Broken Christmases Part II

I’m glad children are children, so they’re not typically aware of how extraordinarily disappointing Christmas actually is. Talk about a holiday that is set up to do absolutely nothing but dash one’s hopes. Even the best parents, with the best of intentions, can’t help but disappoint. I saw an ad for The Gap yesterday with a hip hop theme for “Christmas in the 'hood.” Yeah. Right. Like everyone in the ‘hood can afford to waste their money on $30 t-shirts at The Gap. Most parents, in or out of the ‘hood, are barely managing to scrape by and can’t possibly afford to buy all the computer equipment and electronic games their kids tell Santa they want. Tiny Tim may have been able to understand a deeper meaning to Christmas, but he wasn’t living in a day and age in which commercial television-viewing has become a classic study in how to appeal to the human id.

My own parents did a wonderful job of trying to make Christmas as special as possible. The festivities went in stages in our family. First, there were the stockings, explored while sitting on my parents’ bed. At the breakfast table (eaten in the dining room, where we never ate breakfast unless we had guests), we all exchanged the gifts we’d gotten each other. Finally, we’d move to the living room, whose glass door had been covered with a blanket, hiding what awaited inside. Santa didn’t put presents under the tree. We each had our own chair with our own presents, and once we’d “oohed and awed” over those, presents from extended family members and friends waited under the tree. It was a morning-long affair (but morning had started around 5:00 a.m., which was about as late as any of us could manage to wait).

Even with this much care and attention paid to the day, something from my wish list was always missing. I'd figure this out once the excitement had worn off and I’d sat down to think about it. I’m sure I thought of something even the year I sat on Santa’s lap and suddenly announced, much to my mother’s surprise and horror, I’m sure, that I wanted a stuffed puppy for Christmas. I have no idea how she managed to find that stuffed puppy, which had certainly been news to her, because it had even been news to me until I'd sat in his lap at a complete loss as to what I wanted, just two days before Christmas (my mother once very wisely said to me, “Christmas is for children and men, not for mothers”), but he showed up on my chair Christmas morning.

I wonder who came up with the stupid notion that it’s actually a good idea for a child to sit on Santa’s lap, making specific requests face-to-face. How can a child who’s been so close to Santa not feel he’s rejected her when she doesn’t find what she wanted on Christmas morning? It was probably some psychologist hoping to make a fortune by the damage done to both rejected child and wretched parent who feels so because he or she can’t possibly get said child his very own yacht.

I can’t remember how old I was when I began asking for an Easy Bake oven, but it became an obsession, and year after year, Santa neglected to bring me one. My mother would explain to me it was because Santa didn’t think I needed one, since I was always helping her bake in the big oven in my very own little pans, making mini-versions of whatever she was making. It’s true, I loved making those little cakes and breads beside my mother, but being the greedy child I was, it wasn’t enough. I wanted to bake in the big oven with my very own little pans and have my very own little oven.

I was awfully suspicious of a Santa who refused to bring me my heart’s desire. I was also suspicious of a Santa who seemed to bring my brother all the best toys. He got Tonka trucks and Fisher Price castles, things I hadn’t thought to demand, because I didn’t hang out in the “boys’” section of our favorite toy store, and this was still a day-and-age in which most adults didn’t think to give toy trucks and cars to little girls. Even the best stuffed puppy in the world couldn’t hold a candle to a huge Tonka cement mixer with movable parts. Luckily, Ian was younger and could easily be manipulated into “sharing” his toys. My sisters weren’t quite so generous with things like record players and drum sets. Why didn’t Santa just give all these things to me? I may have been greedy, but I was also an extremely fair child. I would have allotted everyone his or her X number of minutes per day to play with each item.

As I grew older, Christmas began to break in other ways. First, my sister Lindsay went off to college in England and didn’t come home the year I was a junior in high school. My oldest sister had already been in college a number of years, but she always came home. This was the first year in which we had a gap at the breakfast table and an empty chair in the living room. When each of them had gone off to college, I think I’d vaguely been aware of the fact I occasionally missed them (or at least missed their clothes, which were no longer available for me to borrow), but I was way too busy with school work, my after-school job, and whomever my latest unrequited love was to pay much attention. Somehow, though, having one of our family absent on Christmas morning was nearly unbearable, especially when I unwrapped her gift to me to discover it was a box full of things like Mars Bars, Smarties, Opal Fruits, and Wine Gums, all our favorite English candy, nearly impossible to get in this country at that time.