Christmas Past

Christmas is a complicated time, shadowed by joy and tradition and death and mourning.

In childhood, it was a magical time of Christmas cookies iced at the breakfast room table and of Daddy playing Santa. It was also Christmas Eve service at 11 pm, for which it was difficult to stay awake, and Great Aunt Tante (who ate more slowly than anyone I've ever know) and Geat Uncle Harry (who unwrapped presents without ever tearing the paper) and the Andersons and a lovely party at the Hendons' house next door, at which every person, adult and child, received a special gift.

When I was sixteen, Christmas became forever fixed to my mother's death just three weeks earlier. I remember that day only vaguely, but I do remember this: Lucille Wynne, who worked for my family as a housekeeper for many many years, came to be with us all day. She joined us on the glassed-in front porch when we opened presents and she baked our turkey. She became my surrogate mother who taught me about dignity and racial equality and compassion.

Later still, Christmas was filled with my brother's children: Davies, who pulled down the tree and who wore Eatherley's tutu and twirled in the living room on Sterling Road and who once ate nine helpings of lamb, and Eatherley who charmed all the men and women alike with her glorious, flirtatious smile and gleeful pleasure in her toys (I especially remember her making designs with colored balls on a board that then lit up; I think it was called Lite Brite). I was there when Santa visited their house in the night and there when D&E awoke and we all ate "pinch cake." (Years later, as an adult, my niece said, "It's not Christmas unless you're here when we wake up!" This year, my great niece asked, "Can we make Christmas cookies?")

Four years ago, Christmas brought my father to a nursing home after a legal fight for custody, which my brother won. On Christmas Day, all of the family -- except my oldest brother who was not in Birmingham -- visited Daddy at St. Martin's. Although he had scored zero on a cognition test with a highest score of thirty, we all believed he recognized us -- David, Eatherley (pregnant with C), Jen with E, Brenda, Davies, Owen, me, and Daddy. It was a bittersweet visit. Only a few weeks later, Daddy died in his sleep.

And now, another loss marks Christmas with Brenda's death in late October last year. Forty-one years married to my brother, she was an anchor in our family whose sudden death shocked us all and palled last year's holidays.

This year, my brother has a new wife and a new house underway and there are now four family children for Santa to visit.

I look at this picture and I see the history of a family and an emblem of the season: the promise of new life and the certainty of its end, not necessarily a sad realization but a melancholic one indeed.