Why the Ghosts of Christmases Past Haunt Us
/The Boston Herald
It begins with a wish: I wish I still believed in Santa Claus. It begins when you're a kid and your mother sits you down and tells you that what you've begun to suspect is true. And part of you is validated by her words; you feel grown up, you're in on the secret. But part of you wishes you didn't know, wishes you could have stayed a kid forever.
Christmas never lands on your doorstep all by itself after this. It carries the ghosts of Christmases past. “I miss my mother and I miss my kids small,” a friend says. "What I wish is that my mother were young and my kids were little again.”
My friend isn't wishing for what was. She's wishing for something that never existed, not side by side. For when her mother was young, she was a child. And when her first child was small, she didn't have the rest of her children. And yet, what she aches for is all of it. Her mother beside her, and her children all tucked in their beds. Her children's childhoods as well as her own.
I understand this. Christmas comes and I want to be a child again. I want to wake up and hear my mother clinking dishes in the kitchen and hurry downstairs and see her in her bathrobe. I want to put my arms around her waist and feel her warmth and smell the scent of Prince Machibelli cologne, then race into the parlor to see what Santa brought. I want to get dressed in some frilly thing and go to Mass and sit between my parents and know that as long as they are beside me nothing can ever be wrong.
And I want to come back home and see my grandmothers sipping port at the table and Aunt Lorraine and Uncle Frank and their six children walking in the door.
But I also want it to be the Christmas I was 19 and my-husband-to-be appeared at my house and handed me a clock with a card that said, "Here's a little something to put in your hope chest, which is waiting for you downstairs.” It snowed that Christmas. We went to church at midnight and then to Barbara Thomas's for a party. "Bruce gave me a hope chest,” I told everyone.
I want the Christmas the year my son was born. I placed him under the tree and took a picture. "He's the best present, ever,”I said. And he was - and is. And I want it to be the year after, when my husband and I were parents, but still pampered kids.
I want every one of the Christmases that my children were small, "Has he come yet, Mama? Is it morning. Can we get up?" The year we cut down our Christmas tree. The year my oldest daughter cried because Santa brought her a boy's toy. The year, Lucky, the cat arrived.
My children grew up and my cousin's kids came and hung their stockings, first three little kids, then four, then five. And these kids grew up, too, only the two youngest still small.
They will come again this Christmas, everyone but Tabitha who's an exchange student in Germany. And my daughters will be home, one with her husband and one with her fiance. But my son will be in England with his fiance.
That's the ache that's in the holiday.
“I miss my mother and I miss my kids small,” my friend said. We all miss someone. We all want, not just what is. We want, along with now, what was on Christmas Day.
