My Own Merry Little Christmas
By: Carmen Rios
Tags: Personal Essay, Christmas, Holidays, Moms

When I was growing up, my single mother used to buckle my brother and I into her cars — into the sputtering VW Jetta we called Wolfy, into the fireball red Dodge Neon I named Rosie, into the Toyota Matrix she got when our neighbor backed into Rosie until she couldn’t breathe — and take us to see Christmas lights in other neighborhoods.

Those routes became the only maps of New Jersey I could conjure when I needed them. I charted the streets in my neighborhood with lines of plastic candy canes and nuzzling reindeer sculptures as my landmarks, remembered the way to diners and big-box stores with villages of Christmas characters as my North Star.

My favorite destination was the cluster of spread-out mansions where each year the Elvis impersonator my mom went to high school with covered his house in a growing collection of lights, positioned statues in the likenesses of Marilyn Monroe and Santa along the edge of the roof, wrapped his private pond that covered half the cul-de-sac in lines of tiny white lights and played Christmas music for the line of cars that came to revel in it — which sometimes created traffic so serious we missed dinner. His neighbors provided some entertainment during rush hour: they strung up streams of red, blue, green and white bulbs and dotted their windows with burning candlesticks, erected Christmas trees taller than our apartment wrapped in garland behind two-story-tall windows, lit our entire path with elaborate ensembles that dotted the landscape leading up to his front door.

Elvis’ enclave was the exception to a long-heralded fact in our family: Rich people were bad at Christmas. My mother clucked when she drove us home through wealthier towns where houses were adorned with sparse decorations, shook her head while leaning forward to catch a glimpse of a house the size of a ski lodge with a single wreath on the door or a simple Santa on the mailbox.

Instead, we took winding pathways back to the rented apartments we were constantly packing and unpacking our things to fit into — down into riverfront communities where tiny homes on stilts damaged from water were festooned with jumbo lights and vintage wooden Santa and Rudolph carvings crowded front yards, along the narrow streets surrounding developments of naked McMansions where suburban families still lived in their family homes from the 1960s and 1970s and draped lights and ornaments along the gutters in the shadow of wealth.

It was smaller, poorer neighborhoods like these that lit up in acts of abundance during the season. It was people like us who had fewer reasons to Believe but still insisted upon it. That was what Christmas was always supposed to be about in our family: unbridled joy, even and especially for people like us. In a world that so often obscured our experiences and erased our realities, this was our chance to literally shine just as bright as the rest of them.

My mother saw offerings of lights and blow-up Santa-hat-wearing dinosaurs as acts of generosity, ones she longed to reciprocate for her own neighbors. Each year she spent those light-hunting rides plotting out her own eventual masterpieces, talking out loud about what she would do if she had that kind of front yard, or a fence to wrap with garland, or how she would arrange plastic molds of Disney characters if she had space to store and display them. The Christmas lights were just one way the holiday manifested, in our small working-class family, as a form of vicarious living and a pathway to dreaming.

There were rare opportunities for us to get into this kind of fun throughout my childhood. When we rented the big brown house on Hiawatha from family friends, we hung our stockings on an actual mantle and sat in the living room in the glow of our full-sized Christmas tree, which would never again fit in our homes in the years to follow. When we lived in the smaller unit in the two-family house on Mead Ave. we bought light-up reindeer and nearly fell out the window behind the armchair in our living room pushing them onto the roof. Sometimes we put cute holiday signs from the dollar store in the tiny patches of grass or dirt outside our front doors, sticking plastic stakes into humble garden boxes with grins on our faces. Sometimes we pressed window clings onto glass in the shape of peppermints and presents.

But mostly we made our own magic, finding ways to squeeze our collective Christmas spirit into the circumstances we occupied. When we couldn’t fit the big tree in the living room, my mother brought home a tinier one in a plastic gold pot and strung the lights and ornaments along the border of the living room, where the ceiling hit the wall. When we didn’t have a mantle for stockings we hung them instead from dining and coffee tables, with Santa’s cookie plate surrounded by candy cane hooks.

Because we rented, we moved often, and sometimes lived in a state of flux, with our belongings still packed in closets or stuck in tubs — but no matter where we landed, the places we called home were always blanketed each Christmas in an ever-growing collection of decorations: stuffed animals that Santa had left us years before, a weakened wooden nutcracker and his series of younger contemporaries, one singing Santa in a plaid shirt and a belt with a thick buckle that reminded my mom of a late coworker and another in a black tuxedo that we bought to ring in Y2K, a Precious Moments nativity and assorted statuettes of snow-covered caroling bears and ice-skating reindeer, the crooked and misshapen handmade papier mache snowman and Santa that Rocky and I sculpted in elementary school.

No matter what kind of storms she was facing in the financial seasons of her life, my mother also took us each winter up and down suburban highways in pursuit of gifts for our family and her friends, or grabbed supplies at Michael’s on the way home from dinner so that she could paint by hand the names of her coworkers on ornaments before everyone went away for holiday break. Still now, we do those trips together — buying crafts that will count us down to Christmas and then going back again after the occasion for discount ornaments and decorations, both of us dreaming of the brighter and bigger and even more overwhelmingly good season we’ll make together next time around.

My mother’s indefatigable Christmas spirit has always triumphed, no matter how clouded our Christmas skies. We decorated the tree together and listened to music while we baked cookies in an alleyway kitchen in 2016, just one month after my grandmother passed. When my mother wasn’t in fighting condition she directed me, pointing me to the right pine needle on which to hang her childhood ornaments. Because we never lived in a house large enough to host holiday dinners, our tradition was rooted in the buttermilk pancakes my mother made on the griddle on Christmas morning after we covered the floor in paper.

I know now that Christmas cheer becomes a survival mechanism when you need it most, and I realize now why my mother must have needed so much of it in those years. Whenever times are tough, December moors me. When I was in college and grappling with my sexuality, I strung up ten tiny felt stockings for me and all my roommates in that big house on Arizona Ave.; when I was in D.C. on my own, living paycheck-to-paycheck and stealing fruit at the grocery store, I drank my morning coffee out of a five-dollar Christmas mug from CVS until the handle fell off. When my relationships were faltering, I kept track of every yearning my partner expressed for months before the holiday and then figured out how to stuff them into one gift bag; when I was reeling from breakups I did the same for my closest friends.

When I was 16 or 17, I decided to give my mother the same magical mornings she had engineered for us: I secretly hoarded drug-store gifts and Mandee stocking stuffers until Christmas Eve, when I put them wrapped under the tree, each emblazoned with a label written carefully to mirror the same swirling letters that Santa had spelled out our names with for decades. When I realized I would not see my mother for Christmas this year, at 30, I swung right back into the motions of the moment: I ordered a slew of presents to my doorstep and wrapped them in the same paper, different from anyone else’s, and wrote her name over and over again in sloping font on labels that stuck to the front if I handled them gently. I wrapped an oversized box filled with gifts from Santa in the last piece of paper on the roll, sweating over the box and then staring at, back sore and eyes tired, squealing in excitement.

While making her gift list and checking it twice, I stocked my pantry with pancake syrup and mix. I strung lights adorned with handmade felt ornaments around the fence of my small front yard. I trimmed my pink mini-tree with a garland and tiny tree skirt, fluffing the needles just like I learned at my mother’s knee and surrounding it with shipping boxes and gift bags I filled with my eyes shut with the things she sent me from across the country. I hung cards off of a string of twine to make a little bit of something out of the nothing of 2020 and took out a modest collection of stuffed animals from holidays past to keep me company. I hung candy canes off of baskets, bought a five-dollar advent calendar for the dog, hung two small stockings for each of us off of a coffee table. I turned the FM radio to a Christmas station and made grocery lists of ingredients for the staples I would have to make for one, in a toaster oven on a kitchen cart in a cottage by myself.

I have been shocked throughout the pandemic by my ability to move through this extreme practice in frustration — by the coping mechanisms I built in my mother’s backseat that compensated for knowing that we had been slighted by forces beyond our control, by the rituals I’ve designed over the course of 30 years that steeled me for crossing the distance between what I’ve earned and what I might receive. Christmas spirit was not something we were told to practice only when it felt most possible. No matter where we were or what our lives looked like, the sheer force of my mother’s joy carried us safely and warmly into new years with new opportunities and new disappointments.

I used to wait the entire year for Christmas as a girl, blurting out on my list each December every desire I’d ever held back in the toy store or known we could not afford and all the things I envied of my friends for having or resented giving to others. I unwrapped my presents each Christmas morning in pursuit of closing the gap between our circumstances and what we deserved.

Santa didn’t always bring us exactly what we wished for — instead, his magic was deeming us worthy of abundance in the first place. Once a year he reminded us that scarcity of wealth never meant lack of love, joy, optimism, faith. Once a year, he reminded us that our wishes were just as loud as everyone else’s. Once a year, he imbued our tiny traditions with the same gravity and respect as the ones being practiced in those McMansions on sparse land.

I can make a list of the ways my mother taught me to survive: My mother emboldened me and empowered me, urged me to be wild and weird and proud of myself; taught me to stand up for myself and to lean on those I love when I need support; encouraged me to reach for fulfillment and nourishment even if it did not make me rich or famous.

She reminded me every Christmas that hardship, pain and loss could be soothed with even the smallest offering of joy. She equipped me with the optimism I would need to make my own magic. And she showed me how to make even the tiniest Christmases merry and bright.