..if a lot of salutary coincidences happen on your behalf.
I'm not going to beat you with a 'be grateful' stick tonight; I've always found such diaries both over the top and it's difficult to get the constructive message of them through the spittle that often accompanies them.
Nor am I going to go over the top and compare your hypothetically pleasant situation with, say, being a Darfur refugee or a resident of officially prosperous, free and eternally thankful Baghdad.
No, I'm going a rather different way. It's a mix of good and bad, sad and joyful, a story from across quite a few Christmases, indeed.
Once upon a time, I had a mother and a father and by the time I had a memory to call my own, they had had enough of one another.
My parents in my early childhood argued, and yea mightily, and occasionally took their opinions of one another out on me.
My father had beaten us with a belt as little kids with a belt when we misbehaved. As his marriage degraded and his mood along with it, his definition of misbehavior broadened considerably. Age -- as in having very little of it -- was no proof against punishment.
When I was two, my father almost beat me at a Christmas gathering in front of witnesses for defying him. I was told to apologize for hitting my brother (five years older) after my sibling had struck me.
I flat-out refused. Perhaps it was some sense of injustice, perhaps I knew that my father would not dare strike me in front of witnesses, and this was my chance to push back and embarrass him. I don't know.
Older relatives cannot speak to my state of mind, saying only that I was standing there on the carpet, arms folded, stern frown on my faces, quietly saying "No," with my father roaring at me to obey.
He actually had the belt raised, per the accounts, when my uncle interceded. My father looked at him, outraged at the intrusion. "I can't stop you when you are home. But there is no way I am going to allow you to beat your child in front of mine."
It occurs to me that I never bothered to say "Thank you" to my uncle. We're somewhat estranged now. Very different politics. But on that day, he was the best friend I ever had.
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Christmas at three. The good news is that my parents were hitting their financial stride about this time, and while often spending a great deal of time dodging one another or working or socializing, there was no lack of interesting things in the house or in the surrounding neighborhood.
My favorite escape was the basement, a big bonus room that never had time to turn into anything more than a big bare empty room. I would go down the wraparound stairs to check out the travel posters in the laundry nook. I would just climb up on top of the dryer, using a nearby table, and perched on the edge of the sometimes warm and running machine, I would kick my feet against the hollow metal and imagine where all those TWA planes could take me...New York... San Francisco... Paris... London... Acapulco.
Somedays, the "Price is Right" TV show would be on, and (when my parents where married and both working to see each other even less, which was fine by me) the live-in maid, Polly, Polly with her pinch snuff and gravelly voice, would watch it and coldly tolerate my presence. I loved the travel prizes. Loved seeing the slides of being far away, or on a cruise ship, or flying in a plane to Hawaii or Hong Kong or Hannover.
Or I would peruse my brother's brand-new set of Britannica Junior encyclopedias, nice faux-leather red covers and all, and read all the children's articles in the back of each one. (I would gradaute to perusing the various articles on the countries and states, but that would be a bit later.) Anything that took me someway, anyway, elsewhere.
The enyclopedias were a Christmas present for my brother. That was a good Christmas.
_________
Christmas at four. After a point by dad virtually disappeared. I can recall the fights between my parents getting much, much worse, my brother's moods and persecutions more menacing. Suddenly, it all stopped.
Suddenly, there was no live-in maid, no big house with the basement and the laundry nook and the TWA posters, and no father, either. It wasn't just the aggression; my parents were both very strong-willed, competitive people who refused to give up, even on love/hating one another. It was something significantly more dangerous; my father's business ventures had collapsed; he had levered himself, and ourselves, way out of his weight class, to get a piece of the really good life, and the move failed. It wasn't his business partner's fault; he just didn't have $750,000 to cover his losses, back when three quarters of a million dollars was some serious coin (early-mid 1970s).
I was drawing pictures in earnest by then, using a big, low round lamp table to sit near and copy pictures out of the encyclopedias. Or draw maps.
Then one morning the table was gone, too. Some division of assets had occurred. That was not a good Christmas. I missed that table.
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Christmas at five
We, being my mother, brother, and I, moved into a small two-bedroom apartment, my brother and I sharing a room and a bathroom where once upon a time we had crazy amounts of space to ourselves. It didn't bother me so much as my brother, who saw sharing sleeping quarters with me as humiliating, and my mother who was having a hard time adjusting to work becoming not just a thing to get her out of the house but something required to keep a roof over our heads.
Out of necessity, I learned what it was to be raised by professional caregivers. Welcome to the daycare generation. Much of it was nice. One event...not so much.
I was at the top of the sliding board on day, same as on a hundred other days, and I saw bigger kids heaving themselves up on the safety bars and launching themselves down the slide at greater speed. Naturally, I had to try it out.
The only problem was that one of my feet caught on the floor of the platform at the top of the slide, and I pitched headfirst and over the side; I tried to catch myself, but that only assured that I would land with my hands off balance and to the side; I hit the ground squarely on the front of my head, right above the eyes.
Within minutes I was nauseous and sharing this condition with the world. Within half an hour, I was at the hospital; diagnosis: concussion and observation for head injury. I would be at the hospital for four days. It would also be the first and last time that my parents would share a room with anything but enmity after their divorce. They took shifts watching over me, which meant in many cases watching television. I remember watching "Kung Fu" one night with my father there. I remember the two of them talking for fairly extended periods as they made their parental rotations. There was real concern, I think, that I might die.
All I know is that of my early childhood memories, perhaps my fondest one was being in that hospital, and seeing something that I had been too young all my life to witness: My parents sharing experiences and love, albeit for me, together.
Then I learned true disappointment: I asked if they were going to get back together and we could move back to the big house again. My father just looked at my mother and removed himself to the hall, just in sight of the door. First my mother talked to me, about how things were and would never change, then my father returned and my mother left, and said as much the same thing, impressing upon me that I was going to have to learn to accept how things were now, but that no matter where he was or where he lived, that he would love me. Somehow, that did not help very much.
He would move to another city after that -- Charlotte, if you must know. He did it before Christmas. That was a very bad Christmas for me...for my having such high expectations, then nothing.
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Christmas now...
My father would in time dry up, find his kinder, more settled self and live a more modest and regret-filled life that, upon his passing, was missed by those who either did not know him at his worst, or had the capability to forgive what he was and accepted that he had become something more. My mother never forgave him. My brother keeps his own counsel. I did, and I do miss him so terribly.
I look at my own two boys, emulations of my brother and I in so many ways. I talk about my older boy more, in part because he can actually say and do a wider range of things, yet also because I identify far more strongly with the littlest Kendrick. My youngest son, for better or worse, is a clone of yours truly in his basic nature...what, I think, I might have been had even moderately less fearsome times prevailed in my early childhood.
Oh, you should see him, my fellow Kossacks. He is so irrepressibly happy, and optimistic, and not the least bit tentative or discouraged by life. He knows no fear, some but perhaps insufficient caution, finds cause for laughter and curiosity in everything. He loves to be with people, and sometimes to simply do the higher-function activities that only sub-two year-olds can derive from the rolling of plastic cars on tabletops. He's starting to talk, and make jokes, and shows a very strong aptitude for music and writing right out of the gate -- he can hold a pencil exactly like an adult, it comes perfectly natural for him.
And this his two, three, four and five-year Christmases are all coming up.
It brings me to tears to think on just how not like my own four-top of Christmases his are going to be.
And those are good tears to have.
This is a very good Christmas, after all.