My mom is one of those people who they make the Wal-Mart Christmas commercials about, except she wouldn’t shop there.
She lives in the Yukon, the land of the postcard-perfect Yuletide setting, and she goes full out. She likes her lights only blue and white, she makes her own front door wreath with holly and spruce and real cloth ribbon, and there are one-of-a-kind, handmade Santa statues from Norway and Russia all over the place. She starts preparing hors d’oeuvres in November and freezes them. She’s deadly into it.
There are rules that go with Christmas, too: seasonal conduct guidelines, if you will. Some examples are: “Don’t wait outside the bathroom door to punch your sister when she comes out, it’s Christmas,” (even if she did just shrink your sweater on purpose and raid your stash); and “Get in the car. I don’t care if it is the greatest party in the history of Grade Twelve. We’re driving around and looking at the lights. As a family. It’s Christmas.” All her relations are expected to forgo fistfights and let broken marriages be bygones. Everybody will get along, even when together. It’s Christmas.
It’s tradition, one she never broke, until Christmas 2001. In all her fifty-one years she had never been caught south of the sixtieth parallel at Christmas until then, when she decided to come down and stay with me at my place for a week, and we would do it up together. The queen of Christmas past was coming to my apartment.
You can imagine the renovations that had to go down before she even got here. The bathroom needed to be painted, and proper matching towel and accessory racks installed. New linen was in order, and I had to rearrange my shop/single bedroom with a door to render it suitable for maternal accommodations. Things had to be spotless. Things had to match.
I kind of got into it; anything that motivated me to re-sand the floors in the bedroom was a good thing. Anyway, I’d be the one reaping the lasting décor benefits. I would just go with the flow. I would make everything nice for her. After all, it was Christmas.
The real work started right when I got her home from the airport. Turned out I didn’t have anywhere near enough serving plates for side dishes, not to mention cutlery, and I had forgotten all about napkins, of all things. I had fifteen friends coming over for dinner, and there was much to do. She started off by cleaning the bathroom that I thought I had just renovated. There was shopping, too – oh, there was shopping. We got a little one-bedroom apartment tree, and holly boughs were procured from my neighbours’ hedge. We picked up fresh parsley and rosemary for stuffing, a twenty-two-pound turkey, candied yams, and two kinds of pie.
I was thirty-one and had never cooked a turkey in my own oven before. I didn’t realize it was a rise-just-before-dawn type of activity. I was exhausted already – we had been up late the night before rolling scented candles for gifts and decoration – but she got me out of bed and had me making croutons before I’d had coffee. I love my mom more than just about anyone else on Earth, but at some point during the previous day between trying to park on Robson Street and standing in line at the liquor store, we had begun to get on each other’s nerves.
I knew she suspected that my commitment to the festivities didn’t run as deep as hers. I had started to feign interest when selecting salad spoons and had even suggested our guests could drink beer straight out of the bottle. I was slacking off during present-wrapping time and showed no concern that my only Christmas album was by Bob and Doug Mackenzie (a classic, though). I was starting to act like my father, whom she had divorced some years prior for similar infractions.
I was mashing potatoes when I began to lose it a little. We proceeded to argue, about what now I can’t remember. She had spilled hot water from the Brussels sprouts on my arm by accident, causing me to jump and dump the cranberry sauce on her pants. I blame the lack of adequate counter space, now that I think of it. Our guests would begin to arrive in half an hour, she thought, and the stress was getting to us. Because they were my friends, I knew we had at least an hour, maybe more, but she wouldn’t believe me and wanted to put the boil-in-the-bag corn niblets on right away.
“If you said anytime after five o’clock, then the corn needs to go in now,” she snapped. “Why would your friends be late? It’s Christmas. What kind of people are we feeding here, anyway?”
I lost it and launched in on a rant about how Christmas was about being together, not about two kinds of stuffing and matching punch bowls, and that my friends were all lovely people who wouldn’t mind waiting for a while until the corn was done and she should just chill out. That’s when she began to cry. Not a little oh-I-burned-the-cake cry, more like a there-is-not-nor-will-there-ever-be-cake kind of cry.
I should have been gentler with her, this being her first Christmas away from home. I had had so many that I had forgotten. All her friends and the rest of our family were two thousand kilometres away, and our Vancouver snow was heavy and wet and dark.
“Take me to the airport. I’ll just go home right now. You don’t want me here, and I don’t belong,” she sobbed while spooning stuffing into a new bowl.
My heart broke for her. She just wanted everything to be perfect. It was important for her. It was Christmas. It was Christmas and we had yelled at each other, mother and daughter, while performing a ritual passed down from uncountable generations.
I appealed to her practical side. “Mom, you are going to have to calm down and quit talking crazy like that. I love you and I’m glad you’re here in my kitchen, and my friends are going to be here in twenty minutes and I don’t know how to make gravy.”
She snapped out of it right away. “The trick is, you have to get all the lumps out of the flour and water mixture before you add it to your stock. We’ll have to get you a whisk. I mean, I’ll make do with a fork this time, but a whisk is what you really need to do it right. . . .”
My friends still talk about that dinner, and how great my place looked.