the ever giving gift of christmas past

Christmas has always been a tough day for me. As a child, half Jewish, in a home with a family that didn’t get along, Christmas was a double serving of awful. Not only did it not match the cookie cutter picture of a family enjoying each other, exchanging love and gifts, creating cherished memories, but I had to navigate the realities of the experience I was having. My mother, no doubt also disappointed and bracing for the inevitable ‘ow’ as our hopes and dreams stretched and gapped at the seams, would use me as her human stress release, her personal punching bag, a scab to pick as the festering wound was ignored. At some point she would make an off handed comment with a razors edge. I would exclaim or slice back. A battle would ensue that would end with me being sent to my room, where I was alone, but at least safe.

Year after year my mother would have us make wish lists. Sometime in November a paper would appear on the fridge and my brother and I were encouraged to write down what we wanted. I like the idea of a wishlist, of openly asking what someone wants instead of guessing and risking redundancy or disappointment in gift giving. The problem was that my mother wouldn’t stick to them. I would always end up with something adjacent to what I had asked for so I felt like a brat for being disappointed, or, sometimes less painfully, something bewilderingly out of left field.

I am not a huge consumer, but I do love gifts. In fact, many of my favorite gifts, objects I find myself holding on to from move to move, have been free or found, costing nothing to the giver. I still have a simply metal washer my college boyfriend gave me because he was thinking about me as he was walking, then looked down and saw it. The mark of a good gift isn’t expense, but thoughtfulness and effort. Christmas or a birthday put pressure and a timeline on a process that I prefer to be organic.

My mother no doubt meant well. My parents did their best to pull our dumpster fire of a family close to some semblance of normalcy without ever, you know, actually dealing with anything. She would certainly make the effort. Shopping was something she enjoyed. Spending money gave her status and no doubt the sense of purpose. “I’m Christmas shopping for my children.” I can remember the energy she had when she took up a normal task like this, bringing to it a sort of frantic illusion, almost like she was trying to cast a spell. As if she could embody the task so fully that poof! life would magically shift and click into place.

Unfortunately, year after year it was a disaster for me. I tried not to have unreasonable expectations. I, despite the extenuating circumstances of my mother’s mental illness, my father’s commitment to living in an illusion and ignoring the harsh realities of our lives together, my unfair war with my brother who had unwittingly usurped my place in the family as ‘chosen one’ and relegated me to the role of scape goat, still had a tender heart and wanted to feel good on this holiday so many seemed to feel good on.

Underneath the Christmas tree was a minefield of disappointment. My mother would buy me things that ranged from mystifyingly inappropriate to slightly off the mark. In either case they were not useful and certainly didn’t spark joy. Instead I always walked away feeling deeply unknown. My parents, my roommates, the people I lived with and therefore spent the most time around, didn’t seem to know me at all.

One year it wasn’t a designer handbag, something I didn’t want or ask for that at least would have not seemed like a worthwhile investment to me, but a off brand designed to be a knockoff of this designer, whose purses were already impossibly ugly, truly an evolutionary error in conspicuous consumption. My mother was gifted at giving gifts that felt like insults. Was I the person that would carry this? Did I present as this person? Did I own anything similar or ever indicate that I would want to? This bag was everything I wasn’t, a desperate and misguided bid to seem elite.. Trapped in New York, a city that didn’t resonate with my spirit, spending my days in the horse barn housed in a 5 story century old building on 89th and Amsterdam, the poorest kid who wasn’t on scholarship in my posh Upper Westside high school that my grandmother paid for and my parents never could have afforded.

What do we really want? Even in gifts, we want to be known. We want an object that tells us we are seen, we are heard, we are valued, we are worth the effort and expense to demonstrate this. Even with my list in hand, my mother would buy me things she would like. Trapped in the past, her engagement with her children was a fog of wish fulfillment, rewriting her own script on us, changing the story. The characters changed, but not the details. My mother didn’t rectify the perceived favoritism her mother showed her older sister by loving her children equally, but by bestowing all favor on my younger brother, leaving the older child cursed in this generation.

I can remember the feeling sitting under the tree. I would unwrap with unbound childish glee, anticipation in check. Maybe this would be the year she’d get it right and I’d feel the thing I wanted to feel, seen, loved, belonging. I would peel back the tape bracing for a grande blast, steeling myself against impending disappointment. I wrapped myself in my own story to insulate me. It went “I don’t care” and I sang it all the time, so convincingly I could fool myself. Still, each inappropriate gift stung. I wasn’t known to the people who were supposed to know me, to see me, to love me. I would muster up a ’thank you’ then go to my room and cry.

My father, committed to the fantasy, was upset with me for highlighting our family’s discrepancies. How I felt wasn’t important, to fulfill the role of ‘daughter’ I was meant to perform and perform convincingly. My feelings were never attended to, only my behavior. Since dishonesty or any pretending was anathema to who I was, this was especially offensive. I was ruining yet another holiday with that pesky habit of being who I was. This just added insult to injury. Not only was I not seen, but the parts of me that were visible were fiercely scorned. I was ruining Christmas. If I wasn’t a player or would play my role convincingly for once, the performance could have gone off without a hitch.

My grandmother used to say that the jewish religion defined sin as ’to miss the mark.’ You didn’t have evil in your heart per se, but you were off nonetheless. My personal Christmas tradition was to try to hold myself in a posture that would allow me to experience the pleasure I could and avoid as much pain as possible, an exquisite expression of samsara, a cycle without end that seems to preclude the full experience of one and ensure the other.

A sort of denialism around Christmas keeps me safe. Thankfully, being Jewish, it isn’t my day. Living far from my immediate family there was no expectation to gather and stage another forced holiday. Friends or extended family would graciously and gladly extend an invitation to this wandering Jew so I wasn’t alone. Yet these invitations were always tricky. It was something to do. It was people who wanted to be around me. There was love and fun and excitement and indulgence, but I was always separate from it, not really a part of the family, included as best I could be, but a second class Christmas citizen who was there by grace and not by right.

This would hit my buttons. Again I was on the outside inside of someone else’s living room. Again I was not a part of, not seen, not heard, performing the role of gracious and grateful guest. Again keeping my feelings under the surface, the ghosts I brought with me of Christmases. This is unprocessed trauma. The feelings that were exiled, unwelcome in my home, an affront the the lie of my family, the depth of the hurt, rejection and disappointment that wasn’t safe to touch because there was no one to hold me in case I fell in and no love to buoy me back to the surface. I thought I could forget about them, pretend they weren’t there, play my role so well that eventually it would become real. But that isn’t how it works. The feelings needed to be felt.

The same armor that I built up to insulate me from pain also insulated me from pleasure. I couldn’t feel included because I hadn’t touched into the depths at which I was rejected, truly felt the hurt of it, processed and digested it, allowed it to pass through me like a rich Christmas meal.