365 Nights (14 page)

Brad has made it easier, though, because he is a Christmas Tree Stud. I mean, if there were ever a contest for decorating a tree, he would win by a landslide—so just back away from the tree and no one will get hurt. For example, the man has some serious spatial skills, and searching for the perfect tree each season is much more successful because of him. Me? I'm wandering aimlessly through the maze of trees wondering which one is going to seep sap onto my hardwoods, all the while snapping pictures of the kids, hoping for a semidecent Christmas card photo. Brad is great at unrolling yards and yards of lights, each lovingly wrapped around a paper towel tube, and arranging them perfectly on the tree.

But most important, Brad has a happy heart for decorating a Christmas tree. And I do not. I have a happy and quite nostalgic heart
after
the tree is decorated and we sit on the couch and gaze lovingly at this festooned tree and proclaim, “Yep, this is the best one yet.” But I don't really decorate the tree with a happy heart, and not even Christmas music and a hot toddy can help.

Weirdly enough, Brad came to our marriage with barely a stick of furniture, but with boxes and boxes of the most amazing tree accoutrements—garlands of stars, strings of red wooden balls that look like giant cranberries, sweet ornaments. Which is interesting because he nearly married someone who is not Christian. “You know,” I once said, “this whole Christmas tree passion of yours might have been dead in the water if you had married someone who doesn't celebrate Christmas.”

“Yeah, would that have been a buzzkill or what?” he replied as he stood on a ladder and carefully placed with great focus and concentration our homemade angel on the top of the tree.

I really do want a picture-perfect Norman Rockwell Christmas, just in my own dysfunctional way. And it's easy to forget that most family holiday memories are of the dysfunction, not the functional. Functional is not as memorable or compelling; it is not the stuff of family lore. More people remember the year that your uncle Bobby drank too much and mysteriously broke the toilet. That Christmas your cousin Billy came out of the closet. The season that your aunt Millie served raw meat and cold corn soufflé. As much as we try to create perfect holidays, holidays are really the perfect storm for drama.

I had never woken up at my own house on Christmas morning. It was always spent at my grandmother's house, my cousin's house, or my aunt and uncle's house. As a result, I had tremendous faith as a kid; if Santa could find me at a different address every year (which he always managed to do), then all must be right with the world. I discovered Santa's true identity later than my peers, primarily because I had seen him perform some amazing search-and-find feats. Who wants to give up on that?

My grandmother's dining room table was always chocablock crowded—too many chairs and not enough room for everybody. Even the sewing bench from the back bedroom and folding chairs from underneath the bed were pulled in to seat my parents, grandparents, and aunts and uncles. So another table was set in the front of the living room, near the front door. Bordering one side was a love seat that could accommodate two adults or three children, along with a wingback chair, a footstool, and other odd chairs, and that was where older cousins and spouses—about six to eight of us—sat. At the other end of the living room was a third table—a wobbly aluminum one that folded up and slid under a bed in the back bedroom. It, too, was covered with a tablecloth. That was the kids' table, and
that
was where I dined every Christmas Eve until I married. I never in all my life had a holiday meal at the “grown-up” table. Someone would have had to die to free up a space at the “grown-up” table, and there are three other cousins ahead of me anyway.

Grandmother's house was always jammed with bodies. To feed my extended family on Christmas Eve required a couple of sets of dishes and silverware, lots of paper cups and paper napkins, a cooler or giant Tupperware bowl of extra ice, and extra card tables to hold the food. We spread a tablecloth over my grandmother's washer and dryer to make more room for the food. Desserts were stored in the cool air outside, as there wasn't enough room in the fridge. We simply pulled them inside when the meal was over and people had enough room. Those holiday dinners were chaotic, loud, hot, and wonderful, and all I had ever known.

We played outside, running around in the yard, or stayed in, watching football or sitting around shooting the bull. There was much love and affection at those family gatherings. Close quarters in my grandmother's house dictated some of it, but we are also just a cheerful and engaged group.

Holidays with my family were a shock to my Midwestern-raised Brad. All that chaos and noise! “And do they always
hug
everyone like that, every time they see them? I don't really know their names yet—there are so many of them!” he once commented when we first visited. It could be a strain on your senses (and your personal space) if you weren't used to it. And since my grandmother did not permit drinking, he couldn't even take the edge off this claustrophobic lovefest with a nice cold beer or a glass of wine.

At my grandmother's, we would all stand in a circle weaving between tables and chairs and hold hands for a blessing, and my grandmother inevitably would break down in tears. “Well, Lord, I just thank you for all you have done for this family, and I'm just so thankful for our blessings because I know, Lord, well, Lord, this is probably my last Christmas. Amen.”

She does this every year—announce to the world and to the Good Lord that this is her last. And all heck breaks loose and we all start talking at once to take turns fussing over her and telling her that, of course, this is not going to be her last Christmas, as she is healthy as a horse (and she is, or was) and that she very well may live forever, or at least as long as her sister Ima, who lived to be ninety-nine.

“Well, I am just so happy,” she says with her voice trembling and her little white Aqua-Netted head bobbing up and down. “Because in all these years no one in this family has gotten divorced. ” My grandmother says this nearly every Christmas.

And she's right. With nearly thirty people in that room loading up plates with an appalling amount of food, none in our extended family are “dee-vorced,” as my grandmother would say. My grandmother is so proud of this, but she is living proof that staying married does not always equate with being
happily
married. I sometimes think that very surely my grandmother would prefer you to be paralyzingly miserable beyond belief than dee-vorced. “Being unhappy isn't the worst problem in the world,” she might have said. And that was what people of her generation truly believed.

And while they weren't dee-vorced, I can't tell you the last time my grandparents lived together; it must have been during the Nixon administration. They were married for thirty-five years, and after much sorrow and great upheaval, they settled into separate quarters. Never legally divorced, of course, but not really married, it seemed. I have no memory of my grandparents necessarily being affectionate with each other. Though I know that they continued to share meals, a garden, and somewhat of a life that spared them both what they most feared. Those were the times—divorce was unmentionable, unconscionable, and unbelievably not an option. So the family carved out a kind of truth that worked, but it was a tenuous arrangement up until my grandfather died.

My grandfather was warm with his grandchildren. And my grandmother, well, she was always getting food ready. We would spend Christmas Eve at my grandmother's house, where my grandfather would let himself quietly in through the sliding glass door after walking across her backyard from his house. He would leave the same way, with little fanfare. We knew where to find him if we needed him, which we did. My grandfather was irreverent, eccentric, complex, and on occasion loud. In some ways he was a man born in the wrong place and time, as some people are. In any other time, he would have been the charming, garrulous guest that you wanted to sit beside at a fantastic dinner party. In the rural foothills of North Carolina, he was a beloved father, brother, and son who brought his family tremendous love and occasional strife. My brother and I knew only the love and little of the strife and therefore revered him.

Legend has it (and old pictures prove it) that my grandfather was dark and broodingly handsome, and that my grandmother, who was smart and incredibly responsible, was smitten. My grandparents definitely broke Brad's Rule of Twos. She was older when they married, a ripe old twenty. She was a good student and my great-aunt Ima paid for her to attend secretarial school in Greensboro with the condition that if she married, she would repay the tuition. So Ima put up the money and my grandmother promptly repaid her not long after she got married—with delight, I've been told. My grandfather had nine siblings and my grandmother was the second youngest of sixteen children. For some unfathomable reason, my grandparents lived wedged in between both sets of in-laws and my grandmother cared for all four until they had all died. There were twenty-five sons and daughters who could have taken on the primary burden of caring for elderly parents, but somehow my grandmother bore the brunt of it all. Again, those were the times when nursing homes were unheard of and—like dee-vorce—not taking care of family was unmentionable, unconscionable, and unbelievably not an option.

Who knows if my grandparents had met today whether they would have gotten married. The world was smaller then—you met and married people in close geographic proximity to you. (That's why some people are so funny looking.) You met people in high school or in college or you married your best friend's cousin from out of town—which was always a big deal, especially if you lived in a small town that everyone was desperate to leave.

Marriage is now a choice, while back in the not-so-distant past, marriage might have been based on property, money, alliances, and other things unromantic; there was a time when women had little to no say in who their husband was going to be. The husband was chosen by one's family, father, village elder, etc. In fact, it's only been in the last several decades that women in industrialized societies have had the choice about whom they want to marry, and even if they want to marry. So being married to a spouse who didn't light your fire, well, that wasn't so strange back then. It was kind of like a game show gone bad . . . “And behind Curtain Number 2 . . . we have Earle! He's five feet five inches tall with a tractor, a twenty-acre plot of land, a domineering mother, and a small lean-to house with indoor plumbing. Earle's interests are priming tobacco, cleaning guns, going to church . . . and being able to feed himself and his mother until the next planting season. Let's give it up for Earle!” And I would think it fairly common back then that your husband might not trip your trigger in bed, since you didn't really pick him after all. So it was a doubly whammy— you were expected to be intimate with someone you probably didn't even choose. Fast forward to today—a lot of wives don't want to be intimate with the person they
did
choose. At least this is what I hear from girlfriends and on daytime television and often read in women's magazines. So now that we have the power to choose our own mates, things get all mucked up anyway.

My grandparents had a few family heirlooms to pass down to their children. There is a bedroom suite. There is my grand-mother's high school class ring from 1936. There is an antique dish cabinet and some hand-quilted blankets. Some wonderful family photos. A few trinkets here and there that qualify as keepsakes only to our family, such as tiny hand-crocheted tree ornaments shaped like snowflakes, and a clay water pitcher with blue and red flowers. But families also pass down history— stories of bravery, hardship, and tragedy—as well as commonsense knowledge that helps sustain families: how to make butter and jam, how to birth a baby, when to plant things, when to put up the vegetables, how to make maxipads out of old sheets, how to build a barn, and so on. We'd like to think that these lessons and tales outlast our own short lives.

However, nobody in my big, loud, loving family passed down wisdom or commonsense advice about marriage, except to stay married no matter what the cost. No one discussed intimacy within the relationship. I am sure there are very few women, if any, in my age group who were counseled to marry someone with whom they are and would continue to be sexually compatible. For example, it would have been helpful to hear: “You know, darlin', you should really look for a guy who has the same sexual pace as you—it would really go a long way in smoothing out some of those longer-term issues about sex.” But if they had, it means my girlfriends and I would have been shopping for a man who rarely, if ever, wanted to have sex after two kids and the age of forty. And how were we to know?

In fact, the triumvirate of marital woes (sex, money, and religion) isn't even acknowledged by most parents seeking to impart wisdom to their daughters. My family's advice did hit one out of three: “Marry a nice Christian boy and it will all work out.” And what exactly does that mean anyway? I remember sitting down with Brad to talk about religion when we were newly engaged. Interestingly, it was Christmastime. A Baptist and an Episcopalian were coming together, and we could not be further apart on the Protestant continuum (but considering his first fiancée was Jewish, I didn't think we were that far apart). I mean, if you go to church—any church—it in some part signifies belief in God, right? So I asked him about it one night.

“Um, there's something we need to talk about,” I said to Brad. “I mean, I know you believe in God, but I just need to hear that you really believe in God. Before we get married, I need to hear some statement of belief.”

“Yeah, I believe,” he responded.