Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future.
~Paul Boese
The last group of guests bumped merrily out our front door and down the steps. I stood in the open doorway answering the final round of good wishes as our visitors, walking down our front sidewalk to their cars, turned back to wave. Their voices sounded crisp in the newly arrived frigid air of early December. A full moon climbed high in the dark slate sky. I eased the glass storm door shut, and it instantly frosted up as the warm air of our living room hit the icy cold surface. Now, all I could see outside were the hazy gleam of headlights flashing on as our friends started their cars, and the brightly hued blur of Christmas bulbs on the bush just outside our door.
I shut the heavy inside door and turned into our living room. My husband, Mike, bit the leg off a gingerbread man and grinned at me as he sank down onto the couch. “Well,” I said as I plunked down beside him, “it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.” A decorated tree next to the fireplace shimmered with tiny white lights, and a row of candles glowed along the mantel. Gifts wrapped in gorgeous holiday paper and tied with red, green, cobalt blue, or fuchsia metallic ribbon were piled beneath the tree. On some packages, I’d attached a jingle bell or two. Candlelight flickered on the dining room table, glinting off shiny glass Christmas bulbs placed among crystal pedestal cake plates and silver platters that still displayed an abundance of holiday cookies. The scent of cinnamon and cloves from hot apple cider perfumed the air, and the coffee urn emitted its own pleasant and comforting fragrance. Since I am enthralled with all things Christmas, this was bliss. We sat close and relished the quiet.
“Hey, how about some fresh air before we start cleaning up?” asked Mike after a time, breaking the spell.
“Good idea,” I responded, happy to put off the job of restoring order to our kitchen. He rose from the couch and offered me his hand. We pulled coats, hats, gloves, and scarves out of the front closet. “My mother would have liked our party tonight. You know how much she loved all the Christmas hoopla,” I told Mike as we suited up in our warmest winter attire and headed out for a late-night walk. Mike nodded silently, waiting for my cue on the direction of our conversation. My mother died three years ago, in her nineties, and what grieving I did was not so much about losing her, as about never having had her. Burdened with a melancholy outlook for most of her life, she was difficult to please. In my childhood I worked relentlessly, but ineffectively, to satisfy her. Then I worked just as hard in my adulthood to distinguish myself from her and to diminish any similarities between us, in an effort to convince myself that her disapproval of me mattered little.
Only with her death has our reconciliation begun. A cynic would say that I have fashioned this truce to meet my own needs, a convenient and thoughtful gift from an optimistic mind. However, I know otherwise. I sense her hand in the peacemaking, as I have been inspired to ponder the events of her childhood, a time of which she rarely spoke. Those few memories she chose to share about her youth were never pleasant. My concern has slowly turned from the ways in which she broke me, to the ways in which she may herself have been broken in the decades before my life began.
As Mike and I hiked through one neighborhood and into another in the brisk air, I absentmindedly led us into the area where I grew up. Hand in hand we traversed the sidewalk bordering the golf course in my childhood neighborhood. We traded stories of earlier Yuletides. “Is there a reason you’re so nuts about Christmas?” he asked.
I considered the source of the giddiness and sentimentality that overtake me every year as soon as the carcass of the Thanksgiving turkey hits the trash. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll have to think about that one.”
I glanced over at the golf course, which is one block from my childhood home. I described to Mike how, when I was in early grade school, I begged my older brother to take me sledding there on winter afternoons. And how at dusk on Christmas Eve in my youthful years, our parents would send him and me over to these hills with our sleds. On that night we generally had the snowy slopes all to ourselves. We’d make several runs down the double hill, facing a magical spectacle of brightly lit, snow-frosted evergreens in front yards all up and down the blocks bordering that corner of the golf course. My excitement reached a higher level with every speedy descent because I knew that while we were gone, Santa was at our home loading heaps of presents under our Christmas tree. The short trek back to our house after sledding never seemed longer than it did on Christmas Eve.
It didn’t matter to us that many of those gifts were necessities masquerading in bright gift wrap as luxuries: new underwear, socks, wool gloves, and school supplies. We were all the more jubilant when one of the boxes contained a toy train or a doll.
As Mike and I reminisced on our stroll, I realized for the first time the origin of much that I treasure about Christmas. The singing: my mom. The candlelight: my mom. The gift wrapping: my mom. Those tiny white twinkle lights: my mom.
And so my mother and I continue our reconciliation. As the weather gets colder, I become warmer.
