Since my mother died, I’ve been trying to understand my own seasons of grief. It’s been two and a half years without her, and so far I’ve managed to deduce that the gut-scraping pangs begin around Thanksgiving, arriving with the inflated balloons of the Macy’s Parade, impossibly large and just as unwieldy. If Thanksgiving is the grief appetizer, Christmas is the main dish, with a misery hangover that stretches just past my birthday in March. When I see the crocuses come in, I know relief is on its way.
My mother Claudia’s deep, unabiding love of Christmas—or, as she called it, “Crimpus”—exacerbates this loss. Her adoration of the holiday did not come from any religious tradition (I grew up in an agnostic household), but it was an opportunity for all of her whimsy and sweetness to be on full display. Instead of an angel on the tree, we had a yellow plastic toy alien named Abelard who tragically lost his legs in a hot stovetop accident. But with a toilet paper roll, some cardstock wings, and a tissue paper gown, my mother transformed him into our hideous-but-lovable guardian. His bulbous, bright orange plastic eyes watched over us every Christmas.
She set the dinner menu each year, which was always manicotti made with a tomato sauce that she lovingly called “Addicto.” (Our family literally had no cultural connection to the dish, beyond the fact that she was excellent at making it.) Similarly, in an off-kilter offering to my father’s Jewish heritage, we would play dreidel every Christmas Eve, all of us carefully cross-referencing a tiny tri-folded piece of paper reminding us which Hebrew letter meant what. The chocolate gelt—half-off at that point, since Hannukah was usually over—felt like exotic talismans.
The rules of gift-giving were simple: No one ever opened gifts simultaneously, because half of the fun was oohing and ahhing over each other’s spoils. The gift tag also had to be funny, including either an illustration, an inside joke, or a signoff from one of our family pets. For several years, my parents would perfunctorily exchange sweatsuits that they had purchased for one another at K-Mart, and we were often joined by my much older, very cool half-siblings after they spent time with their mom. (Those were some of the very best Christmases, though we never changed much about how we celebrated.) Then, when I was older, my mother began giving me post-Christmas dinner tarot readings; her delicate hands belied the force she used to shuffle the large, waxy cards. We would talk and talk and talk as we charted out my life together.
The holiday isn’t what made Christmas magic; it was my mother. Both of my parents had terribly unfair and unhappy childhoods, finding softness and recognition in one another. With few warm holiday memories to draw from, my mother simply felt her way through, establishing Christmas traditions of her own making. They were all perfectly strange and perfectly us: playful, loving, and a bit improvisational.
Had we exchanged little hand-written notes on Thanksgiving, or if my mother had given me tarot card readings on my birthday, maybe those would have become my favorite occasions. What mattered was that these traditions gave my mother an opportunity to joyfully declare who we were as a family.
This will be my third Christmas without her, and while the previous two felt like a betrayal, this year I am taking a lesson from Claudia, the self-proclaimed “Christmas whore,” and coming up with some traditions of my own to steady me. Two years ago, my husband and I went to Puerto Rico to celebrate with his parents. (We have no children, and without my mother, any holiday mirth that my father once possessed has evaporated.) But as someone susceptible to the holiday sads, I found my despair disorienting, set against the happy palm trees and warm sun. Plus, I just felt like a terrible house guest. So this year, we are staying in Brooklyn, and I’m experimenting with making the space to grieve, because the grief will come—though maybe some of that Crimpus joy will, too, if I just give myself a little more room to feel.
I recently started EMDR therapy to process everything I experienced as my mother’s caregiver (emphysema’s a real bitch), and shared my fears of heading into the holidays with my new therapist. She had me run through an exercise called resourcing: As I held what looked like two giant plastic pulsating lima beans in my hands, I was told to think of all the things that could give me access to joy these next few weeks. I closed my eyes and visions of holiday parties and sparkling wine and laughter danced through my head. Making it to my father-in-law’s enormous Italian fish dinner in New Jersey for the first time, seeing my (no longer) little cousins in a different part of New Jersey on Christmas Day, walking around New York to take it all in—as if through my mother’s eyes—and attempting a version of her manicotti, so that I can taste the past.
This year, I know that I have certain touchstones to get me through the holiday. I have my husband, I have my gym, and friends staying in the city for the holidays. I have the reassurance of knowing that my father is well taken care of in his senior living community. I have my deli guy who always greets me with a “Baby!!!! You always make my day with your smile!!!” I have what I like to call “hate walks,” where I can be free to feel as negative and spiteful as I want as I traverse the neighborhood, thinking terrible thoughts like, Oh, look at your dog’s dumb little boots. He looks like a moron! (It’s a closed-circuit survival tool that harms no one when I am feeling particularly salty.) I also have the knowledge that I was loved well enough and unconditionally enough to receive all of the things my parents never did, and then some.
There was another tradition in our house. Every Christmas Eve, my mother would present me with a small box and offer, “Do you want to open your Christmas ornament?” She got a new one for me every year, and they always felt wonderfully anachronistic. Even more striking, they always seemed to speak to some aspect of me that I felt only my mother could see. When, at 17, I started to come out of my shell, making lots of friends and playing with makeup, my mom gave me an ornament in the shape of a sparkling disco ball. After my father sold the house, I found the box of ornaments, lovingly wrapped in tissue paper—all 37 of the Christmases we had together contained in a single box.
Like the inverse of two bookends, or some kind of otherworldly relay handoff, every year since she passed, I’ve bought a Christmas ornament for her, even though I haven’t had a tree to hang them on. Back in Minneapolis for Thanksgiving, I hadn’t yet found an ornament that was Claudia-worthy. I use her old car whenever I’m back home—a little blue Chevy Cruz—and as I was digging around in the glove box, I saw something yellow and gleaming in the very back corner.
What I found was a little golden duck Christmas ornament. (Ducks were her thing.) I’m not sure how it made it there, but I don’t think it ever hung on a tree. I carried it all the way back to New York in my coat pocket, and it’s now casting a rotund little figure on my desk, smiling at me as much as a duck can smile, waiting for its big debut. We pick up a tree tomorrow.