Christmas Past

Kate did a post about going home for Christmas. What are the rituals, the memories, the traditions…

Commenting in her thread got me to thinking. At 51, I’m fairly far removed from the childhood of my past. We moved around a lot. I grew up in the LA area where my dad was a film editor and my mom was a housewife. They couldn’t decide what suburb or lifestyle they were seeking. I think they both had a bit of the grass always being greener somewhere else. In retrospect, I think they were looking for a place where they would be satisfied with their life and marriage and with each other. It never happened, but it meant that I was given a vagabond spirit.


Until I was ten, we lived in the San Fernando Valley. Track homes. Streets that ran perpendicular. A lot like Wonder Years or The Brady Bunch in physicality, not so much in organic realness. My aunt lived within a few blocks and my paternal grandmother lived a few miles away. The Christmases here are the ones I remember with wonder and magic. There was a Santa in Panorama City where they had “reindeer,” and I remember asking over and over why Rudolf’s nose was not the red I had expected. I remember going to get the Christmas tree being a big event and walking with my eyes closed through the rows and taking big deep breaths of the pine smell. I remember going to my grandmother’s and picking up Christmas presents that were wrapped beautifully with homemade bows courtesy of my aunt. On Christmas Eve we would be allowed one present each to open and my little sister and I would shake, rattle, and roll those gifts to try and tweak out one with a toy. There’s not much to do with a dressy blouse for the rest of the night, but sometimes that was just what you got. My dad would make Tom and Jerry’s (we were not a big eggnog family) and we had special cups with Tom and Jerry engraved in gold lettering at a diagonal across the front. I remember my little sister and me scrambling out of bed as soon as my mom left the room and looking out the window hoping to catch a glimpse of Santa and his sleigh. I remember truly believing in magic.

My older sister and I, about 1960

When I was ten, we moved to a mobile home park on the beach. The other day I was talking to my mom on the phone and I actually had to ask her where we put the Christmas tree when we lived there because I did not remember. What I do remember from living there was the disintegration of my parents’ marriage. My mom’s suicide attempts. My older sister leaving home barely 17 years old and living with a friend her senior year of high school.
When the park was imminent domained by the state, we moved to Oxnard. When I was a sophomore we moved to the Conejo Valley. I don’t remember much from these Christmases either.

My parents finally separated at the beginning of my senior year. Their divorce was so bitter and so embattled that they actually appealed it all the way to the California Supreme Court. The following Christmases were only peaceful when I was with my grandmother, usually on Christmas Eve. Christmas day was spent dutifully with my mother who would drink herself into a temper and make biting passive aggressive comments at my sister and me.

When I moved to Hawaii the summer I was 24 years old, I didn’t go home for Christmas. I was working in a restaurant/nightclub and couldn’t get off. I went out to dinner with my friend that I moved here with, then pulled a 10-2 cocktail shift. It was such a relief to not have drama on my Christmas. I have never been back for Christmas since.

Tomorrow. Christmas Present. It’s a happy story. Really.