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.
