I wasn’t dreaming of a white Christmas in December 1987. In California we like to confine our snow to the ski slopes where it can make itself useful.
What I wanted to do was host my family — parents, sister, and Aunt Catherine — in the Victorian cottage I’d bought in February: a small house, with shabby furnishings and no central heating, but I clung stubbornly to the notion that it made a perfect setting for the holiday.
I envisioned a scene out of Dickens: a fragrant fir tree, roasted meat, a figgy pudding, all set to the music of Christmas carols, preferably sung on the front porch by angelic sweet-voiced children. But alas, that was not what came to pass.
Before I could decorate my fragrant fir, I had to hack off its bottom branches with a pair of scissors and a very dull knife. (All my knives are dull. A gourmet cook I am not.) And, unused to roasting anything, especially for five people, I had bought a ham the size of a breadbox, only to be told that my family had eaten ham at Aunt Catherine’s the night before. Our Christmas dinner consisted of salad, potato chips, and grilled-cheese sandwiches, with ice cream and my sister’s home-made cookies for dessert. So much for figgy pudding.
The angelic children never showed up, but I’d anticipated this and bought some cassette tapes: “Christmas from King’s College,” “Nat King Cole’s Christmas Song,” etc. These I duly played, and they had the odd effect of sending Aunt Catherine out to the front porch.
With Catherine and Hal in England, 1977
I didn’t connect her exits to the fact that she’d lost her husband, Hal, two years before. For me, carols were simply some of the world’s most beautiful songs. I hadn’t learned yet that they’re also keys to a door that opens straight into the past.
Hal had married Aunt Catherine when they were both in their forties. Raised in a New York orphanage, he served in World War II and worked for Lockheed Missiles & Space Company for 30-plus years.
He was a conservative Republican, scornful of my left-wing politics. In turn, I disliked the muscle-bound programs that he loved watching on TV: fist fight, gunshot, commercial; gunshot, bomb blast, commercial. Whenever a character expressed tenderness or compassion, Hal would shake his head and grumble, “Mush.”
Hal on his fishing boat
His last days were spent in stalwart determination to hide the pain he was in from the people who loved him. He died in 1985, at home, nursed to the end by the wife who adored him. I had finally grown up enough to admire him, and I’d always loved him, but he wasn’t someone on whom my happiness depended.
In fact I didn’t know yet that I had people on whom my happiness depended. But I did, and all of them were in my house that Christmas, the year of the too-big-ham, which I donated to a homeless shelter a few days later.
So every subsequent Christmas I played the carols, and Aunt Catherine stepped outside, and I never asked why.
In July 1993, it was Aunt Catherine who called to tell me — “I want you to sit down, hon” — that my father had died.
My parents
Six months later, she followed her brother to Hamlet’s “bourn from which no traveler returns.” My mother, the youngest of the three, died in 2008.
And here it is that time of year again: roasted-meat, figgy-pudding, fragrant-fir with lights and ornaments. As I walk through the grocery store, piped-in music plays “Silent Night” or “The First Noel” or “Little Town of Bethlehem,” and oh, Aunt Catherine. I understand now, and I’m so sorry.
What’s that, Uncle Hal?
Yes, you’re right, old darling.
“Mush.”
