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
“Now if you can just get Paige to do something with that mess.”
“Mom spent an hour curling my hair for tonight, Grandmom.”
“Well, I guess she didn’t devote enough time!”
My grandmother was one of those people (don’t point at me just yet) who thought that adding a chuckle after an insult made it ok. As a teenager, this was impossible for me to deal with because I was fragile and self-conscious, and desperately wanted her to approve of me. She never really did, not until the year she died. I wasn’t alone, though, since she really didn’t approve of anyone else, either.
My grandmother’s hostile sense of humor combined with my grandfather’s stoic presence made for uncomfortable Christmas dinners and more uncomfortable Christmas mornings. For each gift we were given, we received a speech on how lucky we were, and how we really didn’t do anything to deserve such luck. Because my grandparents spent some time in Canada, we actually heard about walking in the snow to school, uphill both ways, and how until we had to break a chicken’s neck to cook it, we didn’t need to complain about what was for dinner.
But the first Christmas my grandmother was gone, I felt a silence in our house. There was no evil cackling coming from the kitchen, and simply being at my parent’s house instead of hers was strange. I felt the lack: I missed her. By that time my grandfather’s Alzheimer’s was serious enough that having him in the room wasn’t the same as it used to be, either. He was quiet and distant, and he kept asking where she was. We didn’t have a flocked Christmas tree that year, and no fire in the fireplace, either. We were somber, and we didn’t know what to say to each other. After years of stressing out with her around, and wishing that she’d just be quiet, she finally complied, and we felt lost.
As we wake up tomorrow morning to celebrate our holiday, I hope that we’ll remember to think of her, and I’m sure she’d appreciate a joke at her expense: Grandmom, it’s quiet as hell without you here, but you finally have our attention. Merry Christmas.
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