A Normal Christmas

Like the hot girl summer, it melts as you approach it, normalcy as elusive as a white Christmas in Houston. You hold tight to a few things if only to distinguish this Christmas from the last, abnormal, one: a little shopping in stores for food and present; spraying seeds, pods, and berries with gold paint; an air of festivity as thick as the fog that passes for holiday weather. All this is reasonable: you and your family are vaccinated. When you close your eyes, you picture the antibodies in your bloodstream, cartoonishly round like something out of Osmosis Jones. Your blood, a yuletide red, is in your imagination thick with fierce but adorable creatures seeking out and hunting down fierce but far from adorable viruses. You open your eyes to avoid lingering on the imaginary battlefield you have created, because if you don’t, you will at some point have to visualize the Omicron variant, and you, like your innocent antibodies, really can’t do it.

You turn from your inner vision to contemplate your collection of tiny battery-powered lights that have solved the persistent first-world problem of outlet-dependence. Now there can be lights everywhere: in your mother’s silver bowl under a pile of glass ornaments; in the recesses of your cupboard of pinecone-themed china; wrapped around glasses of eggnog or goblets of scallops in a glowing amber sauce. You readjust the bird on top of the ornaments, on top of the lights in the silver bowl on the Christmas table. You trust your t-cells, not pictured.

For you, Christmas is all about the birds. Almost 60 years ago now, you went with your father to the yule market on Piazza Navona, where you wandered among the booths that sprung up in mid December between the iconic fountains. Your father bought your mother a string of lights shaped like birds, perhaps doves, each a different pastel color glowing through frosted plastic that, to you, who had never seen the real stuff, looked like it was covered in snow. They were the last lights my father would put on the tree, spacing hem carefully so they spiraled and soared. After your father’s death the day after Christmas in 1978, but before you mother’s the first week in January of 1993, you inherited the birds for your own tree. The birds had been around, having flown (or been shipped) to the U.S, back to Italy, and to the U.S. again. When your mother gave them to you they came wrapped in tissue paper with a current adapter. Every year after that, you plugged them first into the adapter and then into the wall and held your breath. You knew that some year, some Christmas, they would die and you would have a Christmas without bird lights and that one more thing bound you to your mother and father would be broken. 

As it turned out, the birds outlived both your parents. You do not, oddly, remember when they actually failed for the first time of whether you indeed had a birdless Christmas. You do remember that your husband had spent months, perhaps years, searching for replacements on the internet. Finding figural lights is, it turns out, easy: the world is full of versions that are shaped like everything from bottles of wine to chile peppers to, tantalizingly, birds. But they are not bird lights. They are regular white bulbs over which someone has slipped a cheap plastic cover. Your husband, who is a shopping genius, initially found a string that was almost right. They were birds, certainly, and the multicolored bulbs were integrated into solid frosty plastic. But they were, like your imagination of antibodies, slightly cartoonish, with round bodies and wings and shapeless heads. You could not imagine them flying as their predecessors had. They perched for a while, wobbled, and fell, earthbound. A year later, on my birthday, my husband handed me a long metal box: in it was tissue paper, an adapter, and birds. Bird lights. The birds are not identical to the original set, but, in your mind, you can lay this string end to end with the first, connecting past and present. They are, for all (im)practical purposes, the same birds as the ones your father bought your mother in front of the Bernini fountain.

You are, as the bird light story reveals and you would be the first to admit, superstitious. There are other names for superstition: anxiety, tradition, a desire for control, hysteria. Traditions keep Christmas normal, the lights on. You have lived through many lovely Christmases and four horrible ones. You have never completely abandoned Christmas traditions, Christmas normalcy. When your father was dying on Christmas night, you and your mother brought presents to the hospital as carolers sung of tidings and comfort and joy in the hallway. Your mother tried on a beautiful coat she had bought herself “from” my father, pirouetting in front of him until you swore you could see a smile on his face. When your mother was a little further from death on a Christmas Eve 15 years later, you and your husband made a traditional ham, scoring it with cloves and raspberries and serving it to your uncle and aunt, your regular Christmas guests. Your mother could not make it to the table or eat what you had made; you were ashamed at how hungry you were, about how delicious the ham tasted, about how much you ate as your mother lay ill in the next room.

Two more terrible Christmases were to follow, the second of these far worse than the first. You were now in your house, in your family, fully adult, the traditions that served as a bulwark against sickness and death yours to choose. The first of these bad Christmases took place in the exact middle of your son’s cancer treatment, just as he was finishing up chemotherapy. For you every light and ornament reflected both terror and hope: your son was doing well, the tumor had disappeared even before the prescribed course of radiation. That year, you presided over an explosion of birds: robins, wrens, cardinals in glass joined the bird lights on the tree and spilled over onto the Christmas table. The new birds perched on napkins, peered out from behind trees in the centerpiece, dangled on fishing line from the overhead lamp. When you recently came across the menu for the Christmas dinner you must have insisted on hosting, you were both appalled and comforted by the familiarity of the offerings, including the tiny appetizers your son now helps you to make and freeze in the week before the party. 

The worst Christmas was the year after that, when a doctor found what looked like a mass on your son’s thyroid. The mass was discovered in early December; no scanning appointments were available, as the scheduler told us cheerfully, until “after the holidays.” Suddenly, Christmas itself became an insurmountable barrier, a horrifying presence blocking the way to a knowing that might itself be horrible. You thought about last Christmas, and about how the doctor had carefully planned your son’s chemo so that he would be on a break for Christmas, how the nurse had planned his scans so we would have the results before the long holiday break. This second Christmas in the time of cancer was a time to be endured, gotten through. You do not remember much, but you remember a forced normalcy, a march of birds and appetizers, of lights, and roast beef—perhaps a yule log or a croquembouche. There must have been desserts, there must have been presents. The only gift you remember is the one your son made for your November birthday—a lampshade of family silhouettes. You turned the lamp on the day you heard about the mass and did not switch it off until the scan revealed nothing (“It’s gone,” the doctor said, “maybe it was scar tissue.”) You cannot tell in hindsight whether Christmas traditions made things better or worse for you, better or worse for your husband, better or worse for your son and his brother. You do not know whether it was right, or good, or useful to attempt a normal Christmas. Should you have made the mini crab cakes or you should have turned out the lights and gone to bed and hibernated until the news came?

After more than a decade of normalcy, and many appetizers later, came the first COVID Christmas. The bird lights went up as usual after Thanksgiving; you boxed up appetizers and cupcakes that you and your son spent weeks making and sent them to the regular Christmas guests. You ate and drank “together” on Zoom and mimed festivity into the camera. You think that you did not lay a Christmas table, but your memory is shaky on this point. There was much that was normal, and some that was not. Traditions held, were adapted, or abandoned. No one was sick. No lights burned out.

It is now 2021. You think, as the guests leave and you begin to wash the platters before heading to bed, that you have somehow achieved a normal Christmas, if normal means not so much unremarkable as something like “traditional.” The crab cakes are a tradition, and the miniature tamales, and the bowls of ornaments. They were not, of course, always a part of your Christmas; you and your family and guests constantly invent not-quite-oxymoronic “new traditions” each year. Your friend Kate proposed a Secret Santa game rather than a free-for-all gift exchange. All guests and family members took COVID tests just before the party. Ross made entremets frosted to represent our three doodles. You added cacio e pepe cheese puffs (and their gluten-free equivalents) to the appetizer buffet. You know in your bones that Christmas, like its pagan precursors, like solstice celebrations in so many cultures, is fundamentally an act of denial: of asserting light (and lights) in a time of darkness. Part of that denial is the assertion of continuity in the face of change. Every item on the menu, from your mother’s mashed potato pie to the porcini crusted beef roast, every bird ornament or Christmas cracker filled with bad jokes, insists that everything is normal, that the show must go on, that the lights will light when you switch them on or plug them in.