NOTHING IS AS OVER AS CHRISTMAS [SA, 12-26-20]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

 

[The title is a repeat, but the column is new.]

Along about two o’clock on Christmas day, Georgia Karr, the world’ best mother-in-law, would sink into an easy chair in the living room and sigh, “Nothing is as over as Christmas.

It was understandable. She had spent two weeks, maybe two months, getting ready for that one half-day: cleaning, ordering, listing, buying, wrapping, decorating, cooking, everything from scratch--noodles and peppermint bark and fudge and cookies and pies and turkeys and mashed potatoes and ham and cranberry salad and stuffing and sweet potatoes and gravy and roast beast.

After all that work, in a few hours of ripping and opening and gorging, it was all over.

My mother had a very different approach to Christmas. She liked the memories of Christmas in her childhood, but mostly she tried to ignore it, which was the way she dealt with most things she had trouble dealing with.

She did not like gifts at all, I suppose because she felt indebted to the giver, and she didn’t like that. She often refused gifts. “Take that away,” she would cry, when she saw us carrying a wrapped package. In her last years, Helen would sneak decorations and gifts into her house. It was my job, and my father’s, to distract Mother at those times. One day, Helen was walking sideways, trying to keep things out of Mother’s sightlines. “What is that you have?” Mother asked. “Stuff,” Helen replied. My father, usually willing to push Mother’s buttons, said, “Don’t you recognize stuff when you see it?”  

As she aged, and she became arthritic, we bought her all sorts of helps, like electric can openers. She refused to open the boxes or to use the items. She liked to do things her way. She could not whap a package of whap biscuits hard enough to get it open—those packages you “whap” on the edge of a counter to open, and thus their popular name—so she would leave it on a high metal stool in the kitchen, where the sun could shine on it, and go watch TV. Eventually it would heat up enough to explode and she would go back to the kitchen to bake them.

I suppose that is why my favorite book as a child was Lois Lensky’s Mother Makes Christmas.

This year was a very different Christmas. Some mothers had to make Christmas when already locked into the house with kids for months. Some didn’t get to be with children or grandchildren at all. So many could not even get gifts for their children because they had lost their jobs and had a difficult enough time even feeding the kids. My guess is that all of the mothers who tried to make Christmas this year are giving a sigh of relief. “Thank goodness it’s over.”

The good news is two-fold: Christ comes, even if Santa doesn’t. And he’ll do it again next year. Real Christmas is never really over.

John Robert McFarland