Last night I dreamed of my father. The last time I dreamt of my father was the day he died, in 2020. I don’t usually dream, or rather, I don’t usually remember my dreams. And last night, I dream-walked into a dream-room, and stopped, and turned, and there my father was, standing in the dream-doorway. He had something he wanted to tell me, but since I was about to wake up, he said he would tell me later.
And then I woke up.
My father loved Christmas. He made the angel that went on top of the tree from a plastic angel he apparently bought at the drug store. The angel was spray painted gold and covered in gold glitter. Her wings have broken multiple times and have been re-glued multiple times. Nothing made me feel closer to my dad than when I had to re-glue the angel’s wings after we moved, and one of them had broken off. She stood on top of an upside Florence flask that my dad brought home from the laboratory. He spray painted it blue and covered it with clear and white glitter to look like snow. He always bought the biggest tree, and he loved to decorate the tree, and decorate the house, and put Christmas lights everywhere.
Christmas was mostly a “pass,” which is how I think of holidays or events when my father was in a good enough mood that I wasn’t scrutinized constantly. I could “get away” with reading, talking to my friends on the phone, watching TV, or anything that didn’t require any effort on his part. Going to a friend’s house or meeting a friend was a dicey proposition (at least until I drove) because it required him to break his holiday cheer and do a real-life thing. But I could do almost anything else with minimal criticism, as long as I didn’t fight the minimal criticisms that came my way (mostly about how awful I looked or how things I liked were infantile or how smart I wasn’t), and participated in decorating and watching holiday movies as a family.
Reader, I cannot emphasize enough that this was good in my household. Nothing was better than a day or weekend or week that was a pass, and I could let down my guard for a little bit, and just exist, mostly comfortably, in my own skin.
It was never completely free, though. Nothing was. There was a buy-in to get this pass period, a built in penalty. And that was presents.
In my family, for most of my life, and certainly while my father was alive and my parents were married, the philosophy behind gifts was this: you can’t buy someone something that want, because that’s too “easy.” You have to figure out what they want, through some unfathomable means, and buy them the perfect present.
The exemptions to this rule were young children who didn’t know any better. But after a certain, undefined age, the philosophy kicked in.
The upshot of this was years of telling my parents what I wanted for Christmas, and getting nothing on my Christmas list; instead, I got gifts that were slightly adjacent to things I actually wanted (but sometimes, Reader, I would get a thing I asked for. Sometimes. And often it would be three years later.)
More importantly, however, was that this meant that my father never, ever told anyone what he wanted for Christmas. And inevitably, we always get it wrong.
Reader, let me describe what this looked like.
My father, who loved Johnny Carson, would hold a present to his head, and guess what was inside. He was shockingly accurate. I honestly have no idea how he did this.
Then, he would unwrap the present, chortle at being correct, and toss it aside. If you were lucky, that was all that would happen. If not, he would add a value judgement to your gift, such as, “Booorrrringgg.”
And if you were very unlucky, and your gift was particularly unsatisfactory, he would throw it away. In front of you.
Reader, exchanging presents in my house was the perfect recipe for neurosis.
But Christmas was one of the holidays that may father would videotape, with altering degrees of directorship and attentiveness, every year. Because he genuinely loved Christmas. He loved the tree, and the lights, and the angel, and the wrapped presents. He hated It’s a Wonderful Life. He loved Miracle on 34th Street. He loved eating Pepperidge Farm sausages with cheese and crackers and watching movies at the kitchen table. He loved snow, and building snow forts and making snowmen and running through the snow with our dogs.
So I’ve wondered all day about my dream, about what my father would say to me, standing in my dream-hallway. It’s the end of December, and I’ve spent the afternoon wrapping presents and messing about with tape and tinsel and ribbon. And I really have no idea. It could be anything. It would be disingenuous to imagine him saying something nice, but also not quite right to imagine him angry at Christmas, either. The only thing I can think of is that I dreamed of my father, the week before Christmas, and before he could say anything at all, I woke up. And that’s left me thinking of presents, and snow, and snow slides, and fires in the fireplace, and the angel on the tree more than I’ve been thinking about the times in between the holidays.
And I think that today, we both get a pass, and that’s enough.
I wonder if these Christmas traumas didn’t instill some deep levels of empathy in you thus rendering you the greatest gift giver of all time.
I love you, Vickie. There's no such thing as a bad present (you can interpret that any way you like).