Ghosts of Christmas Past

In the old Christmas song “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” our favorite crooners tell us, There’ll be scary ghost stories and tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago. When I was younger, I thought it was a strange line, and the only ghosts I could connect with Christmas were in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found Christmas to be the most haunted time of the year.

When I was young, on Christmas Eve, we made trays of finger food, played Christmas music, danced in the kitchen, and did a round of caroling while my mother played piano. One year, we were about to wrap up our singing to watch The Man in the Santa Claus Suit when my mother said, “Can we do a few more? I feel like my parents are here.” So we did. The year her mother died, I bought my mother a lighted church to add to her Christmas village as a representation of her mother. Next to our fireplace, we have animatronic Santa and Mrs. Claus as an homage to my dad’s mother who collected them (“Look at all my Santy Clauses” she would say to me).

Lauren’s father died December 12 two years ago. Last year, I did an early twelve days of Christmas for her starting on the twelfth. I also bought her a German wood smoker carved as Ebenezer Scrooge (Lauren’s dad was a mortgage broker and lender, like Scrooge; please try to remember that Scrooge turns out good)—he blows pine incense. On college football’s rivalry weekend this year, I texted with my family about the Ohio State v. Michigan game and admonished all to break out their red and silver (Grandpa Laws got his PhD from OSU). My mother then asked if we thought my dad would be watching with us, and I said, “Of course.” Apparently, post-mortal beings get tired and fall asleep at their posts, as they did in life—Michigan won, and Dad didn’t do a damn thing about it. Not that he would be inclined—he wasn’t an athlete growing up.

Dad wanted three things for Christmas every year—a new book (or ten), a box of cherry chocolates, and a can of peanuts. Lauren’s dad wanted a can of cashews and a new book (or three). Me? I want new books every year, and I usually go to Barnes and Noble on Christmas Eve with my boys, just as my father took me. That inevitably leads to a retelling of the Damn Tacos incident wherein my dad belched loudly in the bookstore and a guy at the far end of the road exclaimed, “Shit! Holy shit! Damn tacos or something!”

That is often coupled with the retelling of the Elliott holiday trip to Germany and Leon’s fart in a stairwell that became The Fart Heard Round the World. Nor can we forget the holiday party at Lauren’s parents’ house when I was standing by myself next to the Christmas tree. Suddenly, someone grabbed my ass, and I turned to see Grammie Olive exclaim, “Move ya big fat butt!” Then when she registered it was me, she said, “Sorry. I thought you were Travis (Lauren’s cousin).” Still not sure how that makes it better. Scary ghost stories, indeed.

When Grant was maybe three or four, I drove Grammie Olive to one of the Elliott-Greenslade holiday parties. When she got in the car, her wrinkled face scared Grant, and he began screaming. Grammie helpfully offered, “Whatsa matter with you? You want a poke in the nose?” But on the drive, she fell into reminiscing about her first husband, the real love of her life. Olive had been married four times and outlived all her husbands (the “Grand Slam of Love,” as my father-in-law Leon used to say), but Ralph was really her love. He died suddenly when he was forty-five. Grammie recounted that to me and said, “It’s our faith that gets us through those times, I think.”

When I was young, my mother used to play for the annual Church Christmas cantata. The highlight was a rendition of “O Holy Night,” sung by my mother’s childhood friend, Lani Lambourne. Lani had a top-shelf concert voice, and my mother put a lot of pressure on herself to play well while also not upstaging Lani. When Lucia was in high school, she took voice lessons and sang some Christmas concerts at local churches. One year, she was supposed to do “O Holy Night” as a duet with her teacher, but her teacher came down with laryngitis. I offered to fill in—Lu was the lead vocalist and I was harmony. I sang it way too softly and without enough confidence, but her teacher declared me amazing and no one else was brave enough to say how mid it was (my part, not Lu’s—she was great). Whatever. My main contribution was not to get in Lu’s way, to be an accompanist like my mother was to Lani. It worked. It was family tradition.

We have probably the world’s largest stockings. This was an accident. When we first had Grant, Lauren decided to sew stockings for the three of us. She showed me the pattern she had picked out, and I told her it was way too large. She insisted, “It’s just the pattern. They will come out the way they are supposed to.” They came out wicked huge (as one says in the northeast). Rather than scrap them, we leaned into them, and thereafter, every kid got a similar stocking. We also got family help with them—Graham was born in November, and Lauren was too exhausted to do a stocking that year for him, so my mother sewed it, and Marti later embroidered the names for the three younger kids (we had left that task undone for years).

Now when Christmas approaches, all these come together for me, as though I experience them every year, as though the people, living and dead, are with me. It’s probably instructive that the first step in cracking Scrooge’s bitter heart was to send him the Ghost of Christmas Past and have him revisit his Christmas memories. The founding prophet of our religion said that our kindred “are not far from us, and know and understand our thoughts, feelings, and motions.” Christmas time seems to bring them out a lot to which I say, “Haunt away, old loved ones. But whichever of you turned on the refrigerator water dispenser in the middle of the night and flooded the kitchen a few mornings ago, not cool. Funny. But not cool.”