samX yrreM

This column was published in the Wilton (Conn.) Villager on Dec. 14, 2000.

For most people, Christmas is a time to celebrate life, the birth of a Savior. It’s time to spend with family and friends, to bask in good cheer, to count blessings. Christmas brings out the best in most people.

I am not one of them.

To me, Christmas isn’t about life. It’s about death, and every year is a struggle to get through it.

No violins please but my father died when I was 14. During Christmas of 1965, he was as ill as a human can be and still be classified as alive. He died shortly thereafter.

My father ran a general store in a tiny Missouri town.  Like many men of his generation, his work was his life and he worked six days a week, 12 hours a day. If I wanted to spend time with him, I had to be where he was. So, like my brother and sister before me, I started clerking at the store when I was eight. Every afternoon after school I would report to the store and stay until 7 p.m., closing time.

Christmas was a magical time to work in a country store. Not only did we sell exotic seasonal specialties like Brazil nuts, tangerines, egg nog and satin-y ribbon-shaped candies, we were stocked to the rafters with toys and practical Midwestern type gifts – scratchy flannel shirts, stocking caps, rubber galoshes, long underwear and the like.

Dryden’s Store had a large showroom window, facing the town’s block-long main street. My father let me decorate it each year, and it was the highlight of my holiday.

First I built a fireplace out of cardboard bricks. From the mantel I hung long stockings filled with nuts and candy canes. Around the cardboard hearth I placed empty boxes, wrapped in colorful paper and topped with curlicued bows made by the lady salesclerks. A plastic lighted three-foot Santa was stationed next to the fireplace. Strings of bubble lights draped with tinfoil icicles were tacked around the perimeter of the window. For my grand finale I always wrote “samX yrreM” in spray snow on the inside of the plate glass window, so people driving by could read it properly.

It was, in retrospect, as tacky as all get-out, but I was proud and dad always told customers it was my work.

My father was diagnosed with cancer just before Christmas, 1964, but nobody told me it was terminal. I knew he had undergone surgery in a St. Louis hospital, that he had lost weight, that his color was bad. But I was 13 and, as 13-year olds do, assumed the worst was over and things would return to normal.

I was wrong. Throughout 1965, his cough grew worse, he grew weaker and thinner. My mother, who had never worked outside the house a day in her life, took over the operations of the store.

It was our tradition – the only time of the year outside his work that my father and I spent time together – that on the Sunday before Christmas, we would go to a farm a mile south of town and chop down a cedar tree for our living room. But as Christmas 1965 grew nearer, there was no talk of a tree, decorations or of holiday plans.

One snowy night a few days before Christmas, I went to the farm, chopped down a tree, and dragged it home on my sled. When I called my mother out into the garage to see what I had brought home, she broke down weeping and told me there would be no Christmas because my father was going to die, and soon.

I had no idea. And I still have no other memories of that, my father's last Christmas.

I know this column may seem inappropriate at this happy time of year, even ludicrous. Here I am, a grown man with his own family, bellyaching about something that happened decades ago. I know people who have experienced losses far more profound than mine. Death is a part of life. I should have been able to get over it by now.

But losing a parent, as more and more of my middle-aged friends have found out lately, is something that’s hard to get over. Losing a parent at Christmas, when you’re 14, is enough to take away the wonder and joy of the holiday forever.

I made my annual holiday shopping trip to the mall today. In the atrium, carolers were singing “Auld Lang Syne,” the song the townspeople sing at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life, the movie that reminds me of my father. I had to leave the mall, go sit in my car, and beat up on myself for being such a wuss, for feeling so sad when everyone around me seems so joyful. I want to feel joyful too but, dammit, I can’t.

And I’m not the only one. Mental health professionals report that millions of otherwise well-adjusted people plunge into funks at Christmastime. I bet a huge percentage of them lost loved ones at Christmas, the one time of year when everyone is supposed to be happy. For them, their wounds are ripped open anew every year the day after Thanksgiving and continue to bleed until New Year’s Day when the tree is taken down and the decorations are put away.

For most of the year I’m an upbeat kind of guy. But not at Christmas. And I want those of you who feel like me to know you’re not alone, and you’re not crazy.

I understand how tough it is to keep a happy face when everyone is singing about merry gentlemen and triumph in the skies and all you really want for Christmas is something you can’t have: To be once again – for one blessed moment – a boy writing “samX yerryM” in spray snow on the window of your father’s store, secure in the knowledge you’ll actually have one.

Postscript: I was 49 when I wrote the above column. Well, it’s 15 years later. I’m older and, supposedly, wiser. My sons are grown. My 20-month old grandson, the joy of our lives, will be arriving at our house on Christmas Eve. I suspect Santa will be generous with him.

Of all the columns I’ve ever written, "samX yrreM" generated the most response. I received dozens of emails, letters and calls from readers who said they felt the same way about Christmas as I do, and for the same reason – the loss of a loved one at, as the song goes, "the most wonderful time of the year." 

I still don’t like Christmas – Thanksgiving, the Fourth of July, even Labor Day give me more pleasure –  but writing this column helped me work through it, and I’ve made a concentrated effort ever since not to let Christmas get me down. I realized it wasn’t fair to my wife and children, who had no reason to dislike the holiday, to wear my heart on my sleeve. 

That said, I can’t wait until New Year’s Day.