🧵 Thursday Thread: She Always Loved Christmas ... a dark little holiday story
Because who doesn't love a dark little holiday story this time of year? Plus an invitation to share your own holiday joys, stresses, freak-outs, and everything in between
She Always Loved Christmas
short fiction by Jeannine Ouellette and Billie Oh
As we pulled up to Mom's townhome—I had Graham with me that day, because after all, she is his grandmother—there she was, on her tiny faux porch, stringing red and green lights through the flimsy metal fence, tacking them delicately along the window boxes. God, she loves Christmas, my mother. She always has. “It’s the hap-hap-piest time of the year,” she used to say as she pulled miniature Santas and porcelain gingerbread houses from giant plastic tubs. She did that a lot, actually—wove lines from Christmas carols into everyday conversation. What kid wouldn’t love that?
Back in the day, Mom usually waited until Thanksgiving to start her Christmas preparations. Like everyone else. All through December, our house would slowly fill with holiday decor, like a ship taking on water. It would start with the nativity scene on the radiator, tinsel over the doorways, alternating red and green mugs with golden holly leaves proudly lining the shelves. We loved it—all of us. Even Dad, you could say, got a kick out of Mom’s Christmas thing, the way it lit her up. She loved to play the holiday classics radio station in the kitchen while she baked, singing along to Santa Baby and White Christmas as she rolled coconut balls in chocolate and paraffin, dusted pans of pizzelles with sugar. Joey and I used to perch right there on the counter to watch Mom work. It was mesmerizing, the way her hands, so small and square and fast, seemed to know exactly what to do whether she paid them any attention at all. When Dad wandered in to grab a beer, he’d call her a one-woman show. Then he’d shake his head with that sideways smile of his.
Sideways smile, indeed. That’s a whole other story, isn’t it? Or, at least, a whole other chapter of this one. But, back then, Dad was just Dad, filling his thermos of coffee, leaving for work, coming home, cracking a beer, and another, and another, falling asleep on the couch, starting over the next day. Dad was just there, the way some things are always there, until they’re not. Have you ever heard anyone singing O Come O Come, Emanuel in August while bleaching the garage floor to remove the oil stains from their soon-to-be-ex-husband's hobby car? God, how he loved that stupid '81 Concord. It looked like some kind of spaceship.
Anyway, when I think of that summer before sixth grade, right after Dad left, all I remember are sweaty afternoons filled with Mom’s constant caroling. The way my hands and feet would tingle when those songs started bursting out of her at random. That hairy feeling in my throat when she’d start and stop in the middle of songs, or get stuck on a single line for hours—laughing all the way, ha ha ha—over and over and over. Needless to say, it freaked us out. I mean, Joey was little. Too little, really, to understand. But I was twelve. I saw how my friends caught each other's eyes whenever Mom's caroling drowned out the mechanical gunfire of our video games.
I understood the other thing too—how with each note, something else came out of Mom, that deep animal thing I hated. I wanted to stuff it back down in her, or chase it away, or at least make it quiet down and leave us alone. I suppose it did quiet down, to an extent, by the time school started that fall. Which, in a way, was worse, because then we never knew when it was going to come back and seize her. I tried not to let down my guard, but eventually I always did. You know what it's like to be thirteen years old on a Tuesday morning after Halloween night and walk into your first-hour world geography class—Mr. Kratz, that hard-nosed bastard—only to have Danny Spicer and Graydon Podeszwa ambush you with their squealing laughter, their exaggerated rib aches? Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la! Something about Mom, obviously. But I wouldn’t find out until later how she'd dressed up in a red felt cape and gone door-to-door caroling during the height of trick-or-treating. So, yeah, by high school I’d have given anything to go back to that first sad summer, when the caroling was constant, yes, but happened only at home.
Anyway, Mom’s tiny faux porch. This senior living community looked a whole lot nicer in the brochures, but oh well. Graham and I watched Mom from the bottom of her porch steps as she fussed with those strings of lights. Graham held my hand, which always felt good. I didn’t want him to grow up too fast. “Grandma, guess what?” Graham said to the back of Mom’s little head. Such a little head. Was she actually shrinking? “I started kindergarten already!” Graham continued. “My teacher’s name is Mr. Lawler.”
“Oh, for the love of all that is holy,” Mom snarled as she yanked off a section of lights. “These hooks will not stay put. What a damn mess.”
"The window boxes look great, Mom,” I said. Graham was still staring at Mom’s gray bob, cut blunt at base of her neck. “The English ivy is really taking off, huh?" I said.
Mom tore off the last of the lights and crumpled onto the top step, her head in her hands. “My holly—it was supposed to be holly—didn’t take well at all. I think I overwatered. The ivy was supposed to be a stand-in, and now it has mites.”
Graham’s little hand radiated worried warmth into mine. I squeezed it tighter and stuffed my other hand deep into the pocket of my jeans, where I tugged at a tender mess of strings.
Thanks for reading our dark little story. Let me tell you how it came to be (maybe to redeem myself for my love of dark little stories).
It started about six years ago (how does time move so fast?) when
and I did a really fun thing. We collaborated on not one but three dark little stories about the underbelly of motherhood.The inciting incident that got the whole thing going was the sakura branch we were making for the baby shower we were throwing for my daughter-in-law, who is half Japanese, and who had conceived in Japan. We thought the sakura branch would make a fitting shower gift. The actual blossoms on the branch were handmade by us from crepe paper, with help from all the people that attended the shower. That branch now hangs from my granddaughter Bryn’s ceiling.
Anyway, while making the branch, we (okay, this was all me) discovered the joy of shellac, which we used to seal the wood part of the branch, which was actually just a real broken branch we found on the ground, and also the little paper mache birds we perched upon it (I also have a thing for paper mache, but that’s a story for another day).
Anyway, around this time of the branch I was in the acute phase of a heartbreaking family situation that’s become chronic, and during that acute heartbreak something about the shellacking really calmed me. I kind of wanted to shellac everything. I kind of did shellac a lot of things. It was weird. Which gave me an idea—what if a woman developed a genuine shellacking obsession, and started shellacking things that, well, you absolutely shouldn’t shellac, like the couch, the carpet, the dog… I’ll stop here, but you get the picture.
A story of unravelling.
This led to the idea of the motherhood project, taking different angles on the theme of maternal unraveling in a culture not made for mothers. Billie and I worked over email, a few sentences at a time—meaning, Billie would write a few sentences, the email the story to me, and I would write a few sentences, email it back, etc. It was pure joy to see what strange or awful idea one or the other of us would come up with, so surprising to watch the story emerge from the lines that came before, growing in ways neither of us were expecting.
I came to love all three of these little stories, including and maybe especially the shellacking story. I want to return to this project with Billie one day soon, and perhaps even expand it a bit, and get it out on submission. But since one of the three stories involves Christmas, and I’m sharing this oddity with you now, because, why hoard?
This story pays homage to the truth that both Billie and I have a weird tic of humming Christmas carols when stressed (regardless of the season). Why?I don’t know. But the truth is, as much as I do now love the rituals of Christmas we’ve created with our grandchildren—especially the decorating an outdoor solstice tree and our annual Christmas show!, and in spite of the fact that I like this holiday better than I used to, I’ve always found Christmas to be difficult, melancholy, and somewhat panic-inducing.
Maybe it started the year I was ten, just months after my stepfather left, when we had taken the borders into our house and my mom was gone at night school and her boyfriend’s house most of the time, and I was home alone, and decided to sneak peak all five or six of my presents under the tree, then expertly re-taping them. I was old enough to know there was no Santa, but somehow I was still bleakly disappointed on Christmas morning when the five or six presents I’d already opened had not magically multiplied into anything else. I don’t think it was about the gifts, per se.
I think it was about hope, and my complete loss of it.
That was the same Christmas we got into the car with the dog and drove all the way from Wyoming to Minnesota straight through blizzard conditions, because my mom decided at the last minute she needed to go home. When we got back to Wyoming a week later, a neighbor came by to berate us for irresponsibly leaving our Christmas tree unattended as potential tinder.
Anyway, holidays can be both beautiful and stressful, the best and worst of times.
Whatever you do or don’t celebrate—Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza, solstice, or otherwise—I’d love to hear your stories of joy and stress and freak-outs and everything in between. Even, or especially, if it involves shellacking!
Any and all holiday stories, thoughts, memories, wisdoms, reflections, calming rituals, etc., welcome. ❤️
Love,
Jeannine
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