The Magic of December 23rd

The was once a time that Christmas felt magical. When December was full of early dusk dotted with lights and Silent Night playing softly on the radio. When eagerness built through weekends that were punctuated with snowflakes that never amounted to anything, only there for the ambiance. Christmas Eve was a whole vibe of its own: cookie baking and grown-ups off work early and evening gatherings to get ready for, all in anticipation of the main event, Christmas Day.

These days, I walk the aisles of the mall in search of that magical feeling, the one where rosy-cheeked shoppers laden with bags and good cheer laugh amongst themselves. I want to see the line for Santa snaking through corridors, excited children in holiday sweaters peeking ahead, wondering how much longer until their turn. Instead, a much-too-young-to-be-Santa guy in a synthetic and unrealistic beard sits on the throne. He looks bored and the absence of the line reflects that. Don’t people take their kids to see Santa anymore, I wonder, as I walk by. Fake Santa doesn’t even look up.

The mall is empty because it’s a dying breed, I know this. As a mom I know Amazon is the way to go,  but something has compelled me to come here. To select wrapping paper from the bins in TJ Maxx and matching pajamas for my kids from the holiday patterned walls of Old Navy. But the hollowness of the dirty tile floors and the irritated young mother who’s dragging her toddler by the arm have turned me off. I slip into Bath and Bodyworks, just so my trip isn’t fruitless, and purchase several overpriced soap-and-lotion sets. There.

The gloom trails through much of the month though. It doesn’t help that we race through the flu and strep like we’re trying to earn a medal for being the sickest healthy people around. We miss multiple festive gatherings due to this. These aren’t my real traditions, but ones that I’ve adapted as an adult, a divorced woman trapped in a town I never meant to live in. Still, I was looking forward to the customer party at the bar I’ve frequented on my kid-free Wednesday nights for years, a soup and wine place for lonely people. I was excited for the gingerbread-house-making party for a bunch of girls who are way too old but still indulge for their moms’ sakes. Instead, I lay dying on a couch and watching Christmas movies from times past, alone, because my equally sick kids preferred to convalesce in their rooms.

I wanted the magic of the tree-getting, but it’s been proven that tromping through mud and trying to hack a tree down with a handsaw and kids who are too weak and apathetic to effectively help is not as magical as it looks. Still, I take my youngest and we spend eons looking for the right one. I struggle to let her pick and perpetuate this magic with an eleven-year-old on the tail end of the best part of childhood. I cringe as she picks trees she knows I will hate, just to be argumentative, but I surprise her by agreeing.

My teenage son has zero interest in tree-decorating, and although I know he would participate and feign enthusiasm, I let it go. My daughter, who has been begging to do this since November, loses interest rather quickly, and I spend the evening unwrapping each ornament, lovingly drifting back in time to when my kids were small, opening yearly ornaments left by their elf, Percy. Percy still visits, even if no one believes in him and he doesn’t even leave notes anymore.

When I get over the flu and its less than a week before the big day, the news of the artic freeze starts fluttering, through social media and weather apps. Depending on who you talk to, its either a bunch of hyped-up meteorologists with a flair for drama, or the whole world is going to halt in an instantaneous flash freeze that will render even walking outside impossible.

“Thank goodness its not on Christmas Eve,” the other moms say, the ones with husbands and big houses and families that live in the same town. “That would be awful!” they say, shaking their heads with relief that the dangerous weather event will only be on December 23^rd. No biggie. Their Christmas Eve traditions will be safe.

But my Christmas Eve traditions, which are barely anything, are set to happen on December 23^rd. My Christmas Eve isn’t even a real Christmas Eve, because divorced families have to split the holidays every year. I could read a million articles that try to put salves on that wound, that tell me its just a day, what matters is spending time together—but I don’t believe it. You don’t celebrate Easter Sunday on a Wednesday, and you don’t celebrate Christmas Eve on December 23^rd.

(If I wrote the article, I’d say it’s not the same, the “magic” doesn’t exist the way it does when you live in a house with a family and your kids are young enough to wear matching jammies and you take them outside at eight p.m. to throw glittered oatmeal in the yard, reindeer food you call it, and take numerous pictures of chubby hands holding heavy plates of cookies and the excitement in their eyes is contagious even though you’re so tired and you know there is hours of work to be done after they go to sleep and you’ll be exhausted through all of Christmas Day and you’d rather just drink wine with your sister but you don’t have the type of husband who will do all the work of carrying the presents up from the basement so you concede because in the morning you will be beaming as tiny little cherubs in pigtails and overgrown buzzcuts that stick straight up squeal with glee as they rip through the packages and you would give anything to go back to that moment, forever.)

None of that is the same on December 23^rd. There is no mother on the planet who is okay with missing half of the Christmas mornings of her children’s childhood.

Christmas Eve on December 23^rd  (with teens and preteens nonetheless) is not the same as having little kids and a real family under my roof, with a mom and a dad and traditions. Its not the same as extended family camping out in the guest room that I no longer have. But December 23^rd is what I have now. Despite the flu and the commercialism of 2022 and the lack of magic that exists in bigger kids, I make Christmas Eve December 23^rd plans with a bit of leftover, buzzing excitement. I invite friends over at varying points in the day to exchange presents, and I purchase wine and cranberry soda and little holiday snacks to serve. I tell the kids we will get sushi from the good place that’s a forty-minute round trip, since seafood on Christmas Eve is one of the only traditions from their early childhood that I’ve kept. I suggest a Christmas movie, which is met with eye rolls, but my kids are agreeable. They know how much I hate these off-years.

But, some mythical Elsa has decided to encapsulate the world in ice and my plans are dashed. Nobody is driving to my house on December 23^rd this year, and sushi isn’t happening either unless I want to get it from the grocery store, and grocery-store-sushi for a fake Christmas Eve is just…sad. The deflation in my spirit is pretty complete, but I scrounge up something from deep down and adjust accordingly—frozen pizza and shrimp cocktail, it is! Two movies instead of one! My kids comply, even if they beg off after one movie. My daughter half-heartedly puts out milk and cookies, even though I’m fairly certain she doesn’t believe.

I cringe at the thought of setting my alarm for one a.m. to go down to the basement and bring up the gifts, but I do it because, what if this is the last year? What if from here on out, forever, I never need to hide presents every again? So, I do it, half-asleep and imagining what would happen if I tripped on the rickety stairs and tumbled to my death in the early hours of Christmas Day? These are the times I want to cry: when I’m so tired and there is no one to help me. There is no other adult in my house to stumble with me, bleary eyed, to take a bite of Santa’s cookie and dump the milk down the drain, to carry heavy boxes and try to put them down as silently as possible.

I’ve mostly stopped feeling sorry for myself, and I remind myself that even when I was married, no one helped me with this task. But still, it feels utterly lonely to be doing this again, by myself, for the seventh year in a row, on December freaking 23^rd, no less.

Christmas morning, aka Christmas Eve morning, is over in a flash. This, at least, seems to be keeping in tune with the real Christmas morning. We gather up paper, whip a bang-up breakfast together, and the kids disappear into their rooms with their loot. By noon, they are gone, off to their second home to celebrate Christmas on the real day.

I’ve made plans for Christmas Eve, if only because my other option, drinking with my dogs, seems like a poor choice. Still, as I wait for my friends to pick me up and take me along to their family gathering, I can’t help but seethe in this loneliness. I want to make this magic, this sparkling essence of Christmas Eve, happen every year no matter what the calendar date is, and every year it feels like a fail. I know this is not accurate, because when I look at the past years I carry heavy nostalgia with me, like an appendage I forget about sometimes. Maybe, I consider, its not the magic I long for, but the nostalgia of it.

I scroll social media and look at everyone’s happy #yay #ChristmasEve #thebestday #family #seafood #champagne pictures, I wonder if I’ll ever be able to let go of this vision of what I thought my life was going to look like. Never, ever as a kid did I imagine spending most of a Christmas Eve alone, every other year of my life. Still, I open a good bottle of wine and pour it into my grandmother’s crystal goblets, a tradition that I brought into my marriage, and I took out of it. I say cheers to my dog and purposely wear holiday colors and even put on lipstick. I imagine my kids in someone else’s home, vibing with anticipation and swirled with magic, even though I am one hundred percent certain that they’re rolling their eyes and sitting on their phones there, just like they did here.

Even though I am one hundred percent certain that they miss me as palpably as I miss them.

I say I want the family, the organic mom-dad-two-point-five-kids-American-dream that has existed since I played House as a little kid.  But what I really want is my kids. Divorce or not, the years of them sitting under my tree at seven a.m. on Christmas morning (whatever day that may be) are winding down.

Still, I hop in the car and insert myself into someone else’s family for a while. I watch the traditions, the food, the comradery and the stories they tell each other about their dead grandparents, which I’m willing to bet that they tell every year. I can see longing sorrow in the eyes of grown men who miss their mother, the inside jokes they have to explain to me, the yearly traditions they partake in—gift exchanges and toasts. I feel like an outsider even though I know in my head I am welcome here. But the warmth can’t undo the hollowness all at once. It can’t fill the empty spaces beside me where my own family should be.

Later, after I am dropped off, I take my dogs outside. The artic freeze is over, but it’s left us air so cold it hurts to breathe—but this feels right. A little bit of pain always feels right. The sky is starless, my fingers are frozen, and the dogs are taking their sweet time in the darkness. There is no north star to make a wish on, and its too cold to be out here for long. I wonder if, next year, I will look back on my pictures of the kids laughing under the tree as they opened the standard mom-gift of underwear, if the old dog in all of the photos will still be with us. If I’ll remember being absorbed into someone else’s family traditions on Christmas Eve, whether I wanted to be or not.

I wonder if I’ll look back on this Christmas Eve and feel nostalgia one day. If the magic isn’t really in the present, after all, but only in the memory.