My dad had this beautiful way of always fucking up Christmas morning.
We were Christmas people. There was no Secret Santa single-gift exchange, and we never got too old or bored of seeing a tree exploding with presents on Christmas morning. Even when Rich and I were grown up and had long since moved out, my family didn’t set budgets or come up with restrictive rules, we just bloody went for it. All of us. Every single year. My old man was the undisputed king of Christmas and he’d always spend way more than he had to make sure we got everything we asked for, and a ton of stuff we didn’t. My mom did the vast majority of the Christmas planning, prepping, cooking, and shopping. She still tells us stories from when we were kids of her coming home with bags and bags of gifts for us. And my dad would look at her and always say the same thing: “That’s not enough. We’ll go back out tomorrow. Together. We can carry more.” When it came to my Pops and Christmas, everything was never enough.
When Rich and I started making our own money, big money, was when things really went bonkers. The weeks leading up to the holidays became a frantic but well-oiled glorious pain in the ass. Each of us would write up and pass out a list of everything we wanted, then everyone else would sneak off and talk privately to divvy it up. Rich would always figure out who was getting what for who. He was by far the most organized. My mom’s list was, without question, the most important, though. She did all the work, so she got the most attention. She got everything she wanted.
My mom’s list was the one thing we couldn’t fuck up, but every year my dad would. Even as adults, long after we had moved out, my brother was still the master of the lists, and he took that job seriously. He’d write down everything Mom asked for, divide it up, and assign things to me and my dad to get. He’d break it down by price, priority, and store location to make sure she was fully taken care of. We all knew what we were in charge of getting. We’d spend that last week checking in with each other to make sure nobody forgot anything. Of course, my mom couldn’t have cared less about what she got as long as we were all home and together, but making her feel like a kid on Christmas morning was always our way to thank her for being such a great mom. And then my dad made a mess of the entire thing.
Aside from the giftsplosion we’d wake up to every year, we didn’t really have too many big family traditions—but we did have a million little ones. Anne Murray or Boney M. would always be playing as Mom walked out of the kitchen with a fresh pot of coffee and a bottle of Baileys. She’d set out a tray of sausage rolls straight from the oven and a huge bowl of those little round potatoes from a can that she’d fried up in a pan with hot oil and herbs. There was always leftover tourtière from Christmas Eve and enough chips and chocolate to keep us awake and full until dinner. We’ve eaten the same thing every Christmas morning for our entire lives.
For years, my mom had suggested, “Maybe one time we could all wake up, shower and get dressed, and have a nice breakfast in the dining room before opening gifts.” That was never going to happen. We were not those people. Between me, Rich, and Dad, if even one of us managed to get dressed for dinner it was seen as a Christmas Miracle.
A few weeks before the holidays my dad went in for laparoscopic surgery. They explained that they wanted to go in with tiny cameras to get a better look at the tumours. Just a few small holes, no big deal. The day he went in, he was ready. My dad had a process that he went through before any of the appointments with doctors or surgeons. He did this alone. We’d do one last group hug, then he’d tell us he had to get ready. I’m not sure what he thought about or said to himself in those moments, but whatever it was, it always got him out the other side. No matter what the doctors did, Dad always woke up ready for whatever was coming next.
I went to see him in the hospital the day after the surgery, and he was sitting up at the end of the bed when I walked in. Even up to this point I had never actually seen my dad lying in a hospital bed. He was always propped right up. Or sitting off the side. It was clear he did this for me.
“Wanna see what they did to me?” he asked as he slid his gown off one arm. “They cut me in half.” He pulled down the other shoulder, and I didn’t even know what I was looking at. There was a slice so big I couldn’t tell where it started or where it ended. He had bandages covered in dried blood with exposed staples sticking out the sides from the centre of his chest, down in a half-circle to his hip, then up his back to between his shoulders. A giant U-shape. Yeah, they cut him in half. That wasn’t supposed to happen. These were supposed to be tiny holes for tiny cameras. But the doctors said they’d needed a better look. They did all of this without telling us or even asking, and there was no coming back from it.
There was no way dad would be strong enough to enjoy Christmas.
I don’t know how he managed to get himself to the end of the bed, or why he felt he had to, but he wasn’t the same man he’d been two days before. He was about to go through as much chemo and radiation as any one human being is supposed to be able to handle, and the fight was fixed.
He had nothing left.
Dad’s first gift from me was the same thing that year as it was every year: new slippers. They were totally expected but always appreciated. Every year, he pulled them out of the box, kicked off the pair he’d got the year before, and tried the new ones on while knocking his heels together and wiggling his toes around inside them. My old man did everything in slippers. Sure, he had shit style and never cared if anything he wore even matched, but he knew how to be comfortable.
“Okay, sweetheart, your turn,” Dad always said as he dug through the mass of colourful paper, bows, and ribbons to find one for my mom. “This one’s from me.”
Most years, my mom carefully tore through the wrapping and opened one of the things she’d asked for. Something straight from her list. It could be anything, but let’s just say a curling iron, and not just any curling iron—the exact, very specific curling iron that she’d wanted for months. The exact curling iron my brother was supposed to get and did get for her. Rich mumbled, “What the hell, Pops?” as he passed my dad on his way to root around under the tree for the exact same box in a slightly different wrapper to hand to my mom.
“Okay, and this one’s from me, I guess,” Rich said while shooting my dad the same look he always did. Mom peeled back the paper, doing her best to look surprised, to reveal the exact same curling iron. She thanked Rich and Dad, then casually stacked them on top of each other beside her La-Z-Boy.
My dad laughed. “Well, now you have two! Nothin’ wrong with that! You can keep one in the basement.” As if my mom had big dreams of doing her hair in the same bathroom where we kept the cat’s litter box.
This would go on and on, all morning long, gift after gift, every year. After all the organizing, all the work, the sub-lists from the main lists, and reassurances that we all knew what we were responsible for getting, my dad had taken Mom’s entire list and bought it all, top to bottom.
We always joked and goofed on Dad for his flakiness and inability to follow simple instructions. It took me forever to realize it wasn’t that at all. This wasn’t my dad not paying attention. This was him being unable to leave anything off my mom’s list. He didn’t have it in him. If my mom asked for it, my dad was going to get it for her, regardless of the rules. So, she got everything. Twice.
It was a predictable and hysterical mess. It was beautiful.
But that Christmas, my dad’s last, was the first year I can remember that not happening. No double gifts for my mom. My dad was too weak to shop, so my brother and I took care of it for him. Rich and I joked that we should buy Mom two of something just to keep the tradition going, but I think that would have crushed him.
When someone’s dying slowly, piece by piece every day, you do everything you can to never point out or remind them of the things they’ve already lost. There was no way we were going to make my dad feel like he was no longer the guy who gave his wife everything she asked for.
Dad still got his slippers that Christmas, but I had to put them on for him. I got a size smaller than I normally did, but he was still swimming in them. He’d lost so much weight that nothing fit properly. He looked like a little kid who got into his father’s closet and tried everything on. I rested his foot on my knee, and helped him get the slippers on, but there was no heel-kicking and toe-wiggling this time.
“They okay, Pops? Not too tight?” I asked.
“Nah. They’re perfect, son.”
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. It wasn’t supposed to happen this fast. As happy as I tried to look that morning, I was livid. We all were.
My dad couldn’t keep food down, and I’m not sure he ate one entire meal in the week leading up to Christmas Day, but he wasn’t going to miss my mom’s turkey dinner, and she wasn’t about to let him down. Mom slayed dinner that night. It was a work of art. Absolute perfection. That dinner, on Christmas Day, was always my dad’s favourite ninety minutes of the entire year, and this one was going to last a lifetime.
Before we started, Pops asked if he could say grace. My parents weren’t particularly religious people, but there’s no shame in turning to God when you need a little extra help or have a prayer you hope has a chance of getting to someone who gives a shit. Dad talked for a few minutes, stopping and starting, wiping his tears with the sleeve of his sweater that was now two sizes too big for him. He reached out and held my brother’s and my hands on either side of the table. All we could do was let him take his time. I don’t remember how he started, or what he asked for, but I remember how it ended.
“Thank you. Thank you for my life. I had a really good life.” His head was down, and his eyes were closed, but my Pops wasn’t praying. He wasn’t thanking God. He was thanking us. “Amen,” he whispered to himself. “That’s it.”