Underneath the Imperfect

Last year, I wrote a story about everything that was broiling underneath our perfect Christmas: Underneath the Perfect

This year, I’m doing a 180 and talking about all the perfect traditional family Christmases that remain in my memory underneath all the imperfect Christmases I’ve had over my lifetime.

Underneath the Imperfect

I’ve had some Christmases. Because I’ve lived long enough to have them. You know what I mean. The ones that go awry for one reason or another, some derailing more seriously than others.

The one when I was a teenager and my baby sister was in the hospital hundreds of miles away, with a 50-50 chance of surviving the removal of a brain tumour, my mother with her, leaving the rest of us kids with our overly serious and very un-Christmas-y stepfather, who tried, but simply couldn’t pull it off amidst the deep sadness we all felt.

The one where that same sister, at the age of 42, was diagnosed with terminal cancer a few days before Christmas and died a few days afterwards. Another extremely sad Christmas.

And the silly faux pas: the one where I baked the Christmas cake in a tin lined with wax paper instead of parchment and it stuck to the pan to the point of inedibility. Or the one where I dropped an entire pan of roasted vegetables, just about to be served, on the floor, leaving us with a less-than-ideal Christmas dinner.

The one that involved divorce talk. The ones with fights, or someone sulking, or being drunk or mean or doing something to ruin the day, the ones where I didn’t show up, the ones where no one showed up for me, the ones I spent alone because my children were all at their dad’s, the ones I slept through, the ones where I was sick or my kids were sick. I’m glossing over all of these, because they truly are distant memories and mostly small hiccups in the wheel of life. We all have them.

However, whatever happens year after year, I can cast my mind back to those first Christmases in my memory, the ones that really were perfect from my viewpoint as a child. The ones where we lived inside a Christmas card.

In spite of growing up in a dysfunctional family, my fondest memories are of Christmas, and I credit my mother for making it so. She made Christmas as special as anyone could make it. Mum was an incredible cook, and baked endlessly at Christmas. Roast turkey, roast beef, roast ham, roast duck, pheasants, Cornish hens, a Christmas goose one year, the stuffing, the gravy, the Christmas cake wrapped in almond paste and iced with royal frosting whipped into peaks to resemble a winter landscape complete with tiny ice skating figures on a “mirror” frozen lake, marzipan bars, chocolate boxes, sugar cookies, coconut ice. All those comforting smells of a warm and abundant Christmas.

my own Yule log cake tradition

Our Christmas dinner table was set with the best china, silverware, crystal and tall red candles in silver candle holders.

Our Christmas tree was the best and the tallest. My stepfather would hike into the forest and cut down the absolute perfectest tree of all, which would touch our ceiling and always be the most magnificent shape. My brother, being the oldest, would set the lights on every branch, just so, and then the rest of us would hang a plethora of decorations, tinsel and silver icicles, until the intoxicating balsam or pine was something magical to behold.

My mother didn’t miss a beat when it came to decorating. I don’t know what her childhood Christmases were like, but she was born exactly two weeks before Christmas, and her mother was born four days before, so maybe December was a special month for them.

One year, she built three wise men out of clay, carving their faces and hands with precision and dressing them in luxurious brocades, silks and furs. Each more than a foot tall, they would stand in a landscape of cotton batting on our mantelpiece above the fireplace. When the holiday was over, they would be carefully packed away in special boxes until the next year. I have no idea what happened to them.

Golden bells hung on the ends of wide red ribbons the length of our staircase. The fireplace crackled with real logs. And on Christmas morning the tree was buried under a veritable mountain of presents that reached nearly to the ceiling. The living room would pile up with discarded paper until someone would shovel it all into a garbage bag to clean up and leave us happily engaged under the beautiful tree that stayed lit all day.

that Christmas I spent in a hotel

As immigrants, we had no relatives to visit at Christmas: grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins lived thousands of miles away across the ocean. But we were a big family unto ourselves. I had an older brother, a younger brother, a twin sister and a younger sister. And my mother’s mother lived with us permanently. The eight of us, and the one or two or three extra people who we invited to join us on Christmas day—usually someone who had nowhere to go for the holidays—would sit around the enormous dining table, lengthened with extra leaves, for the most festive celebration.

After Christmas Day, my mother and siblings and I would play board games: Monopoly, Clue and, later, after I received a special ivory set for Christmas, mah-jongg (I still have it!), which held our rapt attention for days, allowing us to stop only for meals and snacks, which my mother generally prepared, while we called her back to the table when it was her turn.

As we lived in the north, Christmas was always white. Which meant we bundled up and played outside in the snow, building ice forts, launching snowball fights and tobogganing down massive slopes as a family on huge toboggans, my 70-something grandmother included.

I know it wasn’t always perfect, and there’s probably much I’ve embellished and twisted over the decades, but these idylls of Christmas from my earliest years are embedded in my mind forever and I’m grateful for them, whether or not they were true (which, according to me, they are).

Christmas Day woodland hike

What is your absolute favourite memory of Christmas? Is it all the sweeter because of the imperfect ones you’ve endured? I welcome any thoughts about this as we head into the new year.