Christmas has for me always been the most bittersweet potion, consisting of memories both pleasant and painful. Unfortunately, every year the ghosts of Christmas past come back to haunt me. I'm going to let them tell you the story of Christmas past. This post may ramble a bit, but read on...
One of my bizarre superstitions is that I refuse to watch "Charlie Brown's Christmas". It goes back to one of my earliest conscious memories, from four years old. The only memory I can recall of my parents together. It was 1974, and I was in bed with pneumonia. These were before the days of TV in every room, of course, and at a time when parents weren't inclined to set their kids up on the couch in the living room. If you were sick, you were sick, and that was that. My room had a partial line of sight into the living room, though, and I caught fleeting glimpses of the show, on our old black and white with a coat hanger for an antenna. The TV probably wasn't but 13 inches, and the grainy show wasn't easy to see in my weakened state, but I never caught the full show, and never had a good opportunity until I was an adult. Over the past few years, I've had opportunities to, but it's always been one of my "things" to avoid it because somehow I wasn't fated to see it in childhood. Weird, huh?
Christmas, 1981. I remember it well. All we wanted for Christmas was an Atari 2600, but we couldn't afford it. It was $200, a small fortune back in the days when my mother was making $5.00 an hour. We went to bed on Christmas Eve knowing that the game system we so desired wasn't to be. About ten o' clock, there was a knock on the door, and the worst dressed Santa I've ever seen in my life came in. We knew who he was, of course, but we hadn't expected his visit. He left food, and some toys, among them the coveted game system with Pac Man and Pitfall, still two of my favorite games.
Christmas 1981 was so pleasant for me in part because Christmas 1980 had not been. I cannot listen to the song "O Holy Night", and usually try to avoid any place where I might hear the song. In 1980, my mother was dating a guy with whom she would have one of my younger brothers. He was a church organist, and would play the song "O Holy Night" endlessly. We'd joke, and drop to our knees every time the chorus gave the line "fall on your knees". We had a good Christmas that year, one of my favorites was a nice blanket. It doesn't seem like much to some of you, but I've always been a sucker for a good throw. My mom left the man shortly after Christmas, and we returned home to get our things to find out every Christmas present we had received was gone. I still have no idea where they went. Five years later, five days after Christmas, we got the call that my brother, the child of that man, was found dead. The father would be convicted of causing injury to a child and would die in prison, but the facts of how my brother died are far too gruesome for this blog or any blog for that matter. In my younger years I tried to undertake writing a book about it, and pored through the case files. I never did get the book done, but I know far more than most about exactly what happened. The end result, though, is I can't listen to that song.
Christmas 1993 was my first trip home with the woman who would be my wife. Because there was no bus station in my hometown, we caught the bus into Wichita, Kansas. My stepmother was to pick us up, but she decided it wasn't convenient and stayed home. The bus station, usually open 24 hours, closed at 9 pm that Christmas Eve, and my future wife and I had to find our way up to the lobby of a hotel and call to tell my father where to meet us when they got around to coming around to pick us up. It was a 2 hour drive, and it was almost 11 o'clock before we got a ride back home. My wife got a less than favorable impression of the soon to be in laws.
Christmas 1995 is the first Christmas since that one in 1981 that I actually enjoyed as I watched my nearly six month daughter gaze and grin at the lights (and take a massive handfull of pumpkin pie off mommy's plate, but that's another story, entirely).
Children have made the holiday season have some of its magic again. And I am sure that some day in the far future I might actually be able to enjoy it. But for now, the ghosts of Christmas Past linger, and I've got to put some more good ones behind me before the good memories completely outweigh the bad.