Spending Christmas

by Joseph Bottum
12/20/1999

What fades in memory is not the fact, but the feeling. I can call up every detail of those Christmases of my childhood. A cold sparrow peering out across the lawn from under the snow-covered lilac hedge, while I sat at the window, waiting for my parents to wake. My father cocking his head to the side to concentrate on cutting out the sections of a grapefruit for breakfast. The heft of the Swiss Army knife from Uncle Howard, smuggled in the pocket of my dress pants to church. The steam rising while we washed the endless Christmas dishes, until the fog formed into little rivulets that raced each other down the kitchen window panes. The ink-and-paper new-book smell of Kipling's Jungle Books, read with a flashlight under the blankets after my mother had come in to shut off the lights and whisper one last Merry Christmas.

I can call up every detail -- except the emotion, the overwhelming waves that beat upon my sisters and me down the long stream of days in the Christmas season. To dwell on those memories is more to remember that I did have a certain feeling than to recapture just how that feeling really felt. They come faded like last year's pine needles that fall from the box of Christmas ornaments when you bring it down from the linen closet. Why should I remember the long-needled ponderosa tree we had when I was 6? The heavy-scented balsam tree, bending under the weight of the ornaments, when I was 8? The Douglas firs, the Black Hills pines, the juniper? The scalloped holly sprigs set on the sideboard and mantel, with a stern warning every year not to eat the berries? The silly-looking plastic mistletoe my mother would hang, giggling with my father over some joke they wouldn't explain to the children?
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