Dec. 7, 2017
If you’re a Scrooge, avoid this area in the holiday season at all costs. You will be dismayed by Santa’s arrival on Woodstock’s Town Green on Christmas Eve and detest the light displays of Santas and snowmen, wreaths, reindeer, stars, candy canes and the like transforming the postage-stamp yards of Midtown Kingston into animated winter fantasias—complete with sound track, in a few cases. There are parades and toy drives for underprivileged kids—avoid these! Be sure to take a wide detour around the area’s churches, whose candlelit services on Christmas Eve resound with singing; at places like Old Dutch, an 1853 dignified stone building bordering a cemetery dating back to the 1600s in Uptown Kingston, the atmosphere of spiritual sanctity combined with the all-inclusive welcome will fatally melt your heart. Avoid the shops in town when carolers dressed in Dickens-era capes, vests, hats and dresses wend through the cold streets, cheering up tired shoppers.
Since the late 19th century, after Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, published in 1843, first coined the term “Merry Christmas” and popularized the holiday as one of family togetherness and joyous festivity, people have complained of the commercialization of Christmas. Many of us who celebrate the holiday have been fixated on the shopping and cooking and giftwrapping and nary give the religious meaning of Jesus’ birth a second thought. The secularization of the holiday, however, hasn’t completely obscured the message of “peace on earth, good will to men.” In my city of Kingston, for example, Christmas is a time for community togetherness, for supporting many of the nonprofits that contribute substantial quality-of-life benefits to the city (the envelopes are arriving in the mail), and giving underprivileged kids and families a helping hand—it’s a time for shining your light.
For me personally, I’m glad Christmas has evolved into a festivity with a wider reach than simply making sure my kid gets a lot of toys. Growing up in the 1960s, I, like almost all the kids in our overwhelmingly white, predominately Protestant New Jersey suburb, had a fanatical attachment to Christmas, and it had everything to do with the stuff we got. Halloween was pretty great, since you got to stay out after dark, submerge your identity in a carefully curated costume and collect a grocery bag’s worth of candy. But Christmas meant time off from school, family rituals that lent a touch of poetry to our otherwise bland suburban existence, and most importantly, a pile of presents.
In retrospect, there was too much focus on the latter—It was the way our noticeably undemonstrative parents showed their love, I suppose. In the status conscious, excessively conformist world of our suburb (in fifth grade, every cool girl wore white go-go boots; when my mom refused to buy me a pair, I knew I would never be cool) you didn’t talk about how this might be misguided, or comment on the weird family dynamics it happened to expose.
One of my earliest memories, around age four, was the incredible excitement I felt when I opened the door to the basement on Christmas morning and glimpsed the life-sized Patti Playpal doll I had desperately wanted amid the stack of gifts. (I just Googled the brand name and the 1961 commercial came up on Youtube; it had doubtless enticed me, though I have no memory of the ad.) Each year, as Christmas approached, my brother, sister and I went through the same ritual: we would search my parents’ closets for secret purchases (and hopefully not find anything, which would have killed the surprise on Christmas day). On Christmas Eve, when we were supposed to be in bed, we’d do surveillance from the stair landing, glimpsing our parents placing gifts under the tree in the living room through the hall entrance as we lay on our pillows. We’d be up at dawn the next morning, comparing and assessing our individual piles. Before breakfast, to assuage our impatience, we got to open the smaller packages stuffed into the humongous stockings our grandmother had knitted. When we finally began to tackle the piles, everyone went in turns, which heightened the pleasure and the suspense.
Looking back, the importance we placed on those gifts seems a little too emotionally fraught, a little too disconnected from what they were supposed to signify. You opened up the boring stuff first—the rectangular packages that signified clothes—and left the most mysterious packages for last. One year, when my little brother was about six, he saved a large, odd-shaped present for last. When he ripped off the wrapping paper and discovered it was a dustpan and brush—encouragement from my parents to clean up around his workbench–his disappointment was so profound he burst into tears.
My dad was also evidently disappointed by his gifts and so he came up with a novel solution: he would buy himself some expensive cologne and wrap it, pretending to be surprised and delighted when he opened the package. We joked about Dad’s gift to himself, but there was no hiding my mother’s annoyance. We sensed a fissure in our otherwise safe little world—that we had a father who felt like a left-out child himself, who was disappointed in our silly kids’ gifts of ugly coasters or plastic demitasse cups and lived in a Walter Mitty fantasy of aspirational wealth—perversely so, it seemed, considering our spacious Tudor house, excellent rated schools, total material comforts. Gift giving could carry all sorts of messages, and they weren’t necessarily about love.
But Christmas also connected us with earlier generations on my mother’s side of the family—an anomalous occasion in a family that eschewed any ethnic identity and was solidly “American” in its complete acquiescence to corporate culture, down to the Wonder bread, Minute Rice, and frozen vegetables we subsisted on. Each year, my mom’s mother, our “modern” grandmother, Nana—she was tanned, slim, chicly dressed, happily independent—came to stay for a week. She made a plum pudding from a traditional recipe of her mother’s, and on New Year’s Eve, when my parents were out, served us tea in tiny, exquisite porcelain cups reserved solely for that purpose. Among the boxes of tree ornaments were a few made of fragile, milky glass in the shapes of a berry, Santa Claus, and a cottage, light as a feather, from her childhood, which we carefully hung on the most prominent spots on the tree. Loaded with bulbs, which sparkled in the glow of the colored lights, and doused in tinsel, the tree was magical, imbuing the living room with a touch of forest fragrance and mystery, hinting at folkloric fairytales. Beneath the swoop of its lower branches, on the dark-green felt skirt Nana had sewn, we arranged miniature cardboard houses covered in glitter in a row and set up the wooden crèche, with its porcelain cow and wooden gray donkey. We laid out the antique wind-up toys, which still worked; a brown-furred monkey that clapped a pair of cymbals, a clown that spun in circles, a seal that balanced a ball on its nose.
While we never “believed” in Santa—my parents considered this irreligious—and were supposedly commemorating Jesus’ birth, no one talked much about this, outside of Sunday school. The Christian message was mostly transmitted to us through the holiday TV shows–the sad croonings of Mr. Magoo and Linus’ citation of the Bible in “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”
Fast forward 30 years. I’m now a mom, hosting my own family holiday gatherings—involving siblings, cousins, and eventually, when my son was in college, his dad and stepmom and their sons and later still my son’s wife-to-be parents. I was working hard as a business freelance writer with a bunch of deadlines just before Christmas, and I was hating the season—the lachrymose Christmas music that swamped the airwaves, the crowds, the pressure of having to buy a truckload of gifts, which stemmed from a family tradition I now resented. (I envied my college friend’s family’s practice of buying no more than two gifts each; each person would draw straws from a hat to determine the recipients). I detested the desperate, last minute, late-night wanders through the mall searching for a present while having no idea what that person wanted, and spending money that not only felt like too much but a waste (at that time the shopping opportunities here in Kingston were much more limited).
I never got around to purchasing a tree until the afternoon of December 24, by which time the pickings were slim (but the discounts significant). One year, accompanied by my exasperated mother, all the places on Route 9W in Town of Ulster were sold out. We finally found a few trees at a farm stand in Esopus, although the smallest was eight feet tall. Fortunately my house has high ceilings, but dragging it into the living room and fitting it into the stand was a bitch. Trimmed and swaddled in lights, it was gorgeous, complementing my Victorian house–but nearly caused a serious injury one evening when it suddenly crashed onto some guests. (My cousin’s husband subsequently stabilized it by tying a rope around the trunk and attaching it to the wall.)
People would begin to arrive—from central New York, Washington, D.C., suburban Connecticut—filling the kitchen with tins and Tupperware containers full of homemade cookies and stuffing the fridge with cheeses, veggie casseroles, a roast, pies, dips, you name it. Shopping bags full of presents were lined up in the hall. Everyone helped, and despite my grousing, midway through the meal the pressure would lift and I would thoroughly enjoy myself. After everyone had left, while basking in the sudden quiet and green-and-red glow of the tree, I had to admit that I was blessed with a wonderful extended family, generous, fun people all. The effort was worth it. My son was the only kid in my immediate family, and I was grateful for the attention toward him, even if my sister did go overboard with the gifts, and that he got to spend time with my cousin’s children.
Now he’s grown up, married, and lives in another city. Thanksgiving is the time we all get together, and lack of time off from his and his wife’s jobs and the horrendous traffic conditions curtail getting together at Christmas. Hence Christmas is now a subdued affair. I’m down to buying just a handful of presents, which is manageable and fun, and because we celebrate at my sister’s, I don’t even have to buy a tree (and I usually don’t). We eat a couple of sumptuous dinners, sing some carols around the piano, binge watch shows on TV I otherwise never get to see (not having cable), go into the city for a play or a movie. The huge mountains of trash we generated decades before is now much reduced, and carefully recycled. The holiday is no longer about excess; I try to tamp down the inevitable tensions and be grateful that we’re still here, aware of the resonating absence of others we shared the holiday with in years past.
This year, with the advent of so many wonderful new retail stores, I look forward to staying close to home and doing most of my shopping in Kingston. I’ll buy a couple of toys this year and drop them off at People’s Place; when I did this last year, it made me feel like a mom again. I’ll give my neighbor, who is there to help when my furnace goes out or my dog is left out inadvertently, a mug or some other token of gratitude. Christmas in Kingston, where family ties are deep and newcomers are welcome, opens your heart and fosters a feeling of belonging. When the jingles start up and the stores expand their hours, when the concerts are scheduled and the brilliant holiday displays are switched on, I no longer feel a creeping sense ofdread–just simple contentment and a quiet joy, gladness for this refuge from the dark.