I have one sibling, a brother who is five years older than me. Like most older brothers, I am sure, Curtis lived to pick on his little sister as we grew up. It was standard procedure on a car trip for him to stick his pointer finger into the flesh of my thigh to get me to whine, “Mama, he’s touching me!” Cheap entertainment, I guess you’d call it. If I was lying on my bed reading a book, which was often the case, he might slip into the room and pounce on me, tickling me until I cried “Uncle!” He was the one to introduce me to the monsters in my closet or under my bed as well. He had me so believing in those guys when I was very little that I would wet the bed rather than get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, risking a death-cold skeletal hand gripping my ankle.
I can’t remember how old I was when Curtis first told me there was no Santa Claus. I know I was about five years younger than he was when he found out. I remember the superior smirk on his face as he burst my bubble with that pronouncement. I also remember believing him instantly. I’m sure I had noticed (and maybe even looked for) gifts squirreled away in the top of my parents’ bedroom closet that later ended up under the tree or noted the outdoor utility room was uncharacteristically locked for a week before I got a bicycle from Santa for Christmas. I remember wondering if we would stop getting those presents from “Santa” as soon as our parents realized we no longer believed. I’m pretty sure we badly faked believing in Santa for at least half a decade after that.
The presents “From Santa” did keep coming. In fact, they kept on coming until the Christmas after my mother died in 2001, just shy of her sixty-second birthday, when I was thirty-six and Curtis was weeks away from turning forty-one. That Christmas, there was only one present under the tree from Santa. It was marked “To Sveta”/“From Santa” and it was for my brother’s wife. Mama had bought the Christmas gift way back in July. It was a cozy gown for her daughter-in-law, who she had just found out on Mother’s Day was pregnant with her first grandchild, due to arrive in January 2002. Mom was scheduled for rotator cuff surgery in August, so she had started her shopping early, unsure how long her recovery would last and worried it would interfere with her annual shopathon for Christmas. Mom had her surgery on Thursday, August 9th. She passed away in her bed of a heart attack on Sunday morning, August 12th. I remember bawling my eyes out as I wrapped that lone “Santa” gift and addressed the tag “To Sveta”/“From Santa”. The grief of that first Christmas without my mama, without our Santa, was nearly unbearable. But, with that one gift, that caring gesture, she was there.
Mama loved Christmas. She was a thoughtful and prolific giver. She taught me the joy of giving by example in her daily life, but she went overboard at Christmas. The last autumn she was alive (2000) she and I went on a beach trip together as we often did. While we were at Myrtle Beach we visited The Christmas Mouse, one of her favorite stores, and Callahan’s of Calabash’s St. Nick Nacks Christmas Shop in Calabash, NC. During that trip Mama went crazy, buying tons of silver and clear ornaments and crystal garland. She had been inspired somehow to totally redo her Christmas tree. Gone were the chipped glass balls and green and red plastic ivy garland and repaired star tree topper from years past.
When December rolled around, the new tree was beautiful! The only thing that had not changed was the huge pile of gifts overflowing from underneath it and covering a good portion of the living room floor. The shopping had taken months and the wrapping weeks. (At this moment as I think about that, I can hear her singing Pretty Paper or Silver Bells as she worked.) Though her love language was Acts of Service on the receiving end (like mine), the love language she spoke was giving Gifts. She taught me to strike while the iron was hot when I saw something in my travels that would be perfect for a person in my life. To this day I often buy Christmas or birthday gifts months away from the event. She really thought about the recipient of any gift she gave, considering their hobbies, their needs, their special affinities. That always made me feel known, heard, cared for, loved.
For twenty-one years after my mama passed, I tried to take over her role as Santa. Channeling her, I spent way too much money and an incalculable amount of time fulfilling my Christmas list. I tried to fill the hole her absence created with tons of gifts for everyone I or she cared about. I thought I wouldn’t miss her as much if nothing about how we had always celebrated Christmas changed. But everything had changed. No amount of presents can ever make up for her absence.
This year Christmas kind of snuck up on me. The year has flown by faster than any other of my life. While I am usually finished shopping by Thanksgiving so that I can both avoid the crowds in the stores and enjoy the run up to Christmas, filling that time with decorating, wrapping, baking, and listening to Christmas music, this year I had not bought a single gift by the second week of November. Furthermore, I found I didn’t want to try anymore to fill that hole with gifts. I had to admit to myself, finally, that I am not ever going to get the feeling I was looking for through retail therapy. Reluctantly, I put out the word to family and friends that I was finally giving up my role as Santa’s (Mama’s) surrogate. The announcement seemed to be met with relief. Dad, Curtis, and our friends seemed glad not to have to try and keep up with me.
I admit I felt a little sad as I skipped printing out the booklet I have made myself each Fall for decades. It’s pocket-sized and has an individual page for each person I consider my family (which includes not only my brother and his family, my dad and his wife, my sister-in-law and her family, but the friends who are our chosen family as well). In years past, I filled each of those pages with gifts bought and ordered, checked off boxes to the left as ordered gifts arrived from Amazon, and highlighted each line as I wrapped the dozens of gifts in what was usually at least an eight hour marathon of wrapping (sometimes more), so that I wouldn’t forget any of those gifts I had squirreled away during the year.
Determined to focus on what has brought me some joy over the past twenty-one Christmases without Mom, I recruited my husband’s help in pulling out the brand new 9 ft. LED Christmas tree we bought last year. I was already a week behind getting the tree up since I had gotten sick with a cold on Thanksgiving Day and passed it on to him a few days later. Darryl is usually game for helping me set the base in the family room and for snapping the four sections together and that’s about it until it is time to put the star on top, which I can’t reach by myself, even on the ladder. This year I think he sensed I needed more than that from him. He stuck around all day and helped me unbox and hang all the Hallmark Santa ornaments, antique Santa ornaments, and glass Santa ornaments that adorn our tree in honor of my mother, the world’s best “Santa”. Instead of struggling through the chore of getting the tree up, I enjoyed the process, as we worked together to accomplish a goal.
The tree up, I moved on to unboxing the five huge plastic totes of my Santa collection that includes everything from plush stuffed Santas from the 1930s and 1940s, to snow globes, to Tom Clark and Lee Sievers resin Santas, to crystal Santas, to salt and pepper shaker Mr. and Mrs. Claus sets, and to handmade ceramic Santas made by family and friends. The collection now fills a large curio and has leaked out to the floor surrounding the curio and fills the top of the large cedar chest that my dad made in 4H in high school. Each of these Santas is precious to me. Many were bought on beach trips and shopping trips with my mom and each one reminds me of how she loved playing Santa for us!
Next I adorned the walls with the labors of love that are my cross-stitched Santa portraits. I love these so much that I am tempted to leave them out year ‘round. This year I also created a collage from some of my vintage Santa postcard collection that turned out awesome! (Thanks for the suggestion, hubby!)
By the time we had the house glittering from the tree to the curio to the walls to the swirling battery-operated snow globes and had listened to about eight hours of Christmas music (much to Darryl’s delight), I felt proud of what we had accomplished, knowing Mama would have loved everything about it! Though I cannot sing a lick, I waited for Darryl to leave for a trip to the dump, then belted Pretty Paper along with Willie Nelson in memory of Mama, whose singing voice was much better than mine.
The next weekend, I took a morning to wrap the gifts I had bought for my niece and nephew, Christina Joan (her middle name is in honor of Mama) and Jacob. I can’t bring myself to stop trying to give them a taste of what life would have been like for them if Grandma Joan had lived to play Santa for them. (One of my biggest sadnesses is the fact that they did not get to know their Grandma Joan or great-grandma Cartner.) I have always loved wrapping gifts so much that I used to wrap my own when I was a kid. Not the Santa gifts, but the ones from Mama and Daddy. She would put them in a generic box, tape them shut, then let me wrap them. As I wrapped those I had bought for Christina and Jacob this year, I listened to Elvis Christmas and gospel songs and smiled as I reminisced about sitting on the bed with Mama, wrapping gifts for hours, listening to scratchy vinyl records on the stereo.
I jumped at the chance to have dinner this week with my cousin Janet, who I have not seen in several years. She surprised me and brought along her brother, Rickie, who I had not seen in 23 years! As we ate and fellowshipped, I flashed back on the many Christmases of our childhood when Mama would invite her sister, Doris, and her family for a big meal with all the trimmings. We would eat until we couldn’t breathe, then have some dessert (LOL!), then gather around the tree so my cousins, Dennis, Rickie, and Janet could open the gifts Mama had chosen for them. Those days were so much fun! It filled my heart with gladness to get even a taste of those times as we enjoyed too short a time together at that restaurant, so I made my cousins promise we would get together again soon, when we could spend more time catching up like we used to do.
Yesterday, I took a whole day off work … a rarity these days. I got up early and was baking Darryl’s favorite Toffee Cookies by eight o’clock. I moved from cookies to Oreo Bonbons, Peanut Clusters, Pecan Fingers, Brookies and Pistachio-Chocolate Cake. As I worked, I flashed back on the many hours I spent kneeling on a chair at the kitchen table, helping Mama chop candied fruit and pecans for her specialty, Fruit Cookies. The prep for the recipe took what seemed like hours, but the result was so worth it. The recipe made a ton of cookies and Mama loved to share them with co-workers, neighbors, family and friends! As my cake was coming out of the oven I noticed a text I had missed on my cell phone earlier in the day. It was from a friend, inviting Darryl and I to meet her and her husband for dinner. Hoping it wasn’t too late, I texted back. Thirty minutes later, I handed them a Ziploc bag of treats from my day of baking, just like Mama would’ve done, as we joined them at the restaurant.
Santa is gone. I finally admit it with a heavy heart. I can never replace her. What I can do is honor her memory by doing the things she loved like decorating the Christmas tree, listening to Christmas music, sharing time with family, baking and sharing sweet treats with friends, and sharing her story. I can also focus on the memory of my Daddy reading the story of Christ’s birth from the family Bible to Curtis and I to remind us of the real reason for the season, the ultimate gift of God’s Son, the best present of all.
Robin's Eggs 