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Cat Modlin-Jackson | Longreads | December 13, 2023 | 12 minutes (3,364 words)

The first Christmas my sister-in-law was dead, I watched The Holiday. Early in the movie, Cameron Diaz freaks out when she thinks her love interest, Jude Law, is a cheater. She rushes to his house to demand an explanation, and while his two young daughters frolic in the background next to a Christmas tree, he mouths the word “widower.” She responds with a blend of sympathy and solace. In lightning fashion, her reply whips from essentially, Oh god, that’s horrible, to Anyway, moving on! What happens next?! His grief is her relief. Look, I get it: I’d also be relieved to find out my new bonk buddy wasn’t a philanderer. I’m not mad at Cameron; I’m mad that the dead wife-mom is a plot device in more Christmas movies than I can stuff in a stocking. 

This dead wife-mom lurking in the background is rarely relevant to the plot. More often than not, her inclusion only serves as sympathy porn, a cheap move for even the most ostentatiously bad films. She uses our fascination with the morbid for entertainment. For many, a dead-too-soon character is intriguing in the same way as aliens or Santa—something beyond the realms of their reality. Sure, half the season is dedicated to the mysticism of transcendental things: joy, togetherness, and the other stuff that disappears when the Christmas trees go in the trash. But this trope goes a step further in a Christmas movie. It escalates tragic death into magic.

The subtext is that the holiday season is a great backdrop for closure—there’s something in the air and some fluke meeting or supernatural encounter will heal thy spirit. Like in The Knight Before Christmas, when a romance springs up and the love of Vanessa Hudgens’ chainmail bae motivates her to finally bust out her dead mom’s treasured decorations. After years of finding them too painful to look at, all it takes is a few hours with a knockoff King Arthur, and the grief spell is broken. Or again in The Holiday, when a widower can at last open his heart to someone who’s basically a stranger, and the whole family then lives happily ever after (because of course the kids will be equally psyched about New Mommy). Filmmakers use a character’s grief to evoke viewers’ sympathy and cravings for a quick fix. The Christmas widower trope exploits these very human tendencies, triggering sadness for the sake of sadness and making the cheap promise of a neat resolution tied up in a pretty bow. 

My sister-in-law Rachel* died at 37. That first December without her, I watched Jude drop the widower bomb on Cameron and absolutely lost my shit. Rachel and I weren’t as close as we used to be by the time she died, but that didn’t make our relationship any less impactful. Nine years older, she babysat me as a kid and played Barbies, lent me jewelry and makeup for hot dates when I was in college, and later, when I decided to marry a guy my brother and mom low-key hated, played diplomat and big-sister advocate. Years more, she named me the godmother of her baby girl—just months before her first cancer diagnosis. 

Sobbing on the couch as I watched The Holiday, I cried for my brother. For my nephews and niece. For her best friend of 30+ years. For me.

Rachel had withered over three years. Then on a muggy Tuesday in July, I watched her die. Worse than that, I watched her husband, her children, her parents, and her friends watch her die. She couldn’t speak because of all the tubes, so her only way to communicate was with a small dry-erase board. We “talked” briefly about my goddaughter, the baby girl she’d waited so long to have, and her eyes lit up. “Isn’t she fun?!” she scrawled with a marker while grinning from ear to ear, even though she knew her fun was about to end. That evening, I took my nephew to Burger King in an attempt to distract him from what we all knew would be The Bad Day. An elementary schooler at the time, he told me he could deal with her never again being conscious for the rest of her life, so long as she was still breathing. My heart broke all over again, this time just for him. Then there was the morning after, when my brother buckled on the stairs, choking out “Oh, god” as he went down. I’ll never unsee it. And that is why I shake my fist when Netflix whacks a woman we never see. 

Grief is not linear. There is no expiration date. It’s a way of life; an existence marked by absence. For a lot of us, this absence is weightier during days of celebration that can’t be erased from the calendar. This time of year it’s omnipresent, touching all the senses. The bright Christmas lights my dead sister-in-law isn’t here to string up. The cheesy songs she’s not singing. The bacon and Bisquick pancakes she’s not eating with us. The gawdawful Christmas movies she’s not watching. All of it’s here. Except her. 

Christmas and death have a weird bond. To act like the latter doesn’t exist amidst the former would be ridiculous. Between Charles Dickens’ merry band of ghosts and a month full of birthday parties for a guy who dies twice after a miraculous birth, Christmastime is one big existential crisis. And sure, a movie can portray loss and grief in a way that the left-behind can actually connect with, and maybe—just maybe—derive a little lightness from. But for that to work, the plot would have to focus on what already exists. To get really corny about it, the magic would have to come from within. That kind of magic is a slow burn; it’s moving forward rather than moving on, whether that’s a daughter who gets by with a little help from her friends or a widower who gets closer to his sister as they help the kids navigate the world without their mom. It’s learning how to live a new life that’s always going to be laced with death.

Magic is in many ways similar to a too-soon death. Profound, ineffable, inexplicable—even when a cause is clearly identified. Humans will never know what death is like. (Well, most of us, though a lot of Evangelicals seem to have a pretty good grip on who’s going to which afterlife party and when.) 

When I was in sixth grade, I first met a kid whose mom had died young. The news whisper-circuited to me: that my classmate, Sam, no longer had a living mother. She’d died of cancer. My internal reaction was the same kind of confused sympathy that I—and many other adults—would still have today: Oh, god. That’s horrible. 

I felt that way for Sam’s dad, too. Solo parenting isn’t easy. Just ask Jake Russell, the leading widower in Falling for Christmas. Not only did his wife die, but she managed to die on Christmas! Without the dead wife, he and his daughter, Avy, don’t know what to do with themselves. Fortunately for them, a concussed heiress named Sierra (Lindsay Lohan), reignites Jake’s loins. Sierra bonds with Avy over the fact that they had both survived their mothers’ deaths at a young age. All family wounds healed, the three go on to live happily ever after at a lodge in the boonies.

When I was in sixth grade Lindsay Lohan wasn’t even a Mean Girl yet, so I had to rely on personal experience to draw my conclusions about what life was like for Sam and his dad. My mom was a single parent. While her divorce from my “sperm donor,” as we affectionately call him, was ultimately a blessing, her attempt to bring home the bacon and still have the energy to function as two parents drained her. Watching her power through exhaustion day after day, I figured life wasn’t easy for Sam and his dad. At the same time, I had absolutely zero idea what they were going through.

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Whether in real life or on-screen, the more intangible someone else’s circumstances, the more compelled we are to understand the whys and hows of their life. People watch The Holiday or somehow manage to sit through Falling For Christmas because movies like these distill foreign circumstances into familiar narratives. For a lot of lucky people, and probably the majority of those watching these movies, the untimely demise of a parent—or partner, or sibling, or close friend—will always be someone else’s story. Fortunately for filmmakers, it’s an easy story to sell. Viewers for whom this experience is unknown are taken to a false low, only to be proffered a hollow high. Using one of the saddest circumstances imaginable, the dead-mom Christmas trope kicks the audience’s emotions into overdrive, leaving viewers desperate for a happy ending. But for anyone familiar with this particular brand of grief, we know that’s not how it works. Instead of rubbernecking, we’re reeling over the reminder that we’ll never celebrate with her again.

We hardly ever see the dead-mom or dead-wife or dead-mom-wife in these movies. Just the sullen expressions of people who describe her with whispers. Then cut to the next scene where the main characters are slinging snowballs and sipping cocoa like nothing ever happened. 

When this woman is mentioned, she’s there as a mechanism to evoke cloying emotional monologues or swoony exchanges. She’s a ghost. An afterthought. Rarely do we even hear her name. We just know her as an absence, a tool to shore up sympathy for the main character. Once that transaction’s accomplished, the ghost is erased—resurrected only to inject superfluous pathos for the sake of an emotional garnish.

After several years of poring over trash Christmas movies, I can reliably say it’s almost always a woman who gets the ax, leaving behind a cisgender widower and at least one shiny half-orphaned child. The implication is that it’s sadder when a woman dies; there’s more emotional currency. A kid has it harder without a mom. And a man having to parent without a woman? Well, obviously, such a triumphant feat can only be achieved by DILFs like Jude Law in The Holiday.  

DILFS aside, this is one way the dead-mom trope doesn’t completely miss the mark. Feminist strides and 21st century be damned, women still do the majority of the physical and emotional labor that goes into raising children, making a marriage work, and keeping everyone happy at Christmas. Filmmakers are simply capitalizing on that narrative to crank out a Best-of-[Insert Holiday Movie Theme Here]-List production.

So far I’ve found very few exceptions to the only-dead-women-in-the-movie rule, including The Christmas Chronicles. I stumbled upon the Netflix hit the second Christmas my sister-in-law was dead. Before you get on my chestnuts, let me reassure you that I started this movie well aware it would be garbage. (I was cross-stitching a gift and I wanted a seasonal background movie.) I came for Kurt Russell and stayed for Goldie Hawn, having no idea what the movie was about. It took all of two seconds to get the gist: Two kids, traumatized by the death of their father, are left home alone while their also-grieving mom, played by Kimberly Williams-Paisley, is working the night shift on Christmas Eve. Santa Kurt shows up, shenanigans ensue, and the teenage boy with an attitude problem has his love of Christmas and nice-boy behavior restored.

Unlike the widower-dads who get to be a hero simply for managing to do baseline parenting, Kimberly’s character is out here bustin’ it but her family is still falling apart. Even though the dad in Falling For Christmas is kind of a mess, he’s given grace and sympathy by everyone around him. In Chronicles, however, the teenager’s shitty attitude is cast as a byproduct of the loss of a big strong man who can raise him “the right way.” Kimberly sure can’t do it. She’s out there trying to make rent instead of trimming the tree with tinsel. Suddenly ol’ Kurt Russell shows up in a beard and a sleigh and bim-bam-boom, problem solved.

While men generally have the neat luxury of being able to compartmentalize love, child-rearing, and career, the modern mother is demanded to juggle it all, with or without support. Anything less is a failure on her part. In some ways, my dead sister-in-law was the embodiment of the merry homemaker that Hallmark and Netflix love to torment us with. 

Rachel grew up in Martha Stewart’s House of Christmas. Like the dead moms of our favorite streaming platforms, she carried the weight of the holidays on her back, striving to execute picture-perfect performativity in a commercialist world. She spent time and money she didn’t have shopping for the latest and greatest crap, whatever garland and trimmings Better Homes & Gardens magazine deemed trendy that year. Because that’s what was expected of her.

She adored her children, so I can see why—given that she lived in a world where Hallmark Christmas movies demand nothing but excellence from women—she’d want to give them the inventories of every Target in our tri-state area. But for as much as her labor was one of love, that pull toward performance, toward posting about everything on Facebook and Instagram, toward making sure the tree was surrounded by show-stopping gifts she and the kids could flaunt to the Joneses—all piled up into an impossible to-do list. The toll it took on her was obvious to the women in her innermost circle.

My dead sister-in-law was a human being. She could not emulate a Hallmark movie mom. Nor can her humanity be flattened into a corny hologram smiling over the people who miss her. She isn’t some straightforward Saint Mary watching over all of us. Rachel was complicated and messy and so was her life and her relationships. She gave with her whole heart and, even as her body failed, strived to carry the crushing weight of trying to do it all. It’s exactly this nuance and pressure that dies with these wife-mom characters.  

I don’t know if my nephews and niece have ever seen these movies, but I imagine it would hurt to watch someone gush about how their mom’s not there to decorate the tree. Perhaps worse, a flick like The Christmas Chronicles could give the younger ones the impression that grief can be resolved during the holidays, setting the kids up for disappointment when an angel fails to cross the threshold. I’m not sure how my brother would take it, either. After watching him quiet-cry during a 2020 Super Bowl commercial with an old man telling a Google device about how much he misses his dead wife, my guess is my widower brother probably wouldn’t feel a warm and fuzzy connection with the widowed dad in the Christmas Prince series.

For years now, I’ve wondered if the people who resurrect these zombie wife-moms consider how their creation lands for people like my niece, nephews, and brother . . . not to mention my sister-in-law’s parents and ginormous circle of close friends. What story do writers and producers tell themselves so they can plow forward with the knowledge they could be robbing people of Christmas joy to feed a bunch of unscathed, fascinated folks with the on-screen equivalent of toxin-addled Pillsbury Rudolph cookies? 

Maybe these filmmakers reason it doesn’t matter because we’re all dead inside anyway. Maybe they think that going out of their way to make viewers sad is fine. Or maybe these people genuinely believe they’re doing my sister-in-law’s family a favor by giving us the chance to escape into a world where an angelic woman will appear and melt all our pain away.

Sure, there’s a lot of value to on-screen personalities you can relate to—when those characters are actually relatable. Personally, I appreciate a character who’s estranged from their shitty father and, instead of having some neat and tidy reunion with their deadbeat sperm donor, the character goes on living their life without him—and maybe even develops new coping mechanisms along the way. Snuggly redemption arcs, like the dad and kid reconnecting or making peace (often at the instigation of another character), are not helpful. I know the audience is supposed to go, Oh, god! That’s wonderful! But I’m sitting there thinking Dear, god. Make it stop. For a lot of folks with deep family trauma, teddy-bear endings are nothing more than lies that promise to erase the facts of our circumstances. 

Relationships, whether with a living or dead person, are complicated. It’s hard to stuff that mess into a 90-minute movie. We shouldn’t expect oodles of nuance from a blatantly superficial romcom, but there is a case to be made for uplifting flicks that show how people positively cope with the way things are. That honesty, that realistically achievable hope, is what makes it feel good. And that’s exactly what there could be more of in a movie or show that insists on deploying the dead wife-mom.

An almost good example of this is the development of a stepfather-stepson relationship after the loss of their respective wife and mother in Love Actually. I say almost because there are plenty of places where the plotline and the film overall venture into grit-teeth-and-cringe territory. (In fact, one writer at The Atlantic has apparently made it his life’s work to slam Love Actually.) What does work, however, and makes this left-behind storyline different, is that her death is pretty much the only catalyst that would make sense for launching the story arc between her child and husband. In this case, the widower doesn’t know his stepson well, he’s flummoxed when the kid brings up a problem that only the dead mom would know how to fix, the two figure it out anyway, and they become besties in the process. Their story is about how survivors rely on each other to keep moving forward . . . and that beacon of true hope—hope for a life where pain and possibility can exist concurrently—is the kind of holiday magic that could make those who’ve been left behind feel a teeny bit better. 

Trash Christmas movies are popular for a reason. For those of us who indulge, they’re part of a season that can soften the blow of winter’s darkness. For a few precious weeks, SAD (aka seasonal affective disorder) gives way to GLAD (aka happiness) in the form of bright lights, window displays, tacky houses, catchy tunes, and hot cuppas. It’s a unique, sensory-filling (or overloading, depending on how you look at it) kind of joy in a bleak time in an oft-bleak world. 

This time of year, the mundane feels exciting. I stop to revel in silly things we’ve collectively decided are special. I love the thrill of getting a glittery garland from Dollar Tree and I feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude for having a safe home to decorate, for the Christmas cards from old friends who remind me I’m not alone, and for the husband whose permanent childlike joy makes even Will Ferrell’s Elf bearable. (Except that shower scene. Gross.) Just ask the Grinch: It’s not about packages, boxes, or bags. It’s about what we already have. What is still here. 

Yet, as Steve Martin’s character says in Mixed Nuts, a cheesy holiday movie in which no mothers were sacrificed, “Christmas is a time when you look at your life through a magnifying glass, and whatever you don’t have feels overwhelming.” That includes everything from family estrangement to financial pressure, to the absence of the ones who are gone. This will be my fifth Christmas without Rachel. Half a decade gone and I still catch myself wanting to pull out my phone to text her when I bake her favorite cookies, and I still get a punch to the gut when it hits me I can’t. 

So I can come home to my apartment, littered with kitsch decor, cuddle up with my husband and a garbage holiday movie, and feel the happiness of this time of year . . . until someone mouths the word “widower.”

A forever storyteller and former journalist, Cat Modlin-Jackson spends her days working as a communications specialist and her nights writing essays about gender, culture, and chronic illness.

Editor: Carolyn Wells
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

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Harrison Scott Key| Longreads | December 6, 2023 | 17 minutes (4,850 words)

I have enjoyed many happy Christmases and plenty of disappointing ones, like the one I spent eating alone at a Waffle House due to an ice storm, or the Christmas my father accused all the unmarried relatives of being gay. But of all the sad Yuletides of my life, the one I spent guarding $100,000 worth of explosives on the surface of the moon tops the list. The year was 1996. I was 21 years old and, in a way, quite homeless. Home is one of the enduring themes of Christmas, the joy of being in its midst and the thundering melancholy of longing for it, wondering if you can ever really get that feeling of belonging back—if you ever had it in the first place.

At the time, I was a college student in Jackson, Mississippi, and rarely went home. I would only fight with Pop about why I stopped going to church or entertain questions from Mom about my sudden hair loss and what this did or did not mean about radon poisoning. I did love my family, or at least the idea of them, and took great pride in our being rednecks who lived far off in the Piney Woods, a lawless land where nobody would deliver a pizza. So many of my college friends came from civilized places with public parks and museums. When somebody asked where I was from, I would pull out the atlas to poke my finger at the unmarked point on a map of Mississippi, between Brandon and a subatomic little village called Puckett. “Traveling circuses wintered there,” I’d say, a detail I learned from the Rankin County News as a boy.

It was a nonplace, really. The boonies. The sort of place you only went if you were searching for an escaped convict or a coonskin cap. It did not feel like home. Nowhere did. Mom was from the Delta, Pop from the Hill Country up near Coldwater. “Mama and thems,” he called it, in a county where all the cemeteries had tombstones full of Scotts and Keys, which are two of my names. It felt nice to be in a place where so many of my family members had been embalmed. 

As a young man, my father declined an offer to take over the family farm and split for Memphis to seek his fortune like a character in an old country song, though he never found it there. Memphis is where I was born. Was that my home? When I was nine, Pop’s work brought us down to the Piney Woods near Puckett, some three hours south, where we had no kin. In a place like Mississippi, where kin matters, we might as well have moved to Tierre del Fuego. But I had my first kiss here, and hit my first homerun. Maybe this was home. 

It was, I suppose, until a week before Thanksgiving in my senior year of college. I’d come back to do a little laundry when Pop strode into the kitchen and gravely informed me that they were selling the house and moving again, due to a land dispute with a choleric farmer up the road who hated everyone but his cows.

“Where are you moving?” I asked.

“Up to town,” Pop said.

He meant the Ross Barnett Reservoir, an artificial lake with weedy marinas surrounded by forgettable subdivisions, which would allow my father to carry on his illicit affair with the largemouth bass. It was hardly 30 minutes away, but the people up there were all new.

“You coming up to mama and thems to hunt?” Pop asked as I folded laundry.

I didn’t want to spend Christmas with my family at a farm that never would feel like home, staring backward into a past that only made you sad. I wanted to stare forward. I wanted something new. I needed money, for one. My parents sure didn’t have any. “You have to come,” Mom said. “It’s Christmas.”

“Maybe,” I said, walking out of my last childhood home for the last time. I would never come back to this place. We had no people here. Why would I come back? Where would I stay?

I hadn’t been to church in years but still read my Bible often, with all those horrid battles and beasts and skin diseases that reminded me so much of my Mississippi childhood. The elusiveness of home is one of the Bible’s great themes. God himself was mostly homeless. “The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests,” he says, “but the Son of Man hath nowhere to lay his head,” Jesus says, a little passive-aggressively. 

God doesn’t seem to care too much about where you’re from, and when you’re from a place, he likes making you go somewhere else, usually worse. The whole book is a fever dream of exile and real estate development, beginning in a garden and ending 1,200 chapters later in something even better than New York in autumn, a hermit’s grand hallucination of a city almost impossible in its beauty and cleanliness and tax revenue. 

I remembered my Bible, and all those hymns, too, so many songs about looking for a home you can’t quite put your hands on. In “We’re Marching to Zion,” we sang about the “beautiful city” that awaited us, reached via “The Gloryland Way,” a spiritual highway leading into a metaphorical Canaan’s Land where there exists a habitation on a hilltop for peoples of every nation with no war or passport requirements. Until then, we slouched through arid and inhospitable lands, filled with stumps and snakes. The message was clear: you could find a home—you just have to die first.

I drove through woods and up into town toward Jackson, wondering if God had a home for me out there, somewhere. He’d led the Israelites to theirs with a pillar of smoke by day and fire by night, but driving back to campus in the dark, I saw no burning signs pointing the way. All I saw was a great big billboard off the interstate, bathed in spotlight. In a blaze of fluorescent fire, the sign shouted with holy ghost power: fireworks!

And I got to thinking.

There are places that matter, sites of consecration and meaning, both natural and human, that possess, through the alchemy of time and memory, a holiness: very old churches, ancient baseball stadiums, certain groves of trees on certain campuses. The Romans called it genius loci, the spirit that inhabits the earth and air of a place. 

There are places and there are also nonplaces, forgotten or ignored or transformed by human progress into blind spots of experience where nobody wants to be, like the landscaping in front of a Burger King. The expansive lot with the fireworks billboard off the interstate was a nonplace, which is perhaps why I felt so irresistibly drawn to it. 

The billboard stood high on a pole, just off I-55, alongside US Highway 80. Once known as the Dixie Overland Highway, it stretched from the briny waters of the Atlantic near Savannah, Georgia, to the raging tempests of the Pacific near San Diego, California, and through a now-forgettable piece of Jackson over the brown sad water of the Pearl River. As I drove by this nonplace, I beheld a magnificent wasteland below the billboard, once a truckstop, now a field of gravel featuring the sort of tattered sheet metal structures where they chain hostages to the floor. 

The fireworks sign stayed up all year, because every June and December, a capacious candy-striped circus tent filled with all manner of fiery delights materialized in this post-industrial apocalypse as if by some strange wood-elf magic. It seemed like the perfect place for a boy from nowhere to spend the upcoming holiday. I don’t know what prompted me to call the telephone company and find the phone number of the company that operated this fireworks tent, but that’s exactly what I did.

“Absolutely not,” Mom said, when I explained over the phone that I’d found holiday employment with Boom City, LLC, a subsidiary of The Hunan Group, Inc., managing Central Mississippi’s largest fireworks tent on a dark patch of highway just over the river from the Murder Capital of the New South. Death was rampant in the area: stabbings, execution-style shootings at the river or the strip clubs just over the hill.

“You’ll be robbed,” Mom said. “What kind of company hires a child to sell explosives?”

Something possessed me, a hunger to escape, to hurry up and exile myself and get it over with. Missing Christmas would be a hard stop, a clean death for the past. 

A few days later, during finals week, my father made a rare appearance on campus. Most of the students were gone already. 

“I brought you some things,” Pop said, opening the trunk of the car to reveal gun cases, ammo, and a machete wrapped in an army blanket.

“Your momma’s worried, son. The machete will make her feel better. I sharpened it,” he said, thumbing the blade.

Pop had brought along my old 12-gauge pump, my .30-.06 rifle, and three preloaded clips with 220-grain shot, in case the fireworks tent was attacked by a team of bison.

“And some pistols,” he said, handing me a bag of pistols.

“Thanks, Pop,” I said, transferring the arsenal to my trunk, a few parking spaces over.

Sometimes, when I think about my life, I think about the quiet moments that may have shaped me more than I could’ve known, like the time my father handed me a sack of guns in a dormitory parking lot because he didn’t want me to die. 

I reported for duty on Wednesday, December 18, 1996. I brought long johns, a hunting coat, bedroll, cookstove, radio, books, and the weapons; along with sufficient foodstuffs for the long dark winter: boxes of ramen, several gallons of Dinty Moore Beef Stew—enough survival gear to stage a delicious, hearty coup. 

The lot was hemmed in on two sides by interstate overpasses and a vast junkyard to the rear. In between the tent and the interstate sat a midcentury motor lodge for travelers using this highway, back when travelers used this highway. The place was still open, rot be damned. A sign announced: telephone in every room. Presumably, so you could call and say goodbye to your loved ones as you bled out on the floor.

The enormous circus tent had gone up overnight. A tractor-trailer the color of dry mustard backed up to one corner, but otherwise, the site was empty—a moonscape. Here I was to meet a man called Donny, who’d show me where the execution-style murders would take place.

Donny was maybe 30 years old with a .44 Magnum on his hip and ran all the Boom City tents in this part of the state. Orientation began in the tent proper, big enough for a church revival, strings of naked bulbs draped across the expanse of it. He opened the trailer, the merchandise stacked to the ceiling. 

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“It’s a hundred grand worth of fireworks,” he said. “I hope you got a gun.”

“I have enough guns to start a new government,” I said.

Behind the trailer, tucked away in the back, were my sleeping quarters, a tiny trailer the color and shape of a Grade B egg.

“There’s a hot plate in there,” he said. “But don’t use it.”

“Got it.”

“You get caught leaving, you’ll be fired,” he said.

“Got it.”

He looked around the empty tent and went to a dark place inside himself. 

“People will want to steal everything,” he said. “But don’t go calling the cops just because. Don’t be jumpy like the last dude.”

“What happened to the last dude?” I said.

“He got jumpy.” 

“What if I need to shower?”

“Use the motel,” he said, of the sex workers’ encampment across the lot. “They’ll give you a shower for five dollars.”

“Have you ever been inside it?” I asked.

“Hell no,” he said. 

Donny had me sign papers that relieved Boom City of any liability in the event of my dismemberment and said he’d see me in a week to empty the cash box and bury my remains.

Alone now on the surface of this godless asteroid, I tossed my bag and bedding into the egg. I’d brought a single sheet and a pair of heavy, careworn quilts made by my great-grandmother, Mama Bessie—my mother’s mother’s mother—tough as old boot leather and the size of an emaciated gnome. Mama Bessie raised six children alone and came from a time when men were men and women were also men, due to all the men dying. She made her home near Possumneck, another nonplace, east of West and west of Ethel. I could not shake the strangeness of life—how one day, you’re a boy, hoping Santa Claus answers your letters, and the next, you’re living inside a fiberglass egg with a loaded rifle and a pair of heirloom quilts from a village that Santa will never again visit, for it no longer exists.

I worked myself ragged that first day, through the early sunset and into the blue-black chill of night. My overnight security would be arriving sometime before midnight. Donny had let me hire my own night watchman, and I’d selected my big brother, Bird, the only human I knew— besides my father—who seemed capable of manslaughter. He was in town for a few days and sleeping at the new house over at the reservoir, the one I hadn’t even been to yet.

When Bird finally showed up, my body was already covered in a fine layer of gunpowder. 

“What’s the new house like?” I said.

“It’s a house,” he said.

“I’m going to bed,” I said.

“What do you want me to do all night?” he said, surveying the ridiculous tent.

“Keep us both alive.” I handed him one of the pistols.

“I brought my own.”

“If something bad happens, wake me up,” I said.

“Just come out if you hear shooting,” Bird said.

That first morning, my big brother woke me with a vigorous rap on the door of the egg. I unfolded myself, thanked him, and he drove away, to return 16 hours later, as he would every night that holiday. Even when it turned steely cold, I found the solitary work hypnotic and absorbing, a way to vanquish the dread regime of time. For 18 hours, I unboxed and priced Roman candles, M-60s, Black Cats, Saturn missiles, my body covered in combustible dirt. At sunset, I walked the lot with a price gun in one hand and a pistol in the other. I warmed a bowl of Dinty Moore on the forbidden hot plate and watched holiday programming on a small TV on the counter.

When the weather turned cold and unexpected flurries began, I donned a woolen poncho and took my smoke breaks mere steps from the explosives, using the tractor-trailer as a windbreak. I must have looked a sight to the customers and dealers who came and went with some frequency from the Sex Lodge. Sometimes I read Shakespeare. I had a Complete Works the shape and size of a Bible, tiny print on cigarette paper. I had given some thought to becoming an actor, traveling the countryside with a troupe. Who needs a home when you’ve got a stage?

A hundred yards behind the tent, out in the scrubby desert of disemboweled cars, sat a cinderblock shed where a man with a wispy white mullet lived, sexton of the junkyard. I saw him only once a day when he tootled around the lot on a small dune buggy. One day after lunch, I walked across the gravel to introduce myself. Nobody answered and I walked away. Then a voice rang out.

“Ho, there!” 

I turned and there he was, in overalls and T-shirt, waving me back.

“I’m Otto,” he said.

“I’m working the tent,” I said. 

“I do like a sparkler from time to time,” he said, his mind wandering to a happier youth. 

“I’ve seen you out here on your dune buggy,” I said.

“That ain’t me,” he said. 

“Oh,” I said, though it was obviously him.

“That’s the other Otto.”

I wanted to ask him what it was like to live with dissociative identity disorder and which Otto would be slitting my throat later. But this Otto seemed pleasant. 

Customers were scarce—a few truck drivers, attorneys who drove over the bridge from downtown. One afternoon, a local TV reporter stopped by and asked to interview me for a segment on fireworks safety and I made up some important facts about fireworks safety. I must have looked like something dragged out of a bog, the scruffy character in the holiday movie who teaches life lessons.

I called Mom from the landline that ran into the tent from a nearby pole, to give her the number and offer proof of life.

“Could you come to the farm Christmas day, at least?” she said.

“I can’t,” I said.

“I left you a turkey breast, if you get a chance to go to the house,” she said.

“I can’t, I’m not allowed to leave.”

“I just hate this,” she said. “It’s Christmas.”

Isolation works a number on you. I almost wanted criminals to stop by. In the long stretch of dark between sundown and the arrival of my brother, I took to dragging a chair out in the middle of the lot, beyond the glow of the tent, under the great black ceiling of stars, staring up into the cold. I felt like Abraham when God told him to leave home and go find another one and that his family would grow as many as the stars above. I felt like Jacob, his grandson, who sleeps on the ground at night and demands a blessing and God puts him in a scissor hold and gives him a hip injury that lasts all his days. It always seemed odd to me that God would appear to Jacob and all Jacob wanted to do was wrestle. But after a week out on the moonscape, I understood. If God had shown up, I’d have wanted to wrestle, too. 

The night of Christmas Eve, I sat out in front of the tent looking at the stars, the faint wash of interstate traffic a distant waterfall. Where were all the people going? Back home or madly away? My school friends were spread across the country. Other friends were over beyond the gelid swamp rot at Martin’s, a seedy downtown lounge always lively in the homecoming days before Christmas, filled with a neon haze of cigarette smoke and the beautiful stench of whisky and ash. The thought of all that happiness made me sad. I didn’t want to be sad but you can’t help what you think about. All those people, at least the ones I knew, had homes to go back to, right there in town, warm childhood beds in leafy neighborhoods where they’d grown up and could probably keep coming back to for the rest of their lives, if they wanted. 

The idea of having a place to go back to—a house, a village, where you would know people and they would know you—seemed a priceless luxury beyond imagination. Pop had a place like that, at the Coldwater farm. He was there now, asleep next to Mom in a bed in his parents’ house, on the land he called home and always would. I had an egg on wheels.

When Bird showed up that night to let me sleep, I’d made up my mind.

“I’m going to the new house,” I said. 

“Thought you wasn’t supposed to leave,” he said.

“If Donny shows up, tell him I’m over at the motel.”

I careened through better parts of town, everything closed for Christmas Eve but shop windows gleaming yet with light. I wanted a shower. It would be a gift to myself, a small luxury, a humanizing act, a blessing to wrest from the grip of God. I pulled into the neighborhood, tucked away on a forgettable street among a series of forgettable subdivisions, each with its own forgettable boat ramp. The design of the homes was derivative at best, another subdivision without history, all those Frankenstein facades, a Victorian gable here, a Tudor chimney there, shallow porches, hollow columns. The new house was dark, just another brick ranch with shutters that wouldn’t close. 

As soon as I saw it, I laughed aloud: I’d once gone out with a girl who lived here, two or three years before. Uncanny. The girl, Libby, was so pretty, so kind, so tall, so blond—like a captain for the Finnish national volleyball team—and I remember feeling envy that she lived here, in a house, in a place where you could get pizza delivered right to your door. Life is weird.

Pop’s boat was backed into the open carport. Through the window, I caught the unmistakable glow of our lighted Christmas tree, though the house was empty. I found the key Pop had handed me a month before and tried the side door, but it didn’t work, and neither did any other key, and neither would the windows budge nor the locks be jimmied with a credit card. I kicked the shrubberies. I cursed the name of God. I whispered fuck very loudly. 

I climbed up into the bass boat, into the only good seat available, and smoked. 

Libby! Where had her family gone? The brass knocker on the front door still had her family’s surname on it. She’d lived here all her life, she said. Why’d they leave? Divorce? Promotion? A sudden turn of ill fortune? Where did she sleep now and was she sad about that? 

I guess it was in that moment that I must have first begun to see, through a glass, darkly, that all of us lose home eventually. Otto hadn’t been born in that cinderblock shed. Mom had no family farm. She had nothing but us, her children. No wonder she called the fireworks tent every night. When I took this ridiculous job and then hired her firstborn to risk his life so that I might sleep a little, I’d done more than cancel my own Christmas. I’d canceled everybody else’s, too. 

I threw my head back and exhaled a cloud of breath and smoke and overhead saw a perfect square cut into the carport ceiling. Maybe Christmas didn’t have to be annulled. Maybe I could climb through the ceiling and sit by the tree and just enjoy it, for an hour or two.

I found a ladder in the garage and climbed into the attic, crawling on hands and knees across ceiling joists with a lighter to show me the way. I would take a shower and make a delicious turkey sandwich. It would make Mom so happy to know she’d fed me. Maybe I would make a fire, sit by the tree, and watch It’s a Wonderful Life, remembering happier Christmases. Maybe even pray for a few more, down the road. I would make Bird a sandwich, too. 

Up in the rafters now, above what I reasoned was the kitchen, I kicked at every hole in the ceiling that looked like it might be an attic door, but nothing would give. I kicked and cursed like a failed St. Nick, with no gifts and no magic and no way into a house that would never be a home. No room in this inn. Not tonight.

I climbed out and drove back to the emptiness on US 80, where I half-expected to find Bird dead, all the money and fireworks gone, but he sat there, perfectly unharmed, a rifle across his lap, watching a snowy feed on the television. 

Later, Bird and I sat there together in the dark beyond the light of the tent and smoked. From the interstate, the warm red light of the striped canvas must have looked inviting in the blackness. The Bible says Jesus is just like that, a tent you can crawl inside. “Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God,” writes John in the Book of Revelation. 

“Merry Fucking Christmas, little brother,” Bird said.

“So merry,” I said, fingering the safety of my rifle.

We looked at the stars and told stories. I did not want to leave him alone and I think he did not want me to go to sleep. Whatever sadness I felt was as much my fault as anybody’s. I’d made my choices. Home was out there, somewhere. All the hymns said so. Maybe it would be a city or maybe it would be a church or a wife and children or a house on a beautiful street, or maybe it would just be peace in the invisible tabernacle that was Jesus. Who could know.

A few days later, the world descended upon the house of explosives and bought almost everything. Nobody died, I saw no drug deals gone wrong, nobody shot anybody, and Otto didn’t show himself again and neither did the other Otto. I hired a few friends to help out on New Year’s Eve, and it was nice to have company. 

After midnight, when the crowd finally thinned and the traffic slowed, out beyond the glow of the tent, my friends fired off bottle rockets and multi-shot aerials, which burst in bright bouquets of color and light over the junkyard and far across the darkness of the river, and it was fun to see them having fun, but my mind was already down the road, toward some new future where I might never have to be alone again at the most wonderful time of the year. A family. A wife. A place to sleep without wheels. My last night on the lot, in the trailer shaped like an egg, I felt ready to hatch and fly toward some new home. 

These days, I don’t know what to tell people when they ask where I’m from. I have lived in Tennessee, Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Illinois, North Carolina, and Wyoming, and I’ve lived in Savannah, Georgia, now for 17 years—longer than I’ve ever lived anywhere. My mother lives here and my father is buried here, under soft green grass five minutes from my house. I have a wife, too, who moved as a child even more than I did. We have three girls. One will be off to college next fall and the other two after that. I like the idea of staying here so that our children can be from somewhere, even when they leave. It’s nice to know where you’re from.

When people ask where I’m from, I still say “Mississippi.”

And people say, “Whereabouts?”

Sometimes I say, “The Piney Woods.”

Sometimes, “Brandon,” where I had my first kiss.

Or “Star,” where I went to high school.

Or “Puckett,” where I hit that homerun. 

Mostly I just say “You haven’t heard of it. I haven’t even heard of it.”

I still think about that big circus tent. Strangely enough, I now live mere blocks from the very origins of the old Dixie Overland Highway, US 80. They call it Victory Drive here in Savannah, Georgia, but it’s the very same road that runs right by the tent where I worked that December, some 600 miles to the east. I ride my bike across this road to go to work. Crossing that road is like fording a river of time that runs back through the weird history of my little life and all the places I’ve lived and left. Sometimes I think the only home any of us have is in the tabernacle of memory, though I do own a pretty brick house on a leafy street, which feels as close to paradise as I’ll ever get, at least on this side of the Gloryland Way.

The year after I worked the tent, I heard that my successor had been robbed of all his money in the middle of the night and stripped naked, gagged, and bound to a pole. Discovered hours later he was believed to be dead but was only asleep. They say he was fine. I still drive over that piece of interstate every few years when I come back to Mississippi, and I always look off toward the moonscape with fondness; that desolation where I spent the loneliest Christmas of my life. The motel is still there, and so is Otto’s cottage. I don’t know if the tent goes up anymore. In place of the large fireworks sign is a great big banner promising romantic adventures. I have often considered stopping, to have a closer look and stand there amid the wasteland and feel the sweet pang of lost youth, but having no weapon, I drive on.

Harrison Scott Key is the author of three nonfiction books, including How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told, Congratulations Who Are You Again, and The World’s Largest Man. He lives in Savannah, Georgia.

Editor: Carolyn Wells
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens

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Wendy McClure | Longreads | December 2019 | 18 minutes (4,618 words)

The Christmas Tape has always existed.

The Christmas Tape was recorded around 1973 or 1974. My dad thinks we were in our second Oak Park house, the one on Elmwood. I would have been 2 or 3. I don’t remember.

The Christmas Tape was our family tape, a seven-inch reel of holiday music played on an open-reel deck. The first four songs were taped from a folk-music show called The Midnight Special, which aired Saturday evenings in Chicago. I don’t know which one of my parents recorded the Christmas Tape, but I think it was my mother.

The Christmas Tape meant Christmas, which meant that everything was going to be all right.

Because the songs came off the radio — because whoever taped them had only a moment to toggle the RECORD switch — they all have their first few seconds clipped off at the beginning. Each one ends with a few soft thuds of fumbled edits before stumbling into the next song.

Nobody knows these songs; nobody outside our family at least. My brother and I never heard them anywhere else, except on The Tape, and we assumed they came from some alternate Christmas universe.

They are, in playing order:

“The Little Drummer Boy,” by Marlene Dietrich, who sings it torpidly in German while a children’s choir mewls rampa pam pam! in accompaniment. (It sounds, really, like a mash-up between the pageant scene in A Charlie Brown Christmas and a smoky Berlin cabaret.)

“Mystery Song Number One,” one of two folk tunes on The Tape so woebegone and obscure that not even my parents could remember what they were called or who the hell performed them. We thought of this one as “Three Drummers from Africa,” since that was the refrain: Three drummers from Africa/ leading the way/ to play for the baby on Christ-a-mas Day.

“Mystery Song Number Two,” featuring a single guitar and the vocals of a slightly dour-sounding trio or quartet. Maybe called “Come Let Us Sing.” Maybe not even a Christmas song.

“Go Where I Send Thee,” by Odetta: For years my brother and I had no idea who the folk singer Odetta was, so for a long time this song was just a voice, neither a he nor a she, racing through the lyrics of raggedly and breathlessly and ferociously in a tempo so frantic and ecstatic that it matched our own Christmas! Christmas! excitement.

Last year I emailed my dad to ask who recorded The Christmas Tape, since he is the only parent I can ask now. He wrote back saying that he and my mom used to love The Midnight Special. “It featured all the folk songs that killed the 60s,” he wrote. It is the sort of funny thing my father likes to say these days, funny but slightly evasive. Does he not remember whether he or my mother recorded the songs? Does he mean he wanted the 60s dead? (Probably.) When I try to nail down family history details I get genial not-quite-answers like this that I have to work around. This is how I came to think it was my mom who recorded The Christmas Tape.

There used to be more to The Christmas Tape. After those first four songs, my mother recorded two popular holiday LPs, collections of carols and traditional songs by the Harry Simeon Chorale and the Robert Shaw Chorale, so that The Tape drifted off into the more conventional realms of “Silent Night” and “Angels We Have Heard on High” for the next two hours or so. Then it sounded more like any other family’s Christmas tape, if other families had Christmas tapes.

I don’t know why my mother decided to tape albums that we already owned and could easily play on the turntable; maybe she grew impatient with recording songs off the radio. Or maybe she wanted to create an expanse of unbroken time, free from the interruption of radio commercials or the need to turn a record album over. Time that she could live inside, with us, seamless as a snow globe.

It’s true the air seemed to change when the tape deck was switched on: a thick pop from the speakers and then an expectant hum, the world enhanced.

***

The original tape-ness of The Tape is important: how it was hundreds of feet of acetate and magnetic particles. How the tape recorder was a Sony deck my parents had purchased in Japan around 1966. They had been stationed there during my dad’s active duty in Vietnam. He had been on minesweeper patrol in the South China Sea and he and my mom sent each other tapes on little three-inch reels. My dad recorded his letters from his ship, using a portable deck, while my mom, back in their apartment in Sasebo, made hers on the new tape deck. On one of the tapes my mother sent, she told my dad she was pregnant.

How, after my dad’s deployment ended, my parents brought the tape deck back to Illinois. They’d bought other stereo stuff in Japan, too: a turntable; speakers; a tuner with an AM/FM band display that lit up like a window in a little house. My brother, Kevin, was born, then me. At some point, I am told, there was a tape of Kevin and me, our tiny babbling voices, but I’ve never heard it. I remember only The Christmas Tape.

How, when my brother was little, he’d been both terrified and obsessed with the tape deck: scared of the drone the stereo gave off when a tape ran out, the noise dark and furred. How my mom noticed he kept drawing circles, pairs of them, and figured out they were meant to be the reels. Later, when Kevin was older, I watched him turn a piece of notebook paper sideways and draw the tape deck box in faithful detail — the headblock, the pinchwheel, the VU meters, the numbers on the sound-control dials that he neatly labeled. Then he took two empty reels — the small three-inch ones, the kind my parents used to send to one another — and positioned them on the paper and turned and turned them.

(How I sat here at my desk and looked at websites about tape decks trying to find words like “headblock” and “pinchwheel.”)

(How I keep doing this, stopping the tape and starting it again.)

Eventually Kevin learned to work the actual tape deck, could thread The Tape’s crumpled leader through the tape head and onto the takeup reel, drawing out the untouchable part that held the music. He’d turn on the speakers, then switch on FWD. Forward.

The Tape sounded the best when it played the radio songs. Whereas the album recordings had the faint crackle and hiss from the stylus needle, the first four songs were so clear their sound seemed to come from everywhere at once, like the multitude of angels that appeared to the shepherds.

***

Also important: The Christmas Tape was almost never played on Christmas day. By then we didn’t need the tape: there were gifts to open and the day took care of itself. The Tape was for the day we put up the tree — a fake one; my mother was allergic to real ones — on an almost invariably snowless weekend day tinged with obligation.

I don’t know which one of us insisted on The Tape each year we brought the tree down from the attic (fully assembled, wrapped in plastic) and brought the slumping, mildew-and-winterberries-scented cardboard box of ornaments up from the basement. Maybe we took turns. Since my brother mastered the tape deck technology, it was likely his job to turn on the stereo and pick the right moment to start The Tape, deploying the wintry, Teutonic dirge of Marlene Dietrich.

Hört ihr Leute, she sings. Pa-rum-pa-pa-pum.

(Also, and I can’t find a way to tell this part without putting everything else on pause: on some nights, during some Decembers, my mom would be in bed early because she’d tried to adjust her antidepressants, or else had just started the meds again and was waiting for them to work.)

Kommt alle her geschwind. Pa-rum-pa-pa-pum.

(And while I remember things like the sound of my mom’s voice in bed — saying I’ll be okay — or the shape of her under the bedcovers just beyond the slab of hallway light from the open door, I have no single fixed recollection, only these parts I know from memory, playing back again and again, and now that’s part of the song.)

***

Eventually the reel-to-reel tape deck was deemed too out-of-date to bother with and retired from the living room stereo cabinet, and my brother took the deck up to his room. He was in college then; I was four years behind him, in high school. My brother figured out a way to dub the first four Tape songs to a cassette so that we could listen to them on a boom box in the living room.

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This gave the sound of The Tape’s songs a slightly muffled underwater quality to them, but the fact that The Tape was now the tape of The Tape made everything more tape-like in a way my brother and I loved. The sonic snap at the start of each song recording was more pronounced somehow, as if each song had to punch through a membrane into existence.

Kevin and I didn’t think of The Tape as just four songs, as the 15 minutes of music I realize they are now. Maybe our sense of time was blurred by what we had learned from making our own recordings, from popping blank tapes into the VCR to capture bright rackety chunks of MTV. You could record five hours onto a 120-minute videocassette, so it seemed like any stretch of time could be made to fit or expand. You could put your whole life into a few minutes if you had the right songs to carry them.

“The Little Drummer Boy,” by Marlene Dietrich: When my mother was 19, her family was stationed at an Army base in Heidelberg, Germany. As she became immersed in the German language she began to speak it fluently. “When you wake up and realize you have been dreaming in another language,” she explained to Kevin and me one night at the dinner table, “then you are fluent.” This song, sung slowly and dreamlike in German, became fused in my mind with the knowledge that my mother had lived in another country and had spoken that language, had maybe been someone else once.

“Three Drummers” by Unknown (AKA Mystery Song #1): For a while the two Mystery Songs, especially this one, gave me twinges of Christian anxiety. This was in the years during and after my stint in Pioneer Girls, a Jesus-ish after-school club that a friend had talked me into attending with her on Tuesdays in the basement of her church. As a result I’d acquired a persistent low-level guilt about not feeling more “saved” and a vague shame that I hadn’t understood The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to be an allegory of Christ until the other Pioneer Girls deigned to tell me. (“It’s so obvious,” my friend Gretchen said.) I wondered if the Mystery Songs were Christian songs I should know but didn’t because my carelessly agnostic family hadn’t taught me better.

“Come Let Us Sing” by Unknown (Mystery Song #2): And I mean, the words to this one are inscrutable: it has a numeric cumulative pattern like the “Twelve Days of Christmas,” but instead of counting drummers drumming and pipers piping, it goes:

Twelve for the Twelve Apostles,

Eleven for the good men gone to Heaven

Ten for the Ten Commandments,

Nine for the moonlight shining bright,

Eight for the Gabriel angel,

Seven for the seven stars in the north,

Six for the noble waiters,

Five for the ferryman on his boat…

And so on, pieces of a weird unknown parable that I thought would become a story if I listened hard enough; everything would suddenly become intelligible, like a dream in another language.

“Go Where I Send Thee,” by Odetta: My brother’s effort to retrieve these songs from the obsolete media that held them might have been especially motivated by the need to hear this one exactly as we knew it. Upgrading the stereo equipment had left us Tapeless for a couple of Christmases and my mom had tried to make do by buying a CD of Odetta’s Christmas Spirituals album. But the songs were re-recordings of the originals, so the “Go Where I Send Thee” track on was different — only two minutes long, more sedate, and completely lacking the licking flames of the version on The Tape — which as far as we’re concerned, is the one true version.

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When Kevin rescued these songs from the original Tape, he could have easily enough copied the rest of the stuff on there — the Christmas albums Mom had recorded, the stretch of Andy Williams and Nat King Cole at the very end, the songs that made up the most of The Tape’s playing time — but there was never a question as to why he didn’t. My brother and I wanted only that small hoard of songs that had never been heard anywhere outside our living room. We were never forced to sing them in creaky unison at school concerts; they’d never been played as holiday background music at the supermarket, or at the office of our terrible dentist, who had a glassy-eyed six-foot marlin mounted on the wall in the exam room. As odd and chewed-around-the-edges as these four songs were, we considered them pure, and so they became The Tape as we knew it.

***

But this also meant The Tape was incomplete. On a C60 cassette you’d have just half of one side filled. On a CD, you’d have more than an hour left.

At first my brother and I tried to add our own songs. For a while I kept and played a cassette dub of The Tape to which I’d added a handful more holiday favorites, such as “Fairy Tale of New York” by the Pogues and “Do They Know it’s Christmas?”, the well-intentioned but sort of awful charity single performed by a passel of 80s British pop bands. These songs, awkward and apocryphal, never felt right on The Tape. Later, when my brother digitized the songs and put them on a compact disc, he tried to fill the remaining space with music he deemed to be in the same spirit as the original four songs, which apparently to him means a couple of Peter, Paul, and Mary tunes, about 50 minutes of Irish folk songs about winter, and a smattering of “Contemporary Celtic” mixed in, and of course that felt wrong too.

(We played it Christmas Day at one of the first family get-togethers after Mom died, and in the middle of what seemed like the fifth shambling Irish ballad in a row I got up from the couch and stalked across my dad’s living room to the stereo. “I’m going to change the CD,” I said under my breath. “This sounds like a bunch of fucking sea shanties.” But this was later.)

I remember as well a version of The Tape in which the first four songs were followed with a long stretch of blank space, so that if you let it keep playing, the cassette mechanism would tick softly along in the quiet minutes until it ran out. I think I played The Tape this way for two or three Decembers when I lived in Iowa. I might have played it in one of my drafty student apartments or on the drive back to Chicago for winter break, listening to the murky strains of Marlene and Odetta and Mystery Folk People for a little while, and then the nothing that became the sound of the car on the road. That still feels like one of the best ways to listen to The Tape: first the old music, which is the past, and then all that empty space, the present and the future.

The space where it all happens: After my brother leaves home for college; after I leave home. After my parents sell the house, which is after my mom falls on the stairs and needs a place that’s easier for her chronic pain, and more and more my dad takes care of her.

After I move back in with them for a year after grad school, depressed and adrift. After my brother gets into something called Mahikari and every weekend he drives 50 miles to their dojo to practice giving “light energy” through his hands. After that one Christmas when my mom lets my brother give Light to her bad knee, the one she’d dislocated when she’d fallen, and he sits there with his hand hovering over her leg for 20 minutes at a time. After I ask my mom if she really thinks it helps and she says, “Well, it can’t hurt.” After everything, it still feels like now.

***

“The Little Drummer Boy,” by Marlene Dietrich: In my 20s I’d put on a little shtick in my parents’ living room making fun of the song, of Dietrich’s mumblings in particular. You can practically hear the ice clinking in her gin and tonic! I’d say. I’d imitate her sneering at the children’s choir: Vat are zees cheeldren doink in mein schtudio?! (I hadn’t really seen Dietrich in any films and had no idea how she really spoke.) I was living in Chicago and would drive out to my parents’ place in the suburbs to help put up the tree and decorations, and being funny had become part of the job somehow. My job, because my mom couldn’t really walk, and later she’d be sick, and because my brother was sort of in a cult, and because my dad was trying to keep the household going, and later I’d try to talk to him and ask him about all of us but none of my questions ever seemed to be the right ones. So instead we’d play the Christmas Tape and I’d make the jokes about this song, because my mom would laugh. Not a parent laugh but an adult laugh, full and unrestrained, and the fact that I could get her to do it felt amazing, like I could open doors with my mind.

“Three Little Drummers,” by the Beers Family: At some point the internet made it possible for my brother to find out, at last, what the two mystery songs were called and who performed them — in this case, a wholesomely pie-faced couple and their blond daughter, the three of them wielding fiddles and autoharps and dulcimers. “Three Little Drummers” is the first track on their 1964 album Christmas with the Beers Family, which is on iTunes and everything, as if it had been there all along.

“Come Let Us Sing,” by the Armstrong Family: It’s a little funny, isn’t it, that both of these lost songs turned out to be recorded by groups dubbed family.

“Go Where I Send Thee,” by Odetta: Years later my husband, Chris, bought me Odetta’s 1960 Christmas Spirituals album, which has the seven-minute version of the song, the same one on the Tape. When I played the album track it was strange to hear the song from the very first second, from the words children, go — because on the Tape these are partly cut off and distorted in a way that makes them burst out of the silence like a strangled cry.

***

Inside the long silence things are still in the present tense, even though it was more than 19 years ago. My parents move to New Mexico, to the house they bought just before Mom’s cancer was discovered. We fly out there for the holidays — my brother on one flight, Chris and me on another. We have all realized over the past month or so that this will be my mother’s last Christmas, and perversely my mind processes this fact with a serendipitous lilt: So nice how that works out, I keep thinking, Christmas in the place where my mother wanted to spend the rest of her life, and now the end of her life coming so close to Christmas.

Chris and I get in close to midnight after a long layover and my dad pushes my mom’s chair into the kitchen so that she can say hello, but when I see her slouched there with her oxygen tank shushing it doesn’t seem at first that she can talk or if she even knows we are there. I haven’t seen her in six months and am not prepared to see her this way. Already she seems to have crossed some threshold. In just another week, right after Christmas, she will start hospice care.

I am too much of a wreck to do my so-called job of being funny. My aunt JoLee and her partner Karla, who have often shared this duty with me, are stranded in Mexico. I was counting on them to make the drinks, crack up my mom, save Christmas, but their flight is cancelled by snowstorms in Denver. My brother, who was supposed to stay at my aunts’ place, now has to sleep in a spare room at my parents’, where the cat hair he’s allergic to clearly bothers him, but he won’t stay at a motel; he coughs wracking, terrible coughs and insists that he’s fine. I know he’s not. None of us are fine right now. At one point my brother is trying to talk to me: he’s upset about something, something about the room where he’s staying and all the cat hair, and how they, our parents, said they’d keep it clear for him but they haven’t. “I want to talk to them about this,” he says, and he keeps saying them and they, which sounds wrong to me and I don’t want to think about why, but finally I have to say it: “What do you mean ‘them’?”

“What?” he says.

“It’s Dad who has to do everything now. Stop saying them,” I say, my throat going tight. There’s no them anymore.

***

(How I knew for years that we would lose her and so I kept a space open for grieving her.

How I kept it open for years, thinking it would prepare me. How it’s still open and maybe unfinished.)

***

Every year now, when it’s an appropriate time to listen to Christmas music, and thus The Tape, I invariably go online to find out what I can about the four songs, because almost every year there’s a little more to discover. Instead of adding new songs, I find I have this notion that the old songs can themselves collect stuff, as if The Tape could record and play at the same time. Chris once took me to see a performance where we watched a guy recording snippets of radio noise onto a tape loop until the sounds overlapped, roiling and repeating, and I imagine The Tape to be something like that, picking up new information. The Marlene Dietrich song, really called “Der Trommelmann,” was recorded in 1964, about two years after my mom left Germany. The Beers Family released only one more album after their Christmas record and ceased playing after Robert Beers, the father, was killed in a car crash. I found out the Armstrong Family was part of the folk community in Chicago in the 60s, though what I wanted to find most of all were the words to “Come Let Us Sing,” which had always sounded so baffling. Was one line really Six for the noble waiters? I’d resorted to typing snatches of lyrics into bizarre search strings on Google.

Last year something came up at last: not a full set of lyrics but a handful of the right lines: Come let us sing; what shall we sing? I’ll sing you one… These appear in an article from a 1930s musicology journal, which identifies the song as an Appalachian tune called “The Twelve Apostles” and declares it to be a “relic” and a “quaint musical survival.”

“Its status as song, carol, or chant is difficult to fix,” the article’s author, a Josephine McGill writes. “Orally transmitted through generations of mountaineers, the text has obviously suffered corruption…Through its reiterations, its questions and answers, the piece suggests threads of association with Hebrew hymns, medieval carols and secular verses.” In other words, like a tape loop with all kinds of tiny luminous fragments taken up in it, bits of old chanties and Biblical stuff and descriptions of the night sky: eight for the Gabriel angel, seven for the seven stars in the north.

On The Tape it seems like the sound for “Come Let Us Sing” has degraded more than the other three songs somehow. The voices are warbly now, as if the music is slowly changing form — not dissolving but settling, like silt in a stream turning to rock.

***

On The Tape, like The Tape is still a discrete thing, when in fact it’s a cassette in a scuffed case in my desk, a CD marked with Sharpie in my brother’s handwriting, a handful of MP3 files on my computer’s iTunes. The iTunes songs were ripped from the CD, four spliced sections of the 15-minute-or-so audio file, the cassette dub of the original Tape. Each digital track is a sliver of time containing not just the song but the seconds of Tape noise that precede and follow it: interstitial bits like residue, like soil clinging to the exposed roots of a plant. Sometimes when I play my music library on shuffle, one of The Tape songs will come up, the sound quality discernibly thin, a sort of audio ghost visitation. When this happens during any season other than Christmas I listen for only a few moments before I click to the next random song.

All four of The Tape songs are now available as tracks on digitally remastered albums, so it’s possible now to buy them as authorized downloads, as tidy song files with metadata. You could build a better Tape but of course it wouldn’t be The Tape. The Christmas Tape isn’t Christmas songs; not even these weird other-universe Christmas songs. The Christmas Tape is itself the other universe, or a portal to it. All the spots on The Tape where the recording was started and stopped, a little door opening and closing.

To get there, almost, I can play the songs, The Tape files, in their original order. I can put them in a playlist so their noise-edges fit together: the faint hum at the end of the Marlene Dietrich song is broken by the pop at the beginning of “Three Little Drummers,” and between that song and “Come Let Us Sing” a flutter and a tiny shard of radio voice, trapped and so brief the only word you can make out is “once.”

I think my mother is there. I think that is her hand on the tape deck’s control switch, trying to catch the songs as they begin, pushing the recording switch from PAUSE to FORWARD. The soft fumbles on The Tape feel like her, her sense of timing, once stopping the recording of “Three Little Drummers” in the middle of the song by mistake. When I ask my dad who recorded The Christmas Tape and he doesn’t say it wasn’t my mom, is that enough for her to be there? I don’t know: I think she recorded The Christmas Tape and I think she is there. On the other side of the playback, she is there. It is a Saturday night in December, near midnight, and she is waiting, listening, in the house where we live.

* * *

Wendy McClure is the author of The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairieand several other books for adults and children. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, BUST Magazine, and the Chicago Reader. 

Editor: Sari Botton

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Suzanne Ohlmann | Longreads | December 2019 | 16 minutes (4,121 words)

I once cared for a patient who looked like Jesus and, after 40 days in a coma, rose from the dead on my shift. I worked nights as an intensive care nurse on an abdominal transplant unit, and Leonard was the spitting image of the white sacred heart Son of God.

It was the week of Christmas when he became my patient, though Leonard had been hospitalized since before Thanksgiving. He was 50 years old and smelled of dried sweat, sour breath, and incontinent bowels. Before I’d been assigned to Leonard’s care, every major organ system had failed, down to his skin, his entire body covered in large, fluid-filled welts called bullae. He was dependent on the mechanical ventilator due to respiratory failure, and connected to the machine by a tracheostomy tube surgically inserted into his throat. His blood pressure and heart were sustained by three different intravenous medications, and his failed kidneys replaced with hemodialysis, the blood from his body washed by an intricate filtering mechanism the size of a Pepsi machine. He had tubes in every orifice, nostrils to anus. Alone, his family three states away, Leonard’s comatose state left him completely vulnerable to the whims of his medical team. He was incapable of closing his eyes, his stare casting an eerie spell over the room until we decided to start taping his eyelids shut for two-hour intervals. Nurses clucked their tongues upon hearing his story, shaking their heads at his plight with a combination of disbelief and indignation, whispering reactions like, “He should have known better,” or, my favorite, “People like that are the reason I’m not an organ donor.”

Leonard was an alcoholic and had Hepatitis C, most likely from IV drug use, though it’s possible he wasn’t aware of his diagnosis. When he went out with his fellow migrant construction workers to a seafood joint north of San Antonio, he should have ordered the fish and chips. But Leonard ordered a plate of raw oysters, fresh from the Gulf of Mexico. Maybe one of Leonard’s physicians had warned him about raw oysters and Hepatitis C. Maybe Leonard knew that because he had Hep C, he shouldn’t drink alcohol; that his immune system was weakened by his ailing liver; that raw or undercooked seafood from the warm waters of the Gulf can carry a monster bacteria called Vibrio vulnificus; that a person with Hep C who contracts Vibrio vulnificus faces a 50 – 85% mortality rate from infection and septic shock. Maybe Leonard knew, but I doubt it. I can’t say that he should have known better.

***

My biological father died of liver failure at age 50 from alcohol and Hepatitis C. His name was Mike, and I had just discovered him in the year leading up to my care of Leonard. My first full year as an intensive care nurse coincided with my first year of contact with Mike’s family. If Mike had known better and skipped the needles and beer, he might have lived long enough to meet me, but he didn’t, and died not knowing of my existence. A year before I met Leonard, I sent identical letters and a photograph to my father’s two siblings, Aunt Christine and Uncle Greg. I’d found their names in his obituary, and located their address on the Internet. They shocked me with emails of sudden welcome just days after I’d sent the letter. I had to lie down when I read phrases like, “You’re part of our family,” and, “Your dad would have been so proud.”

After the initial exchange of letters, Uncle Greg asked to talk on the phone. When I called, he skipped the chitchat and dove into Mike stories: that he was his big brother and best friend; that he never missed a birthday; that he loved to work with his hands and had a bit of a mail-order problem.

“He sure did love his knick-knacks from the Franklin Mint,” he said.

“How did Mike die?” I asked.

“Well, Mike liked to drink Old Milwaukee,” he said.

“Old Mill? Really?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said, “I never liked that stuff — got a real twang to the taste — but Mike drank it for breakfast.”

I laughed. “Breakfast?” I asked.

“Yeah, let’s see: there was the beer, and Mike partied pretty hard in the 70’s. You know how it was: live hard, die young,” he said.

“Yeah,” I lied, thinking of my parents, who spent their 70’s (and 80’s, and 90’s, amen) singing in Lutheran church choir, eating at potlucks in the church basement, or practicing recorder for their failed recorder group. We have photos documenting Dad playing a polished, wooden, tenor recorder, a bowl of black hair on his head, with my mom laughing in a hand-sewn denim suit, blonde highlights in her hair, cocktail glasses of soda within reach of each of them.

“We’re pretty sure Mike had hepatitis from all that partying, so that didn’t help with the beer,” he said.

“Hepatitis? Which hepatitis?” I asked.

“Well,” he said, “we’re thinking it was probably Hep C that got Mike in the end. Hep C and beer.”

***

So there it is. I knew that my biological father had died of Hep C and beer when I cared for Leonard. I even had the information when I took the job in that particular liver/kidney transplant hospital. But it never crossed my mind; not in my choice to leave New York and move south; not in my job search; not even during the interview with the nurse manager. When she asked why I’d decided to pursue intensive care, I told her I wanted to work in a setting that would provide the widest variety of illness, teach me the most about nursing, and in the shortest amount of time.

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“You’ll be right at home here,” she chirped during my interview, her heels clicking across the floor tiles as we toured the hospital. As we passed the rooms, she barked out the illness of each of the 20 patients on the unit. “This is a post-op Triple A with blood pressure issues. We’re about to put him on a nitro drip…and here we have a fresh kidney transplant. Just look at the sparkling urine in that Foley bag. Bed Four is a total septic train wreck. Bed Five is an ESLD/Hep C/Cirrhosis awaiting transplant and headed down the drain with a new viral infection. And Bed Six? Oh yes, overdose, on a vent and a Narcan drip that came through the ER last night. You get the picture? Sound like what you’re looking for?”

Though overwhelmed by the multiple diagnoses, all I could see was a green light. This was my job. This was my next adventure.

“Just one quick question,” I said. “What’s ESLD?”

“End Stage Liver Disease. You’ll become an expert on it if you join our team. ”

I moved and started the job in late December of 2008, six months after passing my boards, eager to master a new set of skills. I worked overtime and followed written orders and hospital protocols. I helped my fellow nurses clean and turn their patients, studied Advanced Cardiac Life Saving protocols to get my ACLS certification, jumped into Codes (cardiac and respiratory arrests), cracked ribs with chest compressions, pushed meds, called out times, and donned gowns, gloves, and splash masks when things got messy. In a matter of months, I’d transformed from a free-lance-musician-slash-nursing-student in New York to a full-time ICU nurse.

Though I had begun to learn about Mike and Hep C, I hadn’t found a way to comprehend his life, or how it related to me. When I arrived to this new realm of Intensive Care nursing, many of our Hepatitis C patients had contracted the disease from needles in the 1970’s, and now needed liver transplants. Many were men in their early 50s, with long hair, mustaches and beards, tattoos and missing teeth — not a group you often find in the Lutheran churches of my childhood. I grew to love them as my patients, and soon learned that these men were a tribe I would come to call my own.

***

By the time I met Leonard during the holiday season, a year had passed since I’d first connected with my biological family. I’d been working the night shift for most of that year and fully succumbed to vampire hours, awake for shorter and shorter amounts of daylight as fall succumbed to winter.

I’d begun to disconnect with conventional life, partly due to my sleep schedule, and partly due to the trauma I tended throughout each 12-hour shift. We had stretches where we’d lose a patient every night, most often those with ESLD who bled to death, or whose lungs filled with fluid, or whose depressed immune systems fell prey to nasty bacteria. My work consumed my life. On my days off, I did little else than laundry and sleep.

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On my first night with Leonard, “Feliz Navidad” piped over the hospital speakers, while a janitor mopped the hallway outside his room, humming along. Two nurses stood over his bed to change the linens, with Leonard on his side facing out, his crystal blue eyes staring past me. He was on Contact Isolation for drug-resistant bacteria, which required any personnel entering his room to wear protective gear. I’d be spending the next four nights in a gauzy yellow gown and blue medical gloves with Leonard, so was content to get report from my post outside the room amidst the flurry of soiled linens and sanitary wipes.

“He has so much gas,” said Trent, his day nurse, scrunching up his nose. “I’ll show you.”

“Please, no, I believe you,” I begged from the doorway.

Trent began gently kneading Leonard’s abdomen, and waves of flatulence opened forth like the bellows of a blacksmith. “It can’t be comfortable for him, poor guy,” Trent shouted over the gales of wind wafting into the hall.

“You have a point,” I said, plugging my nose. “Will you stop the Christmas Fart Fest and give me report?”

I looked back at Leonard’s face, my eyes locked with his empty gaze. I couldn’t admit to anyone that I thought Leonard looked like Jesus, and that music from Messiah rushed into my head whenever I saw him. He was despised, I heard the alto sing, low and mournful with the sighing, string accompaniment, despised and rejected. Brown hair, mustache, beard, piercing blue eyes; this is the Jesus I grew up with in Nebraska. Leonard’s cheeks were less rosy, covered with skin lesions and overgrown facial hair, not to mention the jaundice from liver failure. But even unkempt and yellow, Leonard was a Jesus doppelganger.

I tried to compliment him when I spoke to his mother on her nightly phone calls.

“How’s my sonny?” she’d ask in a thin, scratchy voice.

“He has such beautiful, blue eyes,” I’d say, after listing his maladies and overall poor prognosis.

“Oh thank you, honey. But how can you see them if he’s sleeping all the time? I thought he was asleep?”

This is the danger of trying to look for a silver lining in the realm of intensive care, or deciding your patients look like the Lord. Every connection you make between a patient and something familiar to you, even something ridiculous like a celebrity or a religious figure, makes you more connected to them as a person, and thus an intimacy is born, and thus the sense of loss greater when, as often happens, they die.

“He’s in a special kind of sleep called a coma, and he can’t close his eyes. We see them a lot, and they are beautiful.”

“Oh,” she paused, her voice softer, “I see. Well, you take good care of my boy.”

She ended all our conversations with those words. I imagined her like my grandma, seated at a small kitchen table, her white hair in rows of wavy curls, with an apron and wire-rimmed glasses. Her sweet voice belied the strain of a mother thousands of miles away from her dying son, a son who should have known better.

***

I sang to Leonard when he was my patient. No matter what task or medication brought me into his room, I sang to him all night long and from a lifetime catalog of Christmas music. Leonard lay still in the bed, unresponsive to verbal, physical, even painful stimuli, and I sang. The music kept us company, since Leonard’s non-blinking stare unnerved even the most veteran of nurses. Though I sang in soft tones, I wanted to fill his room with sounds other than the beeps of the IV pumps, the heaves and sighs of the ventilator, and the alarms of his cardiac monitor.

My nursing colleagues laughed at me if they walked past and heard my quiet Christmas concert in Leonard’s corner room, but I grew up in the Ohlmann family, its own four-part chorus. Dad sang tenor, Mom alto, Jeff baritone (after the age of 15), and me, soprano. Lutherans are prone to harmonizing when we sing, church organists accompanying hymns through the first verse or two, then dropping out to let the congregation morph into a choir, which we do nimbly, almost instinctively. Though singing is encouraged, even expected, the emphasis, since the time of Bach, falls on choral music and congregational singing, not on solos; you wouldn’t want to draw too much attention to your voice, even if it were beautiful. Once I branched out as a soprano soloist in college, my mom was sure to remind me, and often, “Don’t be a diva.”

When I was little, both Mom and Dad sang in the church choir, with Dad the occasional cantor/soloist. Each year during Holy Week, he chanted a psalm at the end of the Maundy Thursday service. After communion, the head usher turned down the lights in the nave as the ministers began stripping the altar. In the darkened church, Dad’s raw, tenor voice pierced the silence with the words of Psalm 22.

My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?

Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?

O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but find no rest.

My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?

I never knew who to watch, my dad in the balcony behind me, or the pastors at the front of the church, dismantling the altar in sober, mournful gestures. But were they mournful? Or was it my dad and his pleading music that set the tone?

But I am a worm, and not human; scorned by others and despised by the people.

All who see me mock at me; they make mouths at me, they shake their heads.

My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?

Polite church-goers don’t turn around to see who’s singing in the balcony, an expression of such obvious curiosity considered untoward. But he was my dad, so I craned my neck to see him in the soft glow of his music stand light, eyebrows furrowed, shoulders rising with a deep breath before each phrase.

On you I was cast from my birth, and since my mother bore me you have been my God.
Do not be far from me, for trouble is near and there is no one to help.

My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?

Dad got busy with work at the library and eventually quit the choir. Once I grew up and left home for college at St. Olaf, I took the mantle from Dad and started singing solos from the balcony during holidays and summers at home. But I never sang Psalm 22; not on any Sunday, nor Maundy Thursday, the solo better sung by a man to evoke the voice of Jesus as he died, the antiphon some of his last words from the cross.

I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint;

my heart is like wax; it is melted within my breast;

my mouth is dried up, and my tongue sticks to my jaws;

you lay me in the dust of death.

My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?

I know Dad didn’t realize it, and neither did I as a child, but he was singing my song, the psalmist all those centuries ago writing verses to a primal wound. I don’t mean to speak blasphemy, but Jesus doesn’t get to claim abandonment as his own. In some way, and at some point, we have all been left, like my biological father in his trailer that Christmas he died; like Leonard that Christmas with me. My dad sang Psalm 22 to God, but he sang it to me, too, and somewhere in that little girl inside me, I knew it.

But just as I did with Leonard and all my ESLD patients in the ICU, I had the information, but didn’t connect the dots. Maybe I was in denial. Maybe I was trying to survive. For so long I couldn’t see when my biological past rose to the surface and manifested in my present. I pushed forward on the timeline of my life, and went along with the socially accepted adoption script: all’s well that ends well. But Leonard, my own Jesus doppelganger, had come to renew my faith; not in the Christian sense of salvation, but as the closest I’d come to tending the suffering and death of my own biological father.

***

I moved into my new apartment two days after Christmas, a few weeks after I’d established contact with Uncle Greg. Once I settled in, he sent me a care package that included a pair of photo CDs. One was labeled Miscellaneous Pics, the other, Funeral.

Greg and Christine had prepared a photo collage of Mike’s life for his memorial service just two years prior, so I fired up the Funeral disc first, eager to see if I looked anything like my father. With a double click, photos of Mike began to swim across the screen, with Ozzy Osborne’s tinny voice singing in the background, “See You On the Other Side.”

“Como se dice not Lutheran,” I laughed to myself.

I paused on a picture. Mike sat at a kitchen table, a baby with a bottle tucked into his arms. He looked healthy, young, maybe in his late 30s, with brown hair, a mustache, and a plaid shirt, Western-style with pearled snaps for buttons. Behind him, a clock on a side table showed ten o’clock, and judging by the soft light on walls, it was morning. Mike gazed down at the baby, a can of Old Milwaukee next to him on the table.

I fixated on that photo. I downloaded it, and for weeks looked at it first thing when I woke and last before sleep. I memorized every detail and began to dream about it — not fluid, narrative dreams, but moments where I was part of the scene, sitting at the table with Mike, or watching him from the next room. After a month of near obsession, I called Greg to see if I could glean any information.

“Uncle Greg, can you tell me about a photo from Mike’s funeral collage?” I asked, describing the photograph in detail.

“I’m pretty sure that’s Chelsey or Shawn, Chris’s boy,” he said.

“It’s not his baby?” I asked.

“Oh, no,” he said, “he had a baby girl when he was married but she was barely home. Born premature and spent most of her life in the hospital,” he said.

“I guess I forgot he had a daughter. I didn’t know she was sick,” I said.

“She didn’t breathe too well and once they got her home, she woke with a fever one morning and was dead before suppertime,” he said. I didn’t respond. “Mike never got over that, he said. Think he got a DUI on her birthday for three or four years after that. Sad, all Mike ever wanted was a daughter. Just his luck he had one and never knew it.”

***

By my fourth 12-hour night in a row with Leonard, I’d run out of holiday music, not to mention energy. As the shift wound down to the final hours, I chose one closing act in my attempt to revive his dignity, if not his life. I’d given his body, bed, and room a thorough cleansing, but his ragged hairstyle remained, a mullet, the short-in-the-front/party-in-the-back style famous in the 1990’s, though it’s been worn by men and women alike since the 1970’s (Michael Bolton, Rod Stewart, David Bowie, my brother, Jeff, during high school). Leonard’s mullet had become a rat’s nest at the back of his neck, tangled in his central line dressing, and stuck to the ties that anchored his tracheostomy tube.

So I climbed up onto the stool I’d been using to reach Leonard on his high-tech air bed and cut it. I found out later I needed a physician’s order for such a thing, and, thanks to a good-humored pulmonologist, I got one after the fact. (Okay to trim mullet for hygienic reasons, he wrote.)

As I stepped back to admire my work, I noticed Leonard’s right eye open under the soft, clear tape I used to close his eyelids every two hours. I moved in to peel the tape back, but as I tugged at it gently, his eyelid flinched.

“Leonard? Did you just blink your eye?” I pulled the last edge of tape from his cheek.

No response. I held my breath as I peeled the tape off of his left eye. He flinched again.

“Leonard? Can you hear me?”

No response.

“Leonard, if you can hear me, I want you to concentrate and try to blink one or both eyes.”

After a long minute, he winked his right eye.

“Leonard?”

He winked his left.

“Leonard!” I started shaking his bed. “Are you winking at me?”

Night shift speeds quickly into day on an intensive care unit, and you hope nothing disastrous occurs between 4:30am and 6:30am as you long to end your shift in peace, not in the scuttle of a cardiac arrest or spontaneous hemorrhage.

But Leonard had other plans. After 40 days of sepsis and metabolic coma, at 4:30 in the morning, Leonard decided to open his eye under the tape and wink on command, the flirt. Nurses came running from all ends of the unit, unsure why my singing had changed from Christmas carols to shouting.

“He woke up! He woke up! Leonard! Woke! Up!” I hollered, dancing a jig around his bed.

When his pulmonologist, Dr. Ball, arrived at 5:00am, I waved in maniacal semaphore from inside Leonard’s room. A tall, stern man — not humorless, but never goofy — he donned his gown and gloves in silence. Twenty-five years of critical-care medicine had taught him to lower his expectations.

“Leonard,” I said, “can you wink for Dr. Ball?”

He obliged, first right eye, then left — making us wait a split second longer for the left side; comic timing from a nearly dead man.

“Well,” Dr. Ball cleared his throat. “Good we ordered that haircut then.”

I cringed, unsure Leonard would like his new do. “Uh, Leonard — I hope you don’t mind, but I cut your hair. You were starting to look like Jesus.”

Two months later, Leonard walked out of our hospital and took a bus home. Several months after that, I moved to the day shift, bought a house, and made plans to meet my Uncle Greg in the fall. Just after Thanksgiving, nearly a year after Leonard’s resurrection, he sent me a card with this message written inside:

Miss Hollywood (Suzanne),

I cannot thank you enough for the mental stimulation that your lovely voice gave me to bring me back from that place I was (which is still a mystery!) You were a beautiful sight to wake up to with a beautiful voice. I’ll never be able to explain the joy you’ve given me by bringing me back to my family. The enclosed photo is of me and my two daughters.

Thanks again!

Leonard

I dug the photo out of the envelope and found Leonard with his arms around two very happy-looking girls. He had brown hair, a mustache, and wore a Western-style shirt with pearled snaps. Good health had transformed him from the look of the Lord to an even higher status in my Book of Life. Leonard, his beloved daughters in tow, was a doppelganger for my dad.

* * *

Suzanne Ohlmann is a writer and heart failure nurse in South Texas. She lives with her husband, a firefighter, and a quintet of dogs and cats in downtown San Antonio.

Editor: Sari Botton

Jane Borden | Longreads | December 2018 | 12 minutes (3,211 words)

In a big city, a woman lives a fast-paced life until something forces her to visit a small town, just before Christmas. Shortly after arriving, she connects with a charming small-town man. Commence ice-skating, hot chocolate, a tree lot, tree decorating, caroling, gift giving, charity work, big family meals, snow, snowmen, snowballs, snowball fights, red scarves, cookie decorating, a grand old house or country inn, sleigh bells, giddy children, and the soft plucking of stringed instruments whenever a character delivers a joke.

Every made-for-TV Christmas movie tracks the above plot. And yet, the uniformity does not prevent proliferation: This year alone, Hallmark made 38 holiday films across its two channels. Lifetime made 14. “The word is insatiable,” says Meghan Hooper, senior vice president at Lifetime and Lifetime Movie Network. “We don’t seem to be able to do enough to make the audience happy.”

“Suddenly, Hallmark is no longer a guilty pleasure, it’s just a pleasure,“ says writer-director Ron Oliver, who has made 13 Christmas movies for TV since 2004, mostly for Hallmark, which has become synonymous with heartfelt, holiday romantic comedies (it’s the Xerox of them, or, if you will, the Kleenex). “I have not seen this happen until this year. Everybody jumped on board.“

In 2017, 83 million people watched at least one Hallmark Christmas movie during their Countdown to Christmas and Miracle of Christmas events. The Hallmark Channel was last year’s number one cable network among women 25 to 54 in quarter four, and is shaping up to remain in that spot for 2018. Both Hallmark and Lifetime boast double-digit ratings increases during December. And the field is getting crowded: UPtv produced seven original holiday movies this year, Netflix made four, and Freeform made three.

How did America become obsessed with sappy, predictable, low-budget Christmas movies? Before we delve into history and psychology, let’s finish the plot:

Our protagonist falls in love, of course. She also rights an ethical wrong, always something from the past awaiting resolution and absolution. “It all goes back to Dickens,” Oliver says, referencing Scrooge’s transformation in A Christmas Carol. Like Scrooge, our modern-day heroine receives help, her three ghosts being her new love interest, the small-town community, and a stranger who slightly resembles Santa (what Hooper calls “a Santa-like”). At the film’s end, she and the love interest kiss, usually for the first time (these are family films), and she either moves to the small town or is forever changed by it. No one asks why the moms and aunts look only 10 years older than the protagonist. Roll credits, start the next one, begin to confuse which characters are in what.

It’s easy to assume that viewers enjoy these movies in spite of the repetitive plotlines, as if the networks greedily scam us. But Hallmark and Lifetime both do extensive focus grouping and ratings analysis. They know what works — we watch these movies because the plots are the same. In fact, Oliver calls the plots peripheral: “The real elements of these movies that make people love them is this sense of returning to your own past, your own childhood and sense of innocence from that era.” The slightly varying setups and environs must be similar to deliver us. These films are not art or even entertainment — they serve a function. They are ritual, a ritual as pagan as Christmas’s origins. And their key piece of iconography is the kind of American small town that’s quickly disappearing.

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IMAGINARY AMERICA

“Small towns have always been the iconic image for human relationships,” says Krystine Batcho, a professor of psychology at Le Moyne College, whose work specializes in nostalgia. “The older woman lives here and the nice young family lives here. When you present the imagery of the small town, it’s portraying how we can get along in peaceful ways and help one another.”

Oliver grew up in one of these towns. He recalls, “It was this absolute Norman Rockwell Christmas town.” However, he adds, “I went back, maybe 20 years ago, and it is now strip malls. There is nothing to hold onto from there, so you hold the memories and recreate them in stories.”

He uses his hometown as a template when designing scenes and sets, but admits a challenge: “A few places exist, but they are getting harder and harder to find. We have to make them. We use every trick in the book.” Christmas Everlasting, one of this year’s Hallmark films, is partially shot in Covington, Georgia, because Oliver was drawn to its charming town square. “But when you go two blocks from there, it’s Walmart and CVS,” he says. Ultimately, the setting of the film is an amalgamation of three different small towns, plus a healthy dose of CGI.

Suddenly, Hallmark is no longer a guilty pleasure, it’s just a pleasure.

So these movies deliver a fantasy of a memory — except, for most of us, it’s a false memory we internalized through Norman Rockwell art, and Rockwell was also delivering the fantasy of a memory. You can trace the line of American Christmas imagery all the way to Queen Victoria: In 1848, The Illustrated London News published an etching of Victoria and Prince Albert standing around a Christmas tree with their family. It was published two years later in the States, and had a lasting impact of popularizing the tradition. “Christmas was not always a family-centered celebration,” explains Bruce Forbes, professor emeritus of Religious Studies at Morningside College, and author of Christmas: A Candid History. It became a family holiday in the second half of the 19th century, thanks to the wild popularity of Queen Victoria, and to Charles Dickens, who published A Christmas Carol in 1843. “Dickens was not telling you what was happening in England, he was trying to create a Christmas that didn’t exist yet,” says Forbes. “When we talk about the ‘spirit of Christmas’ now, we talk about generosity. That’s a Dickens creation.“

What did exist prior? In England, not much. As a result of the lasting effects of the Puritan revolution in the 1600s, the English hardly celebrated Christmas at all. The Puritans’ beef was twofold: Christmas was not celebrated by early Christians (the holiday didn’t appear until the 300s) and those who did celebrate Christmas, Forbes says, “went to midnight mass and then to the tavern and got drunk.” So Puritans wiped it from the English consciousness.

Taking the baton from the Victorian image was Currier and Ives. The phenomenal success of this New York City lithography firm in the mid- and late-19th century put affordable prints of snowy landscapes into the hands of a nation. Then in the 20th century, Norman Rockwell paired nostalgia for 19th-century Christmas with images of our mid-century obsessions: the nuclear family and suburban life. It was a powder keg. Today, pulp-like TV Christmas movies recreate these images again — in their own way as prolifically as Currier and Ives — but this time they’re more reflective of our modern world. Additions include both the mundane (texting) and the imperative (finally, after years of criticism, we see characters of color). Nostalgia is meta by nature.

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ART IMITATES ART

A few years ago, Hallmark Cards, Inc., the parent company of the two Hallmark networks (aka Crown Media), tapped one of its senior illustrators, Geoff Greenleaf, to create a series of images about a fictional town called Evergreen. The series of snowy scenes in a small town, featuring quaint shops and an iconic vintage red truck, became a bestseller. In response, Crown Media turned the cards into a 2017 film titled Christmas in Evergreen. The movie, and its 2018 sequel, Christmas in Evergreen: Letters to Santa, were shot at Burnaby Village Museum in British Columbia, itself a fictional setting designed to preserve and romanticize small towns of yore.

Dickens was not telling you what was happening in England, he was trying to create a Christmas that didn’t exist yet.

Oliver believes the mid-century American imagery that these films capitalize on is so effective because it speaks to a time “when America was truly powerful and firing with all six cylinders: making great cars and great music, going to the moon, for crying out loud.” But, of course, Rockwell and his ilk rarely painted the whole picture. “It’s sanitized,” says Forbes. “It ignores all kinds of things: race, teenage pregnancy, poverty. But it was the image that white Americans had of themselves.”

TV Christmas movies have certainly perpetuated this brand of whitewashed nostalgia. As the films’ popularity rose, networks received ample criticism. Still, just five of Hallmark’s 38 holiday films this year feature leads of color. This includes Christmas Everlasting, starring Tatyana Ali, who also stars in this year’s Jingle Belle on Lifetime. “It speaks to a shift in our culture, that suddenly there is a move afoot to have more and more of our real world look like our television world,” says Oliver. Still missing in the genre are LGBTQ love stories; no lead to date has been gay. 

As American as a proclivity towards heteronormative whitewashing, so too is the tendency towards consumerism — some of the imagery within the films is for sale. Christmas in Evergreen has an adjacent product line: a keepsake ornament of the red truck, a magic snow globe, a mystery key, Santa’s mailbox. “We worked in partnership to look at a couple of the products they had that we could weave into the overall storyline,” says Michelle Vicary, executive vice president of programming and network publicity for Crown Media Family Networks, which owns the Hallmark Channel and Hallmark Movies & Mysteries. And of course they did: Hallmark was a retailer long before it got into content creation. “Not all brands evoke emotional connections,” Vicary says, “but that is at the top of what this brand promises and it has been since the beginning.”

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CAPTIVE ON THE CAROUSEL OF TIME

These films are not merely delivering the past; the stories achieve a delicate balance between familiarity and novelty. In them, we see a “constant struggle between wanting to hold onto certain things from the past but wanting a new beginning,” says Batcho. That new beginning is provided primarily by the love interest — TV Christmas movies are never not romantic comedies. Hooper says her team at Lifetime learned the importance of adding a romance element, after trying other versions of holiday films without it.

This makes sense to Batcho. “Like nostalgia, romantic stories focus on relationships and the sense of the ideal,” she says, adding that early brain imaging studies suggest that romance and nostalgia produce similar hormonal releases in the brain, “the loving, feel-good, pro-social feelings.” Plus, of course, as important as it is for us to protect the village, we need new relationships to strengthen the gene pool. But Batcho also says novelty is intrinsically linked to nostalgia. She likens cyclical markings of time, such as holiday celebrations, to a carousel: Each time it goes around, the horses look the same, but different people may be sitting in different places. “By being different and new, [novelty] allows you to escape so you’re not trapped in the past,” Batcho says. “Nostalgic people tend to be more optimistic, forward-looking people.”

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Although nostalgia was originally defined as homesickness and categorized as a disease, scientists now understand its healthy and profound psychological function. Studies suggest that exercising nostalgia enhances mood, reduces stress, and increases both social connectedness and self-regard. “Nostalgia helps us rediscover aspects of our authentic self, by going into our past,” says Batcho. Studies even suggest it helps us ascertain a meaning or purpose to our lives. Batcho also describes nostalgia as a social experience, since we identify ourselves in terms of relationships. “Nostalgia actually helps diminish loneliness by reminding people that, even if you are not physically with those who have loved you, you were once loved,” she says. Further, the process isn’t random. We specifically seek past memories that will help our current state.

“Every time you turn the television on,” Oliver says, “you’re seeing news about another betrayal of an ideal that America held close for a long time. I think the country is trying to find its moral center again. There’s a consistency to these stories that people hold onto like a life raft in the middle of a cultural storm.” Perhaps, as viewers, we also try to right a wrong.

The makers of TV Christmas movies wisely trigger nostalgia in several ways. “We certainly have gone after a certain type of talent, in terms of recognizable faces we grew up with from ’80s and ’90s shows,” says Lifetime exec Hooper. Nostalgia serves us. A 2018 survey by Cigna reports that most adults are lonely — as in, the average score, on a scale from one to lonely, was at least lonely. Other studies have shown loneliness to be a major predictor of poor physical health, leading some researchers to declare loneliness both a health crisis and an epidemic.

Further, cohorts aged 18 to 22 and 23 to 37 reported more loneliness than older generations. “That’s new,“ Batcho says. A press representative for Hallmark identifies the network’s demographic as women 25 to 54, but says that during the fourth quarter – our holiday season – “our women and adults 18 to 34 are through the roof,” suggesting a potential link between loneliness and viewership. 

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WE ARE ALL JUST PAGANS BY A FIRE

Nostalgia TV has been booming for a few years now, and the seemingly endless reboots and remakes premiere all year long. So why this huge surge in viewers around Christmas? Even otherwise prestige-TV-obsessed viewers, who turn up their noses at predictable schmaltz, now indulge in made-for-TV Christmas movies. “I don’t know if the season causes it as much as the season gives you permission,” opines Oliver. “From Thanksgiving night onward, you are allowed to be sentimental.”

“It’s something about the holidays that is just built in: indulgence. Drink the hot chocolate, eat the food, lay on the couch, enjoy your family,” says Hooper.

And when Batcho is asked why people insatiably consume this kind of content during the holidays, she says, “Winter represents nature dying and taking a pause. It makes you feel very sad and hoping to look forward to a rebirth in the spring, which tells us that it is very fundamental and natural for people to like cycles. Bears hibernate. Even human beings need to take a pause.”

In one way or another, they are all saying the same thing, which is that we watch Hallmark around Christmas for the same reason Christmas happens at Christmas: the solstice. In the 300s, when the church designated the holiday, it likely chose December 25th for a litany of savvy reasons: some political and some for convenience, some building off already established pagan rituals. “You could guess them even if you didn’t study the cultures,“ says Forbes. “If it’s a midwinter festival, it would be a festival of lights to push back the darkness. It would feature evergreens because they look alive when everything else has died. To get past the isolation of winter, you would have feasts. And you would have dancing, singing, and drinking.“

From Thanksgiving night onward, you are allowed to be sentimental.

Part of why we’ve celebrated midwinter festivals since before recorded time is because, as Batcho said, we like cycles. They help us predict regular change: It’s cold and dark now, but abundant spring will come again, and we know it. They also help us deal with the constancy of change, with whatever on the carousel is new. “We can’t stop change. What do we do instead? Build cycles,” Batcho says. These cycles come in the form of temporal landmarks, which trigger nostalgia: birthdays, anniversaries, holidays … holiday movies. “We anchor ourselves. It is important for psychological well-being to have a sense that we are not out of control.”

The consistency of plot and its predictable ending therefore serve an important purpose: we need the films to be predictable because they are another icon of the midwinter festival. We see one and our brains not only know what to expect, but also what to do. If we seek this iconography now more than ever, then we must feel especially out of control.

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THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS

It would be easy to attribute the popularity of these films to a kind of escapism resulting from the current division in our country, from the fear and hatred that many feel on both sides. But the rise of both Lifetime and Hallmark TV holiday movies started ramping up around 2012 (see graph). Perhaps the division in our country and the popularity of holiday films (and nostalgia programming in general) are effects of the same cause: an almost unfathomable acceleration of rates of cultural change.

In the 1980s, architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller (he of Dymaxion House and Geodesic Dome fame) posited a theory known as the knowledge-doubling curve. This sort of stuff isn’t 100 percent measurable, but the basic idea is: The amount of information we know, as a species, doubled about every 1500 years back when we were cavemen, and every 100 years in the modern era, up until World War I, at which point, it started doubling at an ever increasing rate. In the ‘90s, Artificial Intelligence researchers estimated the amount of information in the world doubles every 20 months. Today, varying estimates suggest that the amount of information in the world doubles every 10 to 13 months, and that, in our lifetimes, it could begin to double every 11 hours.

Change is coming at a furiously accelerating rate, providing us with greater and greater dominion. However, Yuval Noah Harari argues in his bestselling book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, evolution did not equip us to handle this kind of rapidly increasing power. For millions of years, Genus Homo was positioned in the middle of the food chain. Only in the past 100,000 years did we jump to the top. “Humankind ascended … so quickly that the ecosystem was not given time to adjust. Moreover, humans themselves failed to adjust. Most top predators of the planet are majestic creatures. Millions of years of dominion have filled them with self-confidence.” Our genus, by contrast, stumbles along with far less than a majestic prowess: “many historical calamities, from deadly wars to ecological catastrophes, have resulted from this overhasty jump.”

We need help adapting to cataclysmic change. Nostalgia provides aid, and so does story. Researchers discovered that character-driven narratives cause the brain to release oxytocin, which can enhance empathy, thereby motivating cooperation and leading us to trust strangers. The study, led by Paul J. Zak at Claremont Graduate University, also found that we continue to mimic the actions and feelings of characters after the story ends. If a protagonist accepts shifts in her life and finds optimism for the future, then so may we.

We know that loneliness is on the rise. We know that both nostalgia and story help us create and sustain relationships. And we know that more than 83 million of us are turning to nostalgic stories during the annual month when humans anchor themselves against change, all during a time in history when the pace of change threatens to destroy us. Maybe we’re obsessed with schmaltzy TV Christmas movies because humans understand, deep down, that the real savior, this season and every season, is each other. Come on, you knew this article would have a Hallmark ending.

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Jane Borden is a freelance culture writer based in Los Angeles.

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Editor: Katie Kosma

Fact checker: Sam Schulyer

Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Susan Fekete | Longreads | March 2018 | 13 minutes (3,541 words)

I lived in Atlanta for six years after college. I only went back to St. Pete twice in that time, and both times I stayed with my aunt Linda.

Mom would make excuses about not having cleaned the house, not having done laundry, and therefore not having clean sheets on my bed. It made me sad, a little, because I knew they were lies. I knew her house was full.

Full — floor to ceiling, windows to walls — of stuff. Her mass of belongings included objects de art, trinkets, furniture, memorabilia, books, magazines, journals. And many cats, especially ones with extra toes. Although no one was sure anymore how many of those — or of anything else for that matter — she had.

When I visited, she came over to my aunt’s house, and we hugged and laughed and loved each other greatly and talked for hours on end. About everything.

Everything except the stuff in her house. My mother was a terrific metaphysician, passionate about the world around her and the lives of others. She was spiritual even at her darkest moments, and funny even in her greatest sorrows. She was a joy to be around, if you could avoid the stuff.

* * *

My mom must’ve grown tired of moving, because she stayed many years in that tiny house. I believe her tenure there resulted from a massive conglomeration of coincidences. Cosmic synchronicity. Karma. A big bang of sorts: A new beginning that ultimately brings the end.

She’d found a place she could easily afford, whether she was working a lot or only a little. She’d found a landlord, Joan, who was kind, and would frequently let the rent be late for weeks — even months — at a time, until my mother caught up. She’d amassed more stuff than she’d had in one place since we’d moved out of our big house, and moving it alone was a difficult, sad, embarrassing task to consider. I wasn’t nearby, so she didn’t need to keep up appearances for my sake. (A thing she always seemed to feel a need to do — even though, for my entire upbringing, I had been told that it was unnecessary to maintain appearances among family members, who were supposed to be honest with each other, real.)

So she stayed in the tiny house, and she lived and worked, and the garage sale sirens kept after her, calling her with their keening songs.

She was a joy to be around, if you could avoid the stuff.

I had a fairly good idea how things were going by what arrived in the mail, or via “Package Express” on a Greyhound Bus. Old habits die hard, and my mother was a brand loyalist (if she could afford to be) when it came to frozen vegetables, baking powder, and bus lines. It had become an ever more regular, more necessary part of her otherwise completely unstructured routine when I was away at college.

I loved her packages, and they usually made me laugh, so I never discouraged the practice, except on the occasions when I knew damned well she couldn’t afford it — and even then, my objections bore no weight with her. If I didn’t particularly want or need something that arrived in a box, I’d pass it on to a friend who might appreciate it. She’d usually send a card from her current “stack” of inventory, but the envelope would appear to be too small for the card, bulging at the seams from the clippings, articles, and pages from newspapers, magazines, and local bulletins. She clipped jokes that made her laugh. She clipped poems that she thought I’d like. She clipped articles about people we’d known and places we’d been together — lighthouses on the East Coast, space shuttle launches, a childhood friend marrying a prominent politician. She’d clip articles about things that she knew my friends liked and send them along, with little notes like, “This reminded me of Andrea,” or “Isn’t this the town in Connecticut where Steve is from?” scribbled across the top.

She was also famous for clipping the ends off of Celestial Seasonings tea boxes, because they usually contained some great quotation or sweet saying. She clipped these almost as loyally as we’d clipped Campbell’s Soup labels so we could turn them in at school. I always recognized these clippings as being from these particular boxes of tea because, well, she always sent me tea, too. And it was always Celestial Seasonings, unless the tea included Earl Grey, in which case it was nearly always Twining’s.

Now, please don’t misunderstand me, and please don’t be afraid to offer me tea, should we ever have the chance to visit together on a cool autumn evening. I love a nice cup of tea. I find something very soothing about preparing the water, steeping the bags in a teapot, filling the cup, sometimes adding honey or lemon. I like the presentation, the warm vapors rising to my nose from the cup as I slowly and deeply inhale the leaves, the herbs, the bits of flowers that season my water. So it’s not strange that my mother sent tea: I liked it, and she knew I did, so why not, right?

Right! But she’d send several boxes every time she sent me something, which was more tea than I could drink. More tea than I could serve and still have a life outside of serving tea. At one point, I owned no fewer than two boxes of every variety of Celestial Seasonings tea on the market.

My mother’s care packages usually reflected some little corner of a disorganized mind. She’d include a couple of candles, pretty ones — maybe hand-dipped or made with organic soy or something. But she’d send them to me in a box along with some books she’d found at a secondhand bookstore, maybe about theater or Salvador Dali, or an old, gold-leafed copy of Longfellow poems, which I knew wasn’t worth anything, but it was ornate and beautiful, and I liked that it’d made her think of me. And some hard candies. All sent lovingly, by bus if she felt manic, or third-class postage if not. From Florida. In the middle of summer. So I’d open a box with great anticipation, made greater by the lovely lavender or patchouli or lemony scent from the candles inside, only to find the hard candies less than hard, and the candles melted over the pages of the books, an inseparable ball of wisdom and wax. And I’d laugh at my disappointment, and then I’d cry just a little because I knew she hadn’t considered this possible outcome, and because I knew that I’d be the one to break the news to her.

From time to time, she’d mail things to my friends, too. The ones to whom she sent things usually thought it was very sweet and thoughtful, and they rarely understood the caution with which the words, “What did she send, exactly?” came out of my mouth. Only one or two of them ever got things that were worth any negative mention. One got an envelope of clippings — good ones — but the whole thing reeked of cat piss. She was nice enough to assume, out loud and in my presence, that something had happened in transit — “Some feral cats must’ve gotten into a mail truck. Poor mailman!” — and laughed it off. Our eyes met at one point, and we both knew what we were afraid to say, but it was far too strange to address.

* * *

The other strange gift went to a couple, my friends and neighbors. I’d gone to school with one of them, and we were close, and kept a loving and watchful eye out for each other’s homes and welfare. It was Christmas, and I was working and busily rehearsing some theatrical production. Getting away to “home” seemed like an imposition on my oh-so-productive life, so I’d invited my mother to come visit for the holidays, my treat.

I thought it would be fun, different, and certainly less depressing than going back to my hometown with the full knowledge that I wouldn’t be invited into my mother’s house full of stuff if she could avoid it. With all of her stuff, her lifelong insistence that she wasn’t “very smart,” and her moods, which shifted more swiftly than a tornado’s direction, she was still one of my favorite people in the world.

My mother had always been the best hostess she could possibly be, given whatever means she had to host with. She was overly generous, spared no manageable expense, and would give up her own bed, couch, and floor for guests, even if it meant sleeping in her car for the night. She was equally as good a guest, and would never arrive to anyone’s home for a meal — be it friend, relative or stranger — without bringing along a gift, or more than one. Flowers bought or picked stealthily from a neighboring yard were always a good bet, or a bottle of wine — unless the host was a known alcoholic — maybe some dessert or fresh fruit or a tape of some piece of music she liked and wanted to share. She never arrived empty-handed, and the Christmas I invited her to Atlanta was no different.

My mother’s care packages usually reflected some little corner of a disorganized mind.

Getting her to town had already been a problem in and of itself when I picked her up at Hartsfield Airport that day. She was supposed to have arrived two days prior. It had taken me a full 24 hours to realize that the delay she said she’d suffered had been a ruse.

It shouldn’t have taken so long. I had experience with these things and should have known the signs. She’d missed enough school concerts, plays, graduations, and award ceremonies. Not to say that she hadn’t attended plenty. She had. But sometimes the world would get the better of her, and her strong, fighter’s spirit would be dragged down deep, drowning in the smallness of the situation. Held near the bottom, unable to gasp for air in the liquid uncertainty of these passing moments, she never knew how to signal for help. She seemed to think lifeguards were the enemy, so she’d flounder, alone, hoping to be thrown ashore by the oncoming tide. I recognized it as the depression shade of her colorful bipolar spectrum, and knew that somewhere inside herself she was, in fact, fighting — for herself, for me. But, as often as not, I also called it “selfishness,” because her depression seemed to get the best of her when I needed her most.

This Christmas visit was no different. I’d made plans for us, had lined up fun things to do, and had arranged to spend Christmas Day with some great friends, playing games, laughing loud, eating well. I felt, perhaps finally, grown up. I was managing my life, if not always easily, and coming into my own. I’d developed relationships, held down a job, had friends and artistic connections, and was as close to paying off both student loans and the IRS as I’d ever been. I wanted her to celebrate Christmas with me, while I celebrated that I was learning to live my life.

I’d called her five times the night before her flight was scheduled. No answer. I’d called the morning of her flight; no answer. I sat in my apartment, staring at the phone and out the window, wondering whether to go to the airport. I called again. Stared some more. Finally, 30 minutes after her flight was supposed to take off, my phone rang. Her “Hi” told me everything I needed to know. Then she tried to tell me a story about her washing machine at the laundromat breaking and not spinning properly, and having to move the clothes and rewash all of her laundry and, as a result, missing her flight. It was a long story with lots of phony details, but she knew by my lack of surprise and flat response — “So, are you coming at all?” — that I wasn’t buying it and was upset.

Two days later, she finally managed to get on a flight, and showed up with no suitcase: just two large tote bags, one with a zipper and one with things piled up and spilling out of the top of it. Somehow, they’d let one pass as her purse. She had layered herself in two blouses, a turtleneck, and a sweater because Atlanta was having a little cold snap. She wore a skirt, though, like she almost always did, and socks pulled halfway up her calves, underneath her Birkenstock shoes. She looked like she was either a wealthy, chic eccentric, or a bag lady. I waved at her when I saw her, mumbling under my breath, “Really?”

Thinking twice as much about others as about herself, she had managed, as usual, to bring something for everyone. In the bottom of the zipped tote was a second skirt, some underwear and socks, two more sweaters and a turtleneck — she’d sleep in her slip — her wallet, and a hairbrush with several rubber bands wrapped around the handle. Everything else she’d carried was for someone else. She asked me, as she got in the car, if I had any giftwrap, or if we might stop and pick some up. Did I mention that her flight had landed at 11:52 pm on Christmas Eve?

* * *

The next day, we arrived, with wine and gifts in tow, at my friends’ door. A lovely day was had by all, though sometime after dinner, my mom reported feeling ill and needing to retire to my home next door. I gave her the key and saw her off, thanking her for being there and giving her a warm, deep hug — the kind that I think always made us both feel at home. I stayed behind to drink wine and play games into the wee hours. This is when the embarrassment of my mother’s riches came to light. She’d given everyone a Christmas card. Though the envelopes had all been just a little yellowed, and the glue on the closures less than sticky, the cards were sweet, and each had a handwritten sentiment before my mother’s signature: Jonelle. (Though she’d found out that her name was spelled “Jonell” on her original birth certificate, she’d kept the “e” that she’d been taught to spell it with for most of her life, only ever signing “Jonell” during a particularly rebellious period.)

Most of my friends received some sort of handmade item from the bounty of the bottomless tote bag — a charm for a necklace, an ornament for the tree. Hand-painted. Crocheted. Decoupaged. Attached to the corner of each one’s card with a simple ribbon or strand of red yarn. I’d had some giftwrap, but I’m still uncertain where the ribbons and yarn came from.

The hosts were the reason she’d needed the giftwrap. She’d brought something for the couple generous enough to open their home to us on the holiday, and felt it deserved wrapping. It was a special type of chocolate, shaped like an orange.  It was the kind that presents itself as a whole fruit, but with one rap on a table splits into sections that each look like a real orange section robed in chocolate.  Mom had always found them unique and although she would rarely buy one for herself, it was a gift she loved to give. Something about it symbolized kinship and union to her, the parts of the whole.

I closed my eyes, ducked and waited for the pendulum to reach the end of the pivot, for the weight to oscillate over and over until she could finally rest again, in equilibrium.

It was hours later when one of the hosts remembered the chocolate, and opened it.

There’s a thing that happens to chocolate. I’ve never asked a chocolatier why, but I remember seeing something about it on The Cooking Channel or Food Network. Chocolate turns kind of white, or chalky, I think when it gets too old, or is heated up and cooled again (and again and again, maybe). Or maybe it happens when the chocolate gets buried and forgotten underneath a foot of clothing trampled by seven cats and stacked on top of a milk crate full of matchbox cars in poor condition and two Stretch Armstrong dolls sitting just next to nine cast iron skillets and a bag of 32 packs of cocktail napkins with “Class of ’89” printed on them (even though she knew no one who had graduated in 1989), all resting beside the five Styx albums she bought at least ten times, because she remembered that I loved them but forgot that I owned all of those albums in every form in which they have ever been available, including a now-broken cassette tape I still intend to splice.

Whatever it is, at any rate, the thing that happens to chocolate had happened to this Christmas gift. The host was sweet, especially considering that he’d only met my mother twice, and both times we’d been invading his home during a holiday. He had opened the discolored chocolate in the kitchen. Returning to the living room, where we all scribbled clues for the next round of some party game, he offered, “More wine? Anybody? Neal, how’s your beer holding out?” No one else had heard him mention the chocolate or knew he’d gone to open it. No one else had noticed that he had come back empty-handed.

When I thought an appropriate interval had passed, I excused myself to the restroom and made a pass through their kitchen, “to get a glass of ice water,” on my way back to the game. On the corner of the counter, resting on top of my giftwrap, was the chocolate in its foil wrapper. I peeked inside and noticed that its grandeur had been reduced to a chalky white orb as unappetizing as dung. I picked up the box and foil and turned toward the garbage can, ready to do away with the mess she’d made, when I noticed another problem with the chocolate. In addition to the appearance, the exterior of the box had a very slight smell, a faint odor, a soupçon of scent, barely noticeable. Once noticed, however, it was unmistakable. Cat piss: The same odor I’d caught a slight whiff of at the airport. The same liquid that had stained the unremoved price tag on the bottom of the pretty tin box she’d brought me. My mother, the woman who in my childhood had insisted that my baby-fine hair be brushed, combed, and tended to several times a day so it wouldn’t appear unruly, was living in cat piss. Merry Christmas.

I threw the box in the trash and returned to the game. That night, my mother and I had a terrible fight because she wanted to go home to St. Pete and insisted on leaving right away. (The bluest of the holiday blues had a firm hold on her. In retrospect, I understand that she didn’t want to “fake it,” and she especially didn’t want me to see her pain and sorrow.)

I refused to take her to the airport to await a flight on standby.

She cried.

She called a taxi.

I lost my cool.

She cried.

I yelled.

I told her that if she was going to come and visit again in the future, she should leave her cat piss-soaked presents behind.

The taxi came.

She left.

I cried.

We didn’t talk for two weeks, a desert of time.

* * *

I have a childhood memory. The moving truck had been filled and emptied twice, and the belongings continued to pour out of the house. Finally, in a fit of frustration and anger, our mother threw open the windows of the second-floor sewing room. Before any of us knew what was really happening, boxes of books and garbage bags full of fabric began sliding down the roof and falling with a thud into our front yard. The boxes of books split open on occasion, their syllables cascading across our lawn: Edgar Cayce, Carlos Castaneda, Merriam-Webster, and the “Illustrated Medical Dictionary.” It frightened me.

Even at 10 years old, I could predict that a huge box full of heavy books dropping from a second-story ledge would likely burst open when it hit the ground 12 or so feet below. Why could my mother not? THAT scared me.

I’d later understand that I was still connected to my mother’s heartbeat, still very in tune with the ebb and flow of her body’s rhythms. What scared me wasn’t boxes or books. What scared me was her fury, her upset, her confusion, her suffocation. What scared me was watching her flounder. What scared me was where she went whenever everything else — the madness — took over. It is, I believe, perhaps only by the grace of God that I did not see my mom’s illness clearly then, nor for many years to come. For years, every time her bipolar disorder swung, I closed my eyes, ducked and waited for the pendulum to reach the end of the pivot, for the weight to oscillate over and over until she could finally rest again, in equilibrium. Once her mood was at ease, days or months later, we’d together clean up the mess she’d made, whatever it looked like.

* * *

Susan Fekete is always dreaming about her next adventure and of how she’ll write about it. She’s working on her first book, Ten Boxes: A Story of Stuff.

Editor: Dana Snitzky

Susan Fekete | Longreads | March 2018 | 13 minutes (3,541 words)

I lived in Atlanta for six years after college. I only went back to St. Pete twice in that time, and both times I stayed with my aunt Linda.

Mom would make excuses about not having cleaned the house, not having done laundry, and therefore not having clean sheets on my bed. It made me sad, a little, because I knew they were lies. I knew her house was full.

Full — floor to ceiling, windows to walls — of stuff. Her mass of belongings included objects de art, trinkets, furniture, memorabilia, books, magazines, journals. And many cats, especially ones with extra toes. Although no one was sure anymore how many of those — or of anything else for that matter — she had.

When I visited, she came over to my aunt’s house, and we hugged and laughed and loved each other greatly and talked for hours on end. About everything.

Everything except the stuff in her house. My mother was a terrific metaphysician, passionate about the world around her and the lives of others. She was spiritual even at her darkest moments, and funny even in her greatest sorrows. She was a joy to be around, if you could avoid the stuff.

* * *

My mom must’ve grown tired of moving, because she stayed many years in that tiny house. I believe her tenure there resulted from a massive conglomeration of coincidences. Cosmic synchronicity. Karma. A big bang of sorts: A new beginning that ultimately brings the end.

She’d found a place she could easily afford, whether she was working a lot or only a little. She’d found a landlord, Joan, who was kind, and would frequently let the rent be late for weeks — even months — at a time, until my mother caught up. She’d amassed more stuff than she’d had in one place since we’d moved out of our big house, and moving it alone was a difficult, sad, embarrassing task to consider. I wasn’t nearby, so she didn’t need to keep up appearances for my sake. (A thing she always seemed to feel a need to do — even though, for my entire upbringing, I had been told that it was unnecessary to maintain appearances among family members, who were supposed to be honest with each other, real.)

So she stayed in the tiny house, and she lived and worked, and the garage sale sirens kept after her, calling her with their keening songs.

She was a joy to be around, if you could avoid the stuff.

I had a fairly good idea how things were going by what arrived in the mail, or via “Package Express” on a Greyhound Bus. Old habits die hard, and my mother was a brand loyalist (if she could afford to be) when it came to frozen vegetables, baking powder, and bus lines. It had become an ever more regular, more necessary part of her otherwise completely unstructured routine when I was away at college.

I loved her packages, and they usually made me laugh, so I never discouraged the practice, except on the occasions when I knew damned well she couldn’t afford it — and even then, my objections bore no weight with her. If I didn’t particularly want or need something that arrived in a box, I’d pass it on to a friend who might appreciate it. She’d usually send a card from her current “stack” of inventory, but the envelope would appear to be too small for the card, bulging at the seams from the clippings, articles, and pages from newspapers, magazines, and local bulletins. She clipped jokes that made her laugh. She clipped poems that she thought I’d like. She clipped articles about people we’d known and places we’d been together — lighthouses on the East Coast, space shuttle launches, a childhood friend marrying a prominent politician. She’d clip articles about things that she knew my friends liked and send them along, with little notes like, “This reminded me of Andrea,” or “Isn’t this the town in Connecticut where Steve is from?” scribbled across the top.

She was also famous for clipping the ends off of Celestial Seasonings tea boxes, because they usually contained some great quotation or sweet saying. She clipped these almost as loyally as we’d clipped Campbell’s Soup labels so we could turn them in at school. I always recognized these clippings as being from these particular boxes of tea because, well, she always sent me tea, too. And it was always Celestial Seasonings, unless the tea included Earl Grey, in which case it was nearly always Twining’s.

Now, please don’t misunderstand me, and please don’t be afraid to offer me tea, should we ever have the chance to visit together on a cool autumn evening. I love a nice cup of tea. I find something very soothing about preparing the water, steeping the bags in a teapot, filling the cup, sometimes adding honey or lemon. I like the presentation, the warm vapors rising to my nose from the cup as I slowly and deeply inhale the leaves, the herbs, the bits of flowers that season my water. So it’s not strange that my mother sent tea: I liked it, and she knew I did, so why not, right?

Right! But she’d send several boxes every time she sent me something, which was more tea than I could drink. More tea than I could serve and still have a life outside of serving tea. At one point, I owned no fewer than two boxes of every variety of Celestial Seasonings tea on the market.

My mother’s care packages usually reflected some little corner of a disorganized mind. She’d include a couple of candles, pretty ones — maybe hand-dipped or made with organic soy or something. But she’d send them to me in a box along with some books she’d found at a secondhand bookstore, maybe about theater or Salvador Dali, or an old, gold-leafed copy of Longfellow poems, which I knew wasn’t worth anything, but it was ornate and beautiful, and I liked that it’d made her think of me. And some hard candies. All sent lovingly, by bus if she felt manic, or third-class postage if not. From Florida. In the middle of summer. So I’d open a box with great anticipation, made greater by the lovely lavender or patchouli or lemony scent from the candles inside, only to find the hard candies less than hard, and the candles melted over the pages of the books, an inseparable ball of wisdom and wax. And I’d laugh at my disappointment, and then I’d cry just a little because I knew she hadn’t considered this possible outcome, and because I knew that I’d be the one to break the news to her.

From time to time, she’d mail things to my friends, too. The ones to whom she sent things usually thought it was very sweet and thoughtful, and they rarely understood the caution with which the words, “What did she send, exactly?” came out of my mouth. Only one or two of them ever got things that were worth any negative mention. One got an envelope of clippings — good ones — but the whole thing reeked of cat piss. She was nice enough to assume, out loud and in my presence, that something had happened in transit — “Some feral cats must’ve gotten into a mail truck. Poor mailman!” — and laughed it off. Our eyes met at one point, and we both knew what we were afraid to say, but it was far too strange to address.

* * *

The other strange gift went to a couple, my friends and neighbors. I’d gone to school with one of them, and we were close, and kept a loving and watchful eye out for each other’s homes and welfare. It was Christmas, and I was working and busily rehearsing some theatrical production. Getting away to “home” seemed like an imposition on my oh-so-productive life, so I’d invited my mother to come visit for the holidays, my treat.

I thought it would be fun, different, and certainly less depressing than going back to my hometown with the full knowledge that I wouldn’t be invited into my mother’s house full of stuff if she could avoid it. With all of her stuff, her lifelong insistence that she wasn’t “very smart,” and her moods, which shifted more swiftly than a tornado’s direction, she was still one of my favorite people in the world.

My mother had always been the best hostess she could possibly be, given whatever means she had to host with. She was overly generous, spared no manageable expense, and would give up her own bed, couch, and floor for guests, even if it meant sleeping in her car for the night. She was equally as good a guest, and would never arrive to anyone’s home for a meal — be it friend, relative or stranger — without bringing along a gift, or more than one. Flowers bought or picked stealthily from a neighboring yard were always a good bet, or a bottle of wine — unless the host was a known alcoholic — maybe some dessert or fresh fruit or a tape of some piece of music she liked and wanted to share. She never arrived empty-handed, and the Christmas I invited her to Atlanta was no different.

My mother’s care packages usually reflected some little corner of a disorganized mind.

Getting her to town had already been a problem in and of itself when I picked her up at Hartsfield Airport that day. She was supposed to have arrived two days prior. It had taken me a full 24 hours to realize that the delay she said she’d suffered had been a ruse.

It shouldn’t have taken so long. I had experience with these things and should have known the signs. She’d missed enough school concerts, plays, graduations, and award ceremonies. Not to say that she hadn’t attended plenty. She had. But sometimes the world would get the better of her, and her strong, fighter’s spirit would be dragged down deep, drowning in the smallness of the situation. Held near the bottom, unable to gasp for air in the liquid uncertainty of these passing moments, she never knew how to signal for help. She seemed to think lifeguards were the enemy, so she’d flounder, alone, hoping to be thrown ashore by the oncoming tide. I recognized it as the depression shade of her colorful bipolar spectrum, and knew that somewhere inside herself she was, in fact, fighting — for herself, for me. But, as often as not, I also called it “selfishness,” because her depression seemed to get the best of her when I needed her most.

This Christmas visit was no different. I’d made plans for us, had lined up fun things to do, and had arranged to spend Christmas Day with some great friends, playing games, laughing loud, eating well. I felt, perhaps finally, grown up. I was managing my life, if not always easily, and coming into my own. I’d developed relationships, held down a job, had friends and artistic connections, and was as close to paying off both student loans and the IRS as I’d ever been. I wanted her to celebrate Christmas with me, while I celebrated that I was learning to live my life.

I’d called her five times the night before her flight was scheduled. No answer. I’d called the morning of her flight; no answer. I sat in my apartment, staring at the phone and out the window, wondering whether to go to the airport. I called again. Stared some more. Finally, 30 minutes after her flight was supposed to take off, my phone rang. Her “Hi” told me everything I needed to know. Then she tried to tell me a story about her washing machine at the laundromat breaking and not spinning properly, and having to move the clothes and rewash all of her laundry and, as a result, missing her flight. It was a long story with lots of phony details, but she knew by my lack of surprise and flat response — “So, are you coming at all?” — that I wasn’t buying it and was upset.

Two days later, she finally managed to get on a flight, and showed up with no suitcase: just two large tote bags, one with a zipper and one with things piled up and spilling out of the top of it. Somehow, they’d let one pass as her purse. She had layered herself in two blouses, a turtleneck, and a sweater because Atlanta was having a little cold snap. She wore a skirt, though, like she almost always did, and socks pulled halfway up her calves, underneath her Birkenstock shoes. She looked like she was either a wealthy, chic eccentric, or a bag lady. I waved at her when I saw her, mumbling under my breath, “Really?”

Thinking twice as much about others as about herself, she had managed, as usual, to bring something for everyone. In the bottom of the zipped tote was a second skirt, some underwear and socks, two more sweaters and a turtleneck — she’d sleep in her slip — her wallet, and a hairbrush with several rubber bands wrapped around the handle. Everything else she’d carried was for someone else. She asked me, as she got in the car, if I had any giftwrap, or if we might stop and pick some up. Did I mention that her flight had landed at 11:52 pm on Christmas Eve?

* * *

The next day, we arrived, with wine and gifts in tow, at my friends’ door. A lovely day was had by all, though sometime after dinner, my mom reported feeling ill and needing to retire to my home next door. I gave her the key and saw her off, thanking her for being there and giving her a warm, deep hug — the kind that I think always made us both feel at home. I stayed behind to drink wine and play games into the wee hours. This is when the embarrassment of my mother’s riches came to light. She’d given everyone a Christmas card. Though the envelopes had all been just a little yellowed, and the glue on the closures less than sticky, the cards were sweet, and each had a handwritten sentiment before my mother’s signature: Jonelle. (Though she’d found out that her name was spelled “Jonell” on her original birth certificate, she’d kept the “e” that she’d been taught to spell it with for most of her life, only ever signing “Jonell” during a particularly rebellious period.)

Most of my friends received some sort of handmade item from the bounty of the bottomless tote bag — a charm for a necklace, an ornament for the tree. Hand-painted. Crocheted. Decoupaged. Attached to the corner of each one’s card with a simple ribbon or strand of red yarn. I’d had some giftwrap, but I’m still uncertain where the ribbons and yarn came from.

The hosts were the reason she’d needed the giftwrap. She’d brought something for the couple generous enough to open their home to us on the holiday, and felt it deserved wrapping. It was a special type of chocolate, shaped like an orange.  It was the kind that presents itself as a whole fruit, but with one rap on a table splits into sections that each look like a real orange section robed in chocolate.  Mom had always found them unique and although she would rarely buy one for herself, it was a gift she loved to give. Something about it symbolized kinship and union to her, the parts of the whole.

I closed my eyes, ducked and waited for the pendulum to reach the end of the pivot, for the weight to oscillate over and over until she could finally rest again, in equilibrium.

It was hours later when one of the hosts remembered the chocolate, and opened it.

There’s a thing that happens to chocolate. I’ve never asked a chocolatier why, but I remember seeing something about it on The Cooking Channel or Food Network. Chocolate turns kind of white, or chalky, I think when it gets too old, or is heated up and cooled again (and again and again, maybe). Or maybe it happens when the chocolate gets buried and forgotten underneath a foot of clothing trampled by seven cats and stacked on top of a milk crate full of matchbox cars in poor condition and two Stretch Armstrong dolls sitting just next to nine cast iron skillets and a bag of 32 packs of cocktail napkins with “Class of ’89” printed on them (even though she knew no one who had graduated in 1989), all resting beside the five Styx albums she bought at least ten times, because she remembered that I loved them but forgot that I owned all of those albums in every form in which they have ever been available, including a now-broken cassette tape I still intend to splice.

Whatever it is, at any rate, the thing that happens to chocolate had happened to this Christmas gift. The host was sweet, especially considering that he’d only met my mother twice, and both times we’d been invading his home during a holiday. He had opened the discolored chocolate in the kitchen. Returning to the living room, where we all scribbled clues for the next round of some party game, he offered, “More wine? Anybody? Neal, how’s your beer holding out?” No one else had heard him mention the chocolate or knew he’d gone to open it. No one else had noticed that he had come back empty-handed.

When I thought an appropriate interval had passed, I excused myself to the restroom and made a pass through their kitchen, “to get a glass of ice water,” on my way back to the game. On the corner of the counter, resting on top of my giftwrap, was the chocolate in its foil wrapper. I peeked inside and noticed that its grandeur had been reduced to a chalky white orb as unappetizing as dung. I picked up the box and foil and turned toward the garbage can, ready to do away with the mess she’d made, when I noticed another problem with the chocolate. In addition to the appearance, the exterior of the box had a very slight smell, a faint odor, a soupçon of scent, barely noticeable. Once noticed, however, it was unmistakable. Cat piss: The same odor I’d caught a slight whiff of at the airport. The same liquid that had stained the unremoved price tag on the bottom of the pretty tin box she’d brought me. My mother, the woman who in my childhood had insisted that my baby-fine hair be brushed, combed, and tended to several times a day so it wouldn’t appear unruly, was living in cat piss. Merry Christmas.

I threw the box in the trash and returned to the game. That night, my mother and I had a terrible fight because she wanted to go home to St. Pete and insisted on leaving right away. (The bluest of the holiday blues had a firm hold on her. In retrospect, I understand that she didn’t want to “fake it,” and she especially didn’t want me to see her pain and sorrow.)

I refused to take her to the airport to await a flight on standby.

She cried.

She called a taxi.

I lost my cool.

She cried.

I yelled.

I told her that if she was going to come and visit again in the future, she should leave her cat piss-soaked presents behind.

The taxi came.

She left.

I cried.

We didn’t talk for two weeks, a desert of time.

* * *

I have a childhood memory. The moving truck had been filled and emptied twice, and the belongings continued to pour out of the house. Finally, in a fit of frustration and anger, our mother threw open the windows of the second-floor sewing room. Before any of us knew what was really happening, boxes of books and garbage bags full of fabric began sliding down the roof and falling with a thud into our front yard. The boxes of books split open on occasion, their syllables cascading across our lawn: Edgar Cayce, Carlos Castaneda, Merriam-Webster, and the “Illustrated Medical Dictionary.” It frightened me.

Even at 10 years old, I could predict that a huge box full of heavy books dropping from a second-story ledge would likely burst open when it hit the ground 12 or so feet below. Why could my mother not? THAT scared me.

I’d later understand that I was still connected to my mother’s heartbeat, still very in tune with the ebb and flow of her body’s rhythms. What scared me wasn’t boxes or books. What scared me was her fury, her upset, her confusion, her suffocation. What scared me was watching her flounder. What scared me was where she went whenever everything else — the madness — took over. It is, I believe, perhaps only by the grace of God that I did not see my mom’s illness clearly then, nor for many years to come. For years, every time her bipolar disorder swung, I closed my eyes, ducked and waited for the pendulum to reach the end of the pivot, for the weight to oscillate over and over until she could finally rest again, in equilibrium. Once her mood was at ease, days or months later, we’d together clean up the mess she’d made, whatever it looked like.

* * *

Susan Fekete is always dreaming about her next adventure and of how she’ll write about it. She’s working on her first book, Ten Boxes: A Story of Stuff.

Editor: Dana Snitzky

Long after winter has ended, hating on Christmas remains popular sport, as much a holiday tradition as eggnog and overspending. In the New Republic in December, 1990, James S. Henry published an essay outlining his yuletide complaints and what he sees as Christmas’ flaws. The magazine republished Henry’s piece online for Christmas this year, so I thought I’d share it here, too. The stats might be dated and popular toys no longer the same, but the case Henry builds is as evergreen as a spruce. Each New Year I hope we live in a world with less hate and more understanding. But complaints? I have a few. Happy Holidays.

Christmas destroys the environment and innocent animals and birds. These have perhaps not been traditional concerns for economists. But when one takes account of all the Christmas trees, letters, packages, increased newspaper advertising, wrapping paper, and catalogs and cards, as well as all the animals slaughtered for feast and fur, this holiday is nothing less than a catastrophe for the entire ecosystem. According to the U.S. Forest Service, 33 million Christmas trees are consumed each year. Growing them imposes an artificially short rotation period on millions of acres of forest land, and the piles of needles they shed shorten the life of most household rugs and pets. All the trees and paper have to be disposed of, which places a heavy burden on landfill sites and recycling facilities, especially in the Northeast.

This year, according to the Humane Society, at least 4 million foxes and minks will be butchered just to provide our Christmas furs. To stock our tables, the Department of Agriculture tells me, we’ll also slaughter 22 million turkeys, 2 million pigs, and 2 million to 3 million cattle, plus a disproportionate fraction of the 6 billion chickens that the United States consumes each year. To anyone who has ever been to a turkey farm, Christmas and Thanksgiving take on a new and somewhat less cheerful meaning. Every single day during the run-up to these holidays, thousands of bewildered, debeaked, growth-hormone-saturated birds are hung upside down on assembly-line racks and given electric shocks. Then their throats are slit and they are dropped into boiling water.

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It’s always the same: a morning arrives in November, and my friend, as though officially inaugurating the Christmas time of year that exhilarates her imagination and fuels the blaze of her heart, announces: “It’s fruitcake weather! Fetch our buggy. Help me find my hat.”

“A Christmas Memory,” Truman Capote

’Tis the season! A time for awkwardly posed Santa photos, awkwardly getting tipsy at office holiday parties, awkwardly offensive carols, and awkwardly feigning excitement over receiving a Harry & David fruitcake. For many of us who celebrate Christmas, foods are as closely bound to the experience as gift-giving. And making fun of fruitcake has become a time-honored tradition — though thanks to the success of this dedicated fruitcake besmirchment campaign, I suspect many of us have never actually tasted, let alone received or re-gifted, a traditional fruitcake.

This reading list celebrates oft-maligned holiday foods like fruitcake and mincemeat pie, along with unlikely new candidates like White Castle and KFC.

1. “A Short History of Fruitcake,” (Robert Sietsema, Village Voice, November 2002)

Always start with the basics — if you’re going to mock, know what you’re making fun of. What is fruitcake? And maybe more importantly, why is fruitcake? Sietsema gives a nice overview and taste-tests cakes from some of the more popular purveyors, although this isn’t an underdog story — pardon the spoiler alert, but he doesn’t become a fruitcake aficionado at the end. For that, check out the roundtable conversation “In Defense of Fruitcake” (The Thinking Housewife, November 2013), with seven people who really, really like fruitcake. And if you find their enthusiasm infectious, the piece offers a recipe and recommendations for the best pre-prepared versions.

2. “Just Desserts,” (Katy Vine, Texas Monthly, January 2016)

Fruitcake scandal: two words you don’t expect to need to write together, like “eggnog catastrophe” or “Nativity juggernaut.” This piece isn’t actually about fruitcake itself but is a fascinating look at Sandy Jenkins, an employee at the Collin Street Fruitcake Bakery — arguably the world’s most famous fruitcake bakery — who embezzled over $16 million. The post-indictment estate sale included “$14,000 gold Dunhill lighters, a Cartier silver cigarette case, an Atmos clock, boxes of crystal and silver, and designer handbags,” along with “a frighteningly large Hummel figurines collection,” all bought with fruitcake money.

3. “Christmas at White Castle,” (Arianna Rebolini, Eater, December 2016)

Not all food traditions are shared — some are family-specific, like the annual Rebolini trip to White Castle, and are made special via their specificity. This essay, part of Eater’s great “Life in Chains” series, is a lovely chronicle of just that kind of familial lore:

I don’t remember the first time we ran through this routine, but my mom told me recently we drove through spontaneously; my siblings and I were starving after picking out a tree and White Castle happened to be across the street. As for the rest of the year, we didn’t live very close to the neighborhood. The White Castle Christmas dinner was never magic, I realized — just an arbitrary decision made by my parents which became meaningful through repetition.

4. “How Colonel Sanders Became Father Christmas in Japan,” (Molly Osberg, Talking Points Memo, December 2014)

If White Castle can become a Christmas tradition, why not KFC? Christmas chicken is so ubiquitous in Japan that “[o]n Christmas Eve, Kentucky Fried Chicken’s lines will snake down the block,” increasing KFC’s December revenue by a magnitude of ten over every other month of the year. In a country with no particular tie to Christmas and no baggage around the Colonel and his representation of the historical American South, KFC has pulled off an impressive rebranding. Have you pre-ordered your Christmas chicken meal (cake and champagne included!)?

And yes, all the Colonel Sanders statues will be dressed in Santa outfits.

5. “Why Eating Chinese Food on Christmas is a Sacred Tradition for American Jews,” (Marc Tracy, Tablet, December 2012)

Brooklyn’s Mile End deli is known for its Montréal Jewish food, and specifically for its better-than-pastrami smoked meat. They’ll be open on Christmas Day, but the smokers will get the day off* — it’s time for the wontons. Chinese food on Christmas became an American Jewish tradition in part — but not only — because Chinese restaurants tended to be open on Christmas. Per Tracy, there’s also the inherent suitability of the food (no dairy to worry about!), mixed with a hint of racial superiority. Whatever the origins, it’s become a cultural touchstone for many American Jews, both religious and secular.

(You know who else eats Chinese food on Christmas? Chinese people. Take a stroll through a Chinatown that is no more in Eddie Lin’s “A Chinatown Kid Remembers Ghosts of Christmas Past,” (LA Weekly, December 2016).)

*Okay, not entirely — there’s smoked meat in the fried rice.

6. “The Real American Pie,” (Cliff Doerksen, Chicago Reader, December 2009)

Mincemeat pie is now (1) thought of as a holiday food and (2) made with dried fruit and spices, but that wasn’t always the case. The original mince pie was meat, and booze, and pie crust, and was considered “an American institution” and “unquestionably the monarch of pies,” a title that befits a foodstuff made with those ingredients. The history of mincemeat pie tracks the history of America, from our founding to the industrial revolution to Prohibition and beyond, and it’s bizarre how truly forgotten mincemeat pie now is. Apples get all the love the rest of the year, but take a few moments this Christmas to remember the mince.

Seasons’ eatings!