My Ghosts of Christmases Past 2025

 

This is my 66th Christmas. It is the second Christmas without any of our parents. I’ve learned my first husband and both of his parents have gone to the great beyond. It would be so easy to slip into melancholia. That is what happened at Christmas time 2024. The season has been complicated  because  my mother left us between Christmas and New Years in 2016, failing to notify any of her loved ones that her cancer had returned. We felt she’d deprived us of the opportunity to spend time with her and say a proper goodbye. My siblings and I were angry and resentful until recently. Once Daddy was gone, we found a modicum of acceptance.

We decided to find new ways to experience the holidays. There is little feeling of Christmas cheer. However, I decided we had to have a tree after nine years of leaving the decorations we’d collected over the years stay buried in boxes in the basement. Baby steps.

I watched National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation for the first time in years and laughed out loud.

Our nearby Virginia winery, Briede’, gave us a temporary refuge with a tasting room tastefully decorated, a fire in the wood burning fireplace, cheerful Christmas music, and a welcoming, friendly staff to help us move forward.

I’ve been looking through photographs from holiday times of joy, remembering the good times and some that were fraught with family drama. 

We like to look back on holidays from our childhoods and hold onto memories that in retrospect weren’t always as uplifting and filled with the family cohesion and love that we would prefer to recall. 

Some aunt or uncle always got drunk. Dad cleared the table before people were finished eating. A couple of the great aunts with dementia held imaginary conversations with imaginary friends. 

Dad always took unflattering photographs of mom with her head in the oven and her buttocks in the air. She was never amused.

Our parents dragged us to extra masses to ensure we earned jewels for our future heavenly crowns.

Mom always secluded herself in the basement on December 26th, her mother’s birthday, and cried lonely tears. At the time, none of us understood the pain of being motherless children, even in late adulthood.

So, my brother and sister and I have tried to heal our sibling rivalry wounds, resolving to pack the past hurts away in subterranean vaults, and support one another as only those with shared history can do. 

Although we rarely recall the same experiences in the same way, we have an unbreakable connection bound by shared history, laughter, tears, pain, joy, memories, collections of photographs, time & place, love, hurt, dysfunction, culinary catastrophes, crazy relatives, and shared generational events. 

When I look at these ghosts of Christmases past, I smile through my tears, wishing that for even a nanosecond I could go back in time and capture the innocence, appreciate the joy and laughter, and take a part of it with me to where I am today. 

I guess we all have just a little bit of It’s A Wonderful Life in our hearts. I just wish I’d known to appreciate more when I had it.