He made Christmas perfect

Beverly Beckham

The Boston Globe

December 13, 2015

He made Christmas perfect

I miss him most at Christmas. It doesn't matter that I am too old to be missing a father. It doesn't matter that my memory is selective and that time has nipped and tucked events so that they appear perfect.

Memory deceives. But Christmas, when I was a child, really was perfect.

My father turned into a kid every December. He ignored his fear of heights and enthusiastically scaled a ladder to outline our house in big, gaudy multicolored lights. He propped, in the middle of the front lawn, a giant paint-by-number wooden Santa Claus he made in our cellar one year. He'd been locking himself in the basement for days. "Don't look! Don't peek," he'd say before he'd disappear for an hour or so. "Surprise!" he yelled, finally, unveiling this magnificent Santa to me one afternoon after "American Bandstand." I helped him carry it up the stairs and out the front door. And I stood in awe as I watched him backlight it with a spotlight.

Then there was the scrawny, misshapen tree he'd drag into our parlor exactly one week before Christmas. It was always a sad sack of a tree. But he would somehow, magically, coax it into beauty.

My children shake their heads when I show them faded pictures of these trees, the gaudy lights, the paint-by-number Santa. They laugh out loud at what the camera caught.

I laugh a little, too. But mostly I swallow tears.

If I could have him back as he was then on those December afternoons! And as I was, too, at 9, 10, 11, 12. On Davis Road. Across the street from the Lyonses. Next door to the Campbells. My father comes home from work. My mother is still at work. Rosemary is here, and Diane. And Janet Butler. And it's a party because it's always a party when my father puts up the tree. Perry Como is on the hi-fi singing "There's No Place Like Home for the Holidays." And we are singing, too, and drinking, from small round glasses, eggnog that the milkman brought, which comes in a glass bottle.

We sit on the couch and watch my father wrestle the tree into a wooden stand. He sings as he does this. He makes up his own Christmas songs. He hams it up for my friends.

It's an act of love for him. All of it. Singing. Drilling holes in the tree and filling in the bare spots with extra limbs.

"What are you doing, Mr. Curtin?"

"You'll see," he says.

After he adds branches to the tree, he strings the lights.

"What do you think, girls?" he asks as he changes the bulbs so that that they are all even — red, green, blue, and orange. And then he trades places with us. He sits on the couch and drinks eggnog while we decorate.

We are hanging tinsel when my mother comes home. She acts as if she has never seen a Christmas tree before. She doesn't even take off her coat or her gloves. She stands in the living room and declares that this is most beautiful tree she has ever seen.

Every year she says this. Every year he does these things. But the years are few, because childhood is short. But memory is long, and so these years linger.

We butted heads when I grew up. But when I was a kid? I thought my father was perfect.

I miss him. I miss him every time I hear Perry Como sing. I miss him every time I see a tree that isn't quite even, that could use his trick of symmetry. I miss him every time I pass a house outlined with big, old-fashioned lights.

I miss him, not always, but always at Christmas. And every Christmas I miss him a little bit more.