I know it’s only March, but I love Christmas time. It seems to go by faster and faster each year. I want it to linger. I want it to start well before December and last way past January. Last year (2023) I kept my tree until Easter – actually a week or so after Easter. My Christmas tree became an Easter tree. I always get a real tree, never fake, if I get one at all, and what do you know, it lasted. It just brings me a bit of joy to walk into the living room and see it.
I bought last year’s tree late – like a few days before Christmas – and got the slightest discount because people had bought most of them up already and the guy from the lot let me use a lower-priced tag from a similar-looking tree to ring mine up. It was still expensive – I think like 80 bucks expensive for a six-foot tree. I watered it regularly and it held up well. When it was finally time to throw it out, I plucked a few of its branches, small ones of course, and placed them in this tiny dish I got 10 years prior when I was in South Africa – it looks like an ashtray. Occasionally I smell those little branches with their hard dried leaves. They still smell like pine. That’s the benefit of a real tree, you walk into the room and it smells like pine. You can come in from outdoors and it smells like pine. I want that real Christmas tree scent during the holiday time. Even though it fades, whenever I get close, it’s still there.
This Christmas, I was going to get a tree but I just couldn’t afford it. It was actually a really quiet Christmas for me. I didn’t get any gifts, nor did I give any. I didn’t go to anyone’s house, go to any parties. I didn’t get invited either, nor did anyone come over. It was just me, my Mom and her dog that she got last February. We told each other Merry Christmas, and I mostly just stayed in my room, watching YouTube. That evening, we had Jack in the Box and Carl’s Jr. for Christmas dinner – one combo from each restaurant and we split them – literally cut the two burgers down the middle and each took two separate halves. We also split the fries, half curly from Jack in the box, half regular from Carl’s Jr., though we each stuck to our own drinks. For dessert we had leftover birthday cake and a way too expensive not-quite-a-pint of Haagen Dazs vanilla ice cream that came from one of the few places still open on Christmas day, a convenience store. Then hours went by, the clock struck 12, and it was a new day.
I remember a few years back during Christmas time, I was driving home at night, Kevin Nash was on the radio at 102.3 KJLH, and a woman called in requesting the song, “What do the Lonely do at Christmas.” I’m not a fan of that song. I probably changed to KOST once it started playing, but I liked the advice he gave her beforehand. I won’t try to recall his exact words here. I’d butcher them I’m sure. But in a nutshell, he was basically saying that she had power over her loneliness.
Christmas is a time of year that people not only feel lonely, but they also feel sad. Sad that they’re lonely and alone. Sad that they don’t have that magical type of Christmas we see on TV and now social media. Or sad that they don’t have the type of Christmas they had as a kid.
I remember going over my paternal grandmother’s house on Christmas day one time when I was around 15 or 16. We had gone by to say Merry Christmas, spend a little time with her and pick up our Christmas presents, also birthday present for me. She always gave us money, and by us I mean me and my sister. It was just the three of us at her house when at some point we began discussing how it didn’t feel like Christmas. My grandmother was saying how Christmas isn’t the same once you’re no longer a kid. How once you become an adult it becomes just another day.
I wasn’t quite an adult yet, and didn’t want to believe that was true, yet that feeling had already started to sink in. I’m a firm believer in God. For unto us a child is born, unto us a Son is given…yes, yes, all of that. But I’ll be damned if I haven’t experienced what I can only describe as the magic of Christmas like I did when I was a child and still believed in Santa Claus, and woke up on Christmas morning to toys by the fireplace. I have yet to replicate that feeling again in my life on Christmas day, or any day for that matter. How maddening it is to know that a lie feels better than the truth. Of course, I’m also in my feelings writing this, so perhaps if I focused I could come up with a thing or two.
To make matters worse, even the awe and wonder that comes with believing in Santa was cut short for me. One day, my mom’s pastor mentioned in a sermon that parents shouldn’t lie to their children about Santa. And so, when I was about five or six, my mom gathered me and my sister in the hall and told us the truth. Forty years later and I’m still traumatized.
After that, we still got presents for Christmas. They would still “magically” appear in the living room, in front of the fireplace on Christmas morning. It’s just by then, we knew they were from my mom. Granted, it was still fun, but it just wasn’t the same. Not to mention it was kinda weird to be the only kids in school who didn’t believe in Santa.
As I got older, waking up to toys in the living room on Christmas morning fizzled out. So did the big Christmas dinners we used to have at my maternal grandmother’s house, as people moved further out, got married, just became distant or died. When I was a little kid it seemed like we had those gatherings every Christmas – Thanksgiving and Christmas. Then gradually they happened less frequently until eventually not at all…which, by the way, isn’t necessarily a bad thing, just different.
Somewhere, along the way, Christmas truly did become just another day. It helps that I’m a Christian and can redirect the social expectations and commercialism of it all to the true meaning of the holiday –the birth of Jesus Christ, which, by the way, is, in fact, a big deal. Oh the lessons I’ve gotten over the years from studying that virgin birth. From listening to sermons on it. He is truly the greatest gift in the world, of all mankind. Perhaps only to be surpassed by His death and resurrection of course. Because to get there, you gotta first get here. You gotta first have Christmas. And yet knowing all this I still, when those fall months roll around, wonder, hope, try to capture just a little bit of that betraying magic I felt when I was a child and believed in what wasn’t real.
I tell you, the one good thing about shorter days and longer nights during that time of year is that Christmas lights come out to play. Thankfully there were folks in my neighborhood who seemingly flipped on their switch just as the last note of Mariah Carey’s “It’s tiiiiiiiime!” faded into November 1st. Soon, I began to spot cars around town with antlers on their sides and a round, puffy red nose adorning their grills as well. Every year I say I’m going to do the same to my car, but every year I’ve yet to follow through.
Somewhere around early to mid-November, my favorite radio station,102.3 KJLH, starts intermixing Christmas songs into their regular R&B playlist and KOST 103.5 switches it up to Christmas music 24 hours a day, all season long. Christmas music plays in the grocery store, it plays in the mall. I wait for the perennial Hershey’s Kisses commercial where those red and green foil-wrapped chocolate drops appear in tree formation posing as bells playing We Wish You a Merry Christmas. And the M&M’s one where a yellow peanut and a red plain animated candies discovers Santa in the living room and gasps, “He does exist” only for Santa to reply back, “They do exist.” Even if I’m having a lonely day, a sad day, a bored day or a bad day, I simply encounter some of these Christmas time favs, and then I don’t feel so bad!
Leading up to Christmas, I can’t tell you how many Christmas-in-New York vlogs I watched on YouTube, or mini-vlogs and carousels I viewed on Instagram from people who both lived there and visited for the holidays. Manhattan is like a quintessential Christmas town giving Home Alone nostalgia vibes. I can understand why people head there for the holidays. I spent a couple Christmas seasons in New York myself. I remember one year while living in New York, I went to get a cellulite treatment on the Upper Eastside that I would later be reviewing for work. My job was in midtown on the Westside. I took the subway up, but hailed a cab back. As we made our way to the office, the driver took me through Central Park, and I mean to tell you, the view outside my window – gosh, it was just breathtaking. Especially as a California girl, you don’t see sights like that in person. It was almost unreal – like being in a snow globe that’s come to life. I mean, I had already seen it snow by then, but it looked different in Central Park. I imagine that’s how people who see the ocean for the first time as an adult feel.
But yeah, I watched a bunch of New York vlogs. In them they wore cute coats, mitten and knitted caps. They sipped hot cocoa with friends or family at Ralph’s. They went to the Christmas Village by Bryant Park and had Dubai chocolate strawberries. They ice skated and looked at the tree at Rockefeller Center. They took in the larger-than-life Louis Vuitton installation of its flagship store wrapped as structural, logo-laden presents. It all looked like such a good time.
Then, of course, there’s the folks on Instagram that posted pictures of families in matching Christmas pajamas, or someone baking frosted sugar cookies and other holiday treats. There’s those who decorated their homes, both inside and out, and hosted or attended festive parties. And if I’m honest, I can’t help but admit that there are times when I wish that that was me, that that was my current reality. But I once heard it said that there’s no greater gift than the rising of the sun, and so…
Let me tell you a quick story within this already long ass story before I wrap up and get to the point. During the Christmas season of 2023, I compiled a list of movies I wanted to see in the theatre. One I was on the fence about was The Color Purple. I’d already seen the original one back in the day, then several times over throughout the years on TV. One of my biggest gripes with the movie is that after all the hell Celie went through, in the grand scene when she finally gets the courage to stand up to and leave Mister, the best thing she could say about herself was that she’s here. Matter-of-fact, that’s a refrain often included in Sunday morning sermons in the Black Church – I’m still here. It’s almost like there’s a formula to it. The preacher will run off a bunch of unfortunate circumstances someone may be going through before tying it up with a bow of, “but I’m still here.” At first I’d just go along with it simply because it’s delivered with such theatric persuasiveness, usually followed by shouts of approval from the congregation. But you know life happens, and that made me question it. As I thought about it, just being here, still being here wasn’t good enough for me anymore, if it ever was. I want to thrive – to live a big and bold and happy life. To me, this movie seemed to be anything but that. I just didn’t want to take in that way of thinking when I had a desire to get pass it.
My mother, however, wanted to see the movie, so I decided to go along. I was not impressed with the movie, but when Fantasia started singing that climactic song, I bawled my eyes out – like uncontrollably crying in the theatre. So much so, my mother wanted to know if I was okay. I was. I don’t know what came over me, and then again I do. The circumstances of that song, combined with Fantasia’s soul-gripping rendition, wouldn’t let me hold my peace. Because life continues to happen. And, my set of unfortunate circumstances that previously made me look at “I’m still here” as not good enough had increased and compounded over the years. While “I’m still here” may never be good enough for me, somewhere along the way, I’ve come to realize that it’s still good.
Ultimately my quiet Christmas was a good Christmas because “For unto us a child is born, unto us a Son is given.” But it was also good because I got to experience another one. It was also good because I was there.
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