Some people’s love of the holiday season is obvious. They put their tree up before Thanksgiving, smother their house in lights, and still send Christmas cards out to every person they’ve ever met. Their blatant love of Christmas hits you over the head with the hard density of a begrudgingly re-gifted fruitcake.
I too love Christmas, but in less obvious ways. I might not decorate my car with a Rudolph nose and antlers, ever bake cookies, or sport a different ugly Christmas sweater every day of December, but I love wrapping presents, burning balsam-scented candles, and singing Christmas songs in the car with my boy. I cherish carefully pulling out our artificial Christmas tree of ten years and greeting it like an old friend who’s come to visit and remembering past Christmases as I hang the ornaments. I love helping my son leave cookies and milk for Santa on Christmas Eve, and I especially enjoy driving him nuts Christmas morning as I make him wait for me to get up, brush my teeth, and make the coffee before allowing him into the living room to survey the splendor before him from Santa’s secret visit, dragging out the anticipation and excitement for as long as I can.
Which is why I still wonder how this year I’ve essentially canceled Christmas as I know and love it, and as these December days pass and the dark nights drag slowly on, I am increasingly aware of just how imperfect this holiday season has been for me this year.
I always aspire to make Christmas as magical and wondrous as possible for the boy, even pulling off some nearly impossible feats to keep Santa’s Christmas spirit alive for as long as I could, and I’ve gone to some extreme lengths to provide the most unconventional Christmas gifts ever requested by a child – even allowing Santa to drop off the one-ton church organ he found on Craigslist a day early because there was no way he was going to be able to fit it in his sleigh with all those millions of toys on Christmas Eve.
Yes, the boy may be 15, but Santa still comes to our house. Except this year he won’t be coming because the boy won’t be here. For the first time ever the boy won’t be home, and neither will I, as I will be in one corner of the globe and my boy will be in another.
While he lays his head to rest in a warm flat in Toronto with his father on Christmas Eve, I will be boarding an overnight flight to Scotland, landing on Christmas morning in Edinburgh. It’s an imperfect Christmas in every way, made even more imperfect by having to spend it aboard three connecting flights that just so happened to be the only affordable fare I could find. Instead of waking up on Christmas morning to the warm, familiar delights of a snuggly Christmas at home, I’ll just simply be still awake on the 25th after a night of no sleep, alone except for the other disappointed budget travelers around me, missing Christmas and missing my boy.
We didn’t even put up our tree this year.
Last year I decided I wasn’t going to host another all-out Christmas as I usually do for my son and his father and siblings who live in Canada. Nor was I about to relocate Christmas to Toronto and spend it in Canada under the circumstances of unavoidably awkward merriment. When I suggested to the boy that perhaps he was old enough to travel by plane to Toronto alone to spend the holidays with his dad and siblings, I don’t think I truly believed it at the time. But he reveled in the idea, and with some planning and the reassurance that Santa would be able to find him in Toronto, I sealed the fate of Christmas 2018 as being, probably, the crappiest Christmas I’ve ever had.
It might be white in Toronto and green for Christmas in Scotland, but it’ll be a bona fide blue Christmas from my airplane window seat, comforted only by the velvety warmth of some no-name red wine and the minimal support from the foam of my travel neck pillow, none of which is of any concern to the boy whose excitement over the adventure ahead is matched in intensity only by his anxiety that Santa might not get the message in time to forward his presents to his Toronto address – presents that I won’t be agonizing over this year trying to help Santa find – presents that consist of five very specific VHS tapes and one geography puzzle I’m beginning to doubt has ever even physically manifested into existence. (The boy was never really into toys. As a young Autistic individual, he had way more important interests to indulge in, like license plates, street signs, train crossings, 21stcentury Fox movie fanfare, dominos, organs, and VHS tapes.)
Which is why we recently found ourselves at a special mailbox in Rochester at the corner of Walnut Plain Road and High Street with an overnight express letter to the North Pole.
“Dear Santa, I will be going to Toronto to visit my father for Christmas… The address is… Thank you so much! Etcetera…”
I pondered what my own letter to Santa would say about how all I want this year is for my boy to have a wonderful Christmas full of fond new memories, personal growth, and a newfound sense of independence and accomplishment – gifts that, for a mom, are incredibly painful to give, but, without a doubt, all for the best for the boy.
I think I know how Santa would reply. He would say Scotland is a pretty nice place to find one’s self for an imminent blue Christmas, and I will indeed enjoy my time on holiday. True, this imperfect Christmas without my boy won’t be my best Christmas, but it could be, at least I hope it will be, a best-for-him Christmas for the boy.
This Imperfect Life
By Jean Perry