What Does Christmas Feel Like?

I suppose that every family has traditions, largely formed by fortune and whim, that seem to have an airtight logic, and I suppose that those traditions are most visible around this time of year, when everything formal is more powerful. My family—that is, my nuclear family—that is, me, my parents, and my younger sister—would get up and open presents on Christmas Eve morning, eat breakfast, and drive the two-and-a-half hours from suburban Atlanta to my mother’s hometown of Hawkinsville, an hour south of Macon in Middle Georgia.

I believed in Santa Claus in those days, and it didn’t strike me as odd or suspicious that he visited our house 24 hours before everyone else’s. As I said, your own family’s logic always feels airtight. I love to hear about what other people eat on Christmas Eve, because to this day, we eat breakfast food, even though now we open our presents at night, since there’s nowhere for us to go afterwards. Traditions like these are like the placement of dishes in kitchen cabinets: there’s generally not a perfect reason to put anything in one particular place, and yet we all have the strong suspicion that everyone else’s kitchen is horribly disorganized.

Hawkinsville is a town of about four thousand today and slightly less than that in 1990, when I was eight years old. It’s known for nothing in particular, unless you include something called “harness racing” or a rapper called Young Jeezy, but my mother grew up there, and every year we went back. My cousins (about my age) still lived there, and so did my grandmother, whose house we always stayed at. Our activities will surely seem banal to anyone who didn’t participate in them: we’d go to the Christmas Eve service at my grandmother’s Southern Baptist Church, and on Christmas Day itself, we’d first go to “The Camphouse” to open presents with the “big family”; that evening, the “small family” (my grandmother and her direct descendents) would gather in her formal living room and exchange presents.

At this point, the events I’m describing were more than three quarters of a lifetime ago. It’s a vanished world, as surely as my parents’ Boomer childhood was a vanished world when my own childhood was ongoing. I’m trying to scrape up as many memories of that world as I can. It’s not easy. I couldn’t drive you to “The Camphouse” if you paid me, and there are attendees of that event who will have to remind me of who they are if I am lucky enough to see them in the hereafter. I remember receiving a Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? geography board game, which my cousins and second cousins and I spread out on the floor and played. I remember one cold Christmas morning (or what passed for cold in Middle Georgia) where we picked pecans off the ground under the trees and ate them. (A few of them were rotten, which has probably affected my taste for pecans.) I remember someone (but who?) explaining to me that some people eat turtles. I remember, in general, not being particularly eager to go to the “big family” event, which seemed more of an adult affair. I wonder, in retrospect, if they spent much of the morning communally engaging in the memory exercise that I’m performing here, and if they were more successful at it than I have been. Because what do adults do when they get together with people they knew before they were adults? They talk about the world that has vanished, the Garden of Eden that time has expelled them from.

So I didn’t usually want to go to “The Camphouse.” Nor did I ever particularly want to go to my grandmother’s church, which was old and musty and not very exciting. It’s funny that, looking back, it was my first introduction to high-church Christianity—not that it was high church in comparison to anything but the evangelical-flavored Southern Baptist churches we attended in Gwinnett County. But First Baptist Hawkinsville lit candles for “Silent Night” and sang songs I never heard at our church, obscure songs like “O Holy Night.” Something of those Christmas Eve services arises in me every time I watch a sacristan light a candle in our Catholic parish today, and I think how funny life is.

It was the “small family” Christmas I looked forward to, both because it meant receiving a lot more (and usually better) presents and because instead of eating dinner, we grazed on a variety of homemade snacks: pigs in a blanket, buckeyes (basically homemade Reese’s Cups, if you’re not from the south), Chex Mix (not from a bag, obviously), and haystacks (chow mein noodles coated in butterscotch). I’m not sure I can eat any of those things without it feeling like Christmas.

“Feeling like Christmas” is exactly the phrase I’ve got on my mind. Christmas doesn’t feel like Christmas anymore, and I want to know why that is. Growing up is, among other things, the process of having layers of your childhood stripped away from you without you even noticing it because you’re so excited to grow up. Only later do you look back and realize what you’ve lost. There’s a song I like by the band Okkervil River called “White”; in the first two choruses, the singer says, “Summer’s here, and I’m gonna crack,” but the third flips the script: “Spring is gone, and you’re gonna gasp.” It’s two ways to describe the same experience. As kids, we’re so excited for summer break we don’t notice that the pleasures of another spring have slipped away from us. And likewise, we’re so excited for young adulthood, the summer of our lives, that we don’t notice the angel setting fire to the sword that blocks our way back. When a child stops believing in Santa Claus, it’s a layer of Christmas that’s gone forever. I pretended to believe for several years longer than I actually did. Consciously this was because I assumed I’d get more presents if my parents thought I believed in Santa Claus. Subconsciously, perhaps, I was just trying to hold on to something ephemeral. I was nostalgic from a very early age.

But time marches on, inexorable, and there’s no holding on to the past except in memory. This will be my forty-third Christmas, and every year, less of the world that made up the substance of my childhood Christmases exists. It began with the death of previous generations: first people vaguely related to me, people whom I couldn’t sketch out on a family tree if you paid me to. (A side note: as the generation before our own dies out, there are fewer and fewer people who are able to explain these relationships. It’s not just that the past itself is gone; it’s that even the outline of the past becomes fuzzy and then falls off the cliff into oblivion. We don’t even know what we’ve lost.) Then, in 2014, my grandmother, after suffering from dementia for half a decade, died, just before Christmas. I was in the middle of a bipolar depressive episode so intense that my psychiatrist momentarily put me on the antipsychotic Quetiapine. I felt nothing at the funeral because the whole point of the drug was to keep me from feeling anything. Only later did the full weight of our loss land on me. We hadn’t just lost the person of my grandmother—in some ways, we’d lost her to dementia years earlier. We’d lost her house, and with it, the scene of those family Christmases. A few years ago, my mother showed me the Zillow page for what had been my grandmother’s house: the sellers had, as was to be expected, torn out the shag carpeting, but they’d also removed the formal living room, the site of all those happy Christmases, to make an open floor plan. Not only will I never see that room again, neither will anyone else.

Nine years later, also in December, my uncle Randy suddenly died of a stroke. We’d had time to prepare for my grandmother’s death, and I think most of us felt a vague sense of relief at it—dementia so totally destroys the person who has it that it feels like a mercy when they escape it the only way they can. But no one was ready for Randy to die. He was a good man in a way that will make sense to readers of Front Porch Republic—he was a letter carrier for decades and then worked at the window at the post office. He knew everyone in that town, and everyone knew him. After he retired in his fifties, he took a part-time job at Ace Hardware, where he somehow became even more of a fixture than he was behind the post-office counter. I learned at his funeral exactly to what extent he was part of the town’s glue; I learned the number of young people who looked up to him, whom he was kind to. Sitting there in First Baptist Hawkinsville, the site of all of those Christmas Eve services, I kept thinking about Randy Newman’s “Texas Girl at the Funeral of Her Father”: “Sing a sad song for a good man . . . / Sing a sad song for the sailor a thousand miles from the sea.” The Ace Hardware closed during his funeral, the Hawkinsville equivalent of the lights going down on Broadway at the death of Stephen Sondheim. What higher honor could any of us hope to achieve?

All Christmases have ghosts hovering around them because Christmas involves such intense connections to the past. Thus, the Victorians told ghost stories on Christmas Eve, a practice that survives mostly in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and in a throwaway line from “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year” (“There’ll be scary ghost stories and tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago.”). The longest and darkest night of the year is, depending on the year, three or four days before Christmas, and the holiday must have initially been instituted in part to show us that darkness and death do not finally conquer everything. They’re not angry ghosts—or at least my family’s ghosts aren’t angry. But, like everything else about Christmas, there’s a certain sadness to them. The holiday’s incandescence shines weakly in the dark and cold, and the older we get, perhaps, the less we live in the present-day. “It doesn’t feel like Christmas,” my mother told me the year Randy died. That year felt less like Christmas than any I can remember, but the feeling had been slipping away for more than a decade by that point.

I’ve written in the past about the benefits of nostalgia, but the shadow side of those benefits is that we can get stuck in some hazily remembered version of the past. And is there a more nostalgic time of year than Christmas? But nostalgia is individual, or at least heavily generational. When I was 13, my mother was 43. Surely the Christmases I remember so fondly didn’t really feel like Christmas to her, or at least they didn’t feel like the Christmases she remembered from the 1960s. Her father died when she was a teenager—surely nothing felt like Christmas after that. And then there’s the generation after mine. My two nieces probably have no memory of my grandmother’s formal living room, so they can’t possibly miss it. Thirty years from now, I’ll be elderly if I am still alive at all, and they’ll be middle-aged, no doubt telling their friends and families that the year 2055 doesn’t “feel like Christmas.” And I’m sure they’ll be right—my parents’ house, where we have our Christmases now, won’t be my parents’ house anymore. The generation before me will have fully passed, and my generation will be on our way. The past will have slipped away from Generation Alpha as surely as it slips away from all of us.

Christmas is largely a secular holiday. Other than those Christmas Eve services, none of my memories of Christmas have any particular religious connotations, even though my family was always religious. I don’t know that I have a problem with the secularization of Christmas, though I’m sure that people from an earlier generation could point to it as one of the things that made Christmas not feel like Christmas to them. But I do think it’s significant, for Christians, that Christmas comes at the end of the long period of Advent, a penitential season of waiting. Obviously this sits uneasily with a culture that has decided that Christmas begins the moment the streetlights go out on Halloween. (Another side note: if Christmas doesn’t feel like Christmas anymore, Halloween feels almost nothing like Halloween.) Christmas is such a backward-looking holiday that Advent—which looks forward to the coming and then to the Second Coming of Christ—is a necessary counterweight. The loss of the past doesn’t make Advent feel less like Advent; it probably makes it feel more like it. The year after my grandmother died, I wrote this poem:

The air in the back rooms of my grandmother’s house
Was thick with mothballs, mold, and dust—
The sort of heaviness that told a child,
“There’s no place for you here, no toys,
No books, just matter from the darkness before you were born.”
I was afraid of it, and when I slept back there
I’d dream the hangdog ceiling fan was coming down.

I’ll never see those rooms again. She died last year,
The second week of December.
Her children sold her house. It’s just as well;
The mystery was terrible.
But now that smell is gone, recessed into a further dark.

Today’s the last Sunday of November.
At church, the old woman in front of me
Had dragged her red-striped sweater out
Of storage, where it marinated in the naphthalene.
The darkness re-emerged; we sang
“O Come, O Come Emmanuel,” and then I understood:

Advent must be the dark in which the candle shines,
Or tries to shine. It’s neither overcome nor understood,
But still the darkness will not disappear,
And thus our sadness points us toward the pinhole light.

There’s no recovering the past; it will never “feel like Christmas” again, not in the way it once did, and eventually even the memory of it will be lost forever. But time endlessly—nearly endlessly, Advent reminds us—renews itself, and so does Christmas. Every generation remakes the holiday for itself, and then spends the rest of its life missing it. And maybe, for middle-class people in our affluent and comfortable society, that’s what passes for the “valley of tears” from which we cry to God in the “Hail Holy Queen.” Maybe the point is that, eventually, Christmas doesn’t feel like Christmas—and maybe that allows us to look forward to something instead of looking backwards.

Image via Picryl.