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“A New Dawn ” 

Christmas 1984

By Charles Moon

Note to Elizabeth: I met you in March of 1984 and we have been together ever since. From this point forward, what I am going to write must include you. Because this is a collection of Christmas stories from my unique perspective, I have decided to continue to write about all of the people involved in the third person. Please don’t be upset that I am not writing it to you, because everything I have written is for you, Elizabeth.

– All my love, David.

     I can easily divide my life into two distinct parts – the time before I met my wife, Elizabeth, and everything since. We met in late winter and by September of that year we were engaged to be married. By the time our first Christmas season was upon us as a couple I was consumed with the love I felt for her. New love, young love, fresh love is a powerful thing. So powerful in fact, that for me, in 1984, it overpowered Christmas.

      Elizabeth and I had very little in common. I was the product of a dysfunctional Protestant family who had their roots firmly planted in the city. Elizabeth was the youngest daughter of a devout Catholic couple who had emigrated from a farm in Eastern Europe before she was born. I was a loner with very few close family members and fewer friends. Elizabeth’s circle of friends seemed to expand every time we would get together and her family was even more expansive, with cousins and aunts and uncles from New York to Salzburg.

      In many ways she was the traditional American dream. The youngest child of an immigrant family, Elizabeth graduated from college and was immediately on the fast track to success in her career. By the time I met her, she was in the management program of a retail chain and looked like the favorite for permanent position.

      Finding employment after college wasn’t as easy for me. After many months of trying, I accepted an offer from a gentleman who was working out of a spare office in an insurance agency owned by his friend. He had hired me supposedly to execute drawings for engineers and architects who needed supplemental help. He paid me sporadically and in varying amounts. There was very little real work and it turned out that he had used the ruse of his own company to cheat a few gullible clients out of retainer fees without providing any real service to them. Luckily I was hired by Lee and Stevens Engineering, a reputable firm two months before the sheriff and the IRS caught up with him. For those nine months after graduating, I had to move back in with mom.

      Even after I was hired by Lee and Stevens Engineering, I had not saved enough money to move to my own apartment before I met Elizabeth. At that time she too was living in her parents’ house. After we became engaged, we both decided to keep our living arrangements the way they were so we could accumulate enough money for a down payment on a house. It meant that I was constantly travelling back and forth between Auburn and her parents’ house in Palmyra, NY.

      When the cold weather descended upon upstate New York and its population withdrew into the comfort of heated enclosed spaces, we joined them at the shopping mall. The preparations for starting a new life together in the middle-class American style meant we had to have a fully furnished residence complete with all the comforts we had become accustomed to in our parents home. Weekends found us, hand-in-hand, browsing through department stores and shops stocked floor to ceiling with pots, pans, dishes, glassware, curtains, table linens, towels and toiletries. We were two adults just starting to play “house” together like a couple of kids on a rainy afternoon, only this game was going to last us the rest of our lives.

      Unlike many of my male acquaintances, I enjoyed the whole shopping experience. I got to spend large amounts of time with my beloved Elizabeth while learning each other’s tastes in décor and lifestyles. We discovered that in spite of our divergent backgrounds, we had arrived at very similar points in our preferences. Our compatibility was confirmed many times that autumn roaming through the stores and locating household items that we knew was “us”.

      Our recent engagement provided plenty of distraction from the coming season for me. It also provided a good deal of protection for Elizabeth who, as far as I know, had never had a bad Christmas. The last thing I wanted to do was expose her to this particular Branch family tradition.

      On a Saturday early in December we made our usual trek deep into the retail jungles of Rochester, NY. It had been an unusually mild autumn and even though the stores were fully adorned with the trappings of the season, it didn’t feel like Christmas and I was able to disregard most of it.

      Elizabeth had seen an advertisement for a microwave oven on sale at one of the larger department stores and we were pretty certain one of those would not arrive as a gift in the near future. She wanted to display her bargain hunting skills for me and prove that as a shopper she was astute and frugal. I accompanied her as a silent partner in the transaction. It took only fifteen minutes to locate the correct model, review it’s specifications and carry the box to the cash register. It took almost the same amount of time to carry it to my car, parked in the last space in the twenty-third row of the crowded holiday parking lot.

      We re-entered the mall through a side door to the largest store in the complex, closer to where we had parked but not directly connected to the mall itself. To get back to the main gallery of the mall we had to walk through the entire first floor of Macy’s Department Store. Macy’s was the Taj Mahal of retail. It carried expensive designer lines of clothing, imported gourmet candies and fine jewelry suitable to adorn the upper crust of society. Macy’s was a strict “look but don’t buy” policy for our combined but limited income.

      A two-tone gold and silver wristwatch with a matching band in one of the display cases caught my eye and I went over to look at it.

      “Do you like that one?” Elizabeth asked.

      “I really do, except for the price. I’d feel funny wearing something that expensive on my wrist.”

      “Maybe someday you’ll have one.”

      It was “pie-in-the-sky” thinking at this point in our life, but it didn’t cost anything to look.

      “Maybe,” I mused.

      The jewelry counter wrapped around the central escalator in a graceful arc and led us to the main aisle of the store. The flow of shoppers carried us toward the store’s main entrance where they had set up an extravagant seasonal display of glittering red cloth and artificial greens around boxes wrapped in colorful papers and shining bows. In the center of the display was a monstrous Christmas tree adorned with hundreds of antique reproduction ornaments – all for sale in their home décor section.

      We approached the display and the soft glow of Christmas enveloped Elizabeth. Her head leaned to one side and her eyes sparkled as they reflected the twinkling lights illuminating the tree.

      “Let’s go look,” she cooed.

      Before I could answer, Elizabeth was leading me by the hand into the section of the store they had set aside for the specific purpose of selling all the decorations associated with the season. As we approached the arched entry, the sounds of pre-recorded carols settled over me like a cold wind through an open window. The walls were draped in red cloth accented with gold garlands of tinsel and clusters of green holly at each seam. Where there was one huge tree in the main entrance of the store, here there were sixteen smaller trees, all trimmed with ornaments of a specific theme. Around the base of each tree were boxes and baskets containing the corresponding ornaments in their packages for sale.

      Elizabeth floated through the store like an angel among its companions. I felt the walls begin to close in on me. I could see that, in the presence of the overabundance of festive symbols, we were both reliving our respective childhoods. She was enjoying the rapture of a Yuletide fantasy and improving her experience by including me in it. The muscles in my neck began to tense.

      All the reminders of the season seemed to mock me. I knew, and they knew, that I did not belong here. But, Elizabeth did belong here. She had escaped the constant disappointments Christmas had served to my family and kept the innocent joy of the season in her heart. I fought the urge to grab Elizabeth’s hand and drag her out of the store.

      “Fight it, David,” I kept telling myself over and over again. “This is not about you. You have to do this for Elizabeth.”

      Elizabeth was so intoxicated with the Christmas spirit that I don’t think she noticed my discomfort. I tried as best I could to set aside my feelings, but every smile I would project to reassure my fiancée that we were sharing the same experience seemed false. It felt disquietingly familiar to pretend to feel something that I wasn’t feeling for the sake of Christmas. I hated it.

      We spent no more than ten minutes in that part of the store although it felt like hours.  When we left, my anxiety left, too. It was clear to me that Elizabeth loved Christmas. She enjoyed it, she cherished it and perhaps even needed it. I couldn’t tell her what it did to me. Not yet, at least.

      Elizabeth’s family had their own set of holiday traditions. A lot of it was the sincere practice of what my family had only pretended to observe for so many years. They gathered as a family and exchanged gifts with a tree, Christmas carols, and an overabundance of food. The only thing I found unusual was that they exchanged gifts on Christmas eve, instead of having the children awaken to the indulgent greed of a Christmas morning laden with toys and treats stuffed under the tree and into stockings. As far as I was concerned, anything different was good.

      As a future in-law I was invited to attend their family gathering and participate in the gift exchange. I wanted to feel the love of a close-knit family gathering to celebrate the holidays. I wanted to forget my past and become one of “them”. Most importantly, I wanted to be with Elizabeth.

      My own family wasn’t going to be together this year. Andy was just starting college and had immersed himself in academics to escape the holiday. Terry had left the continent for the tropical island of St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands and decided Christmas was not a good enough reason to buy a plane ticket. Mom took the opportunity to visit her own parents in New Jersey for a few days.

      Mom was planing on being home for Christmas day even though I told her I would be perfectly fine spending the day alone. I had hoped she would take a much-needed rest and enjoy her visit with her parents and my uncle’s family. She insisted and I gave in. Before she left for New Jersey, she asked me to drag the decorations down from the attic so she could put them up.

      I was setting up the artificial tree in the corner of the living room when mom came around corner carrying a smaller box.

      “Look what I found packed away.”

      Mom was holding my stuffed reindeer doll that she had made for me when I was six.

      “I didn’t think these were still around.”

      She looked at the little toy like she had uncovered and ancient artifact.

      “I don’t remember seeing that thing for years,” I lied.

      I had carefully packed my toy away every January, but I refused to admit that to her. I wasn’t embarrassed that the connection I felt with that tattered velvet animal might appear unmanly. I was afraid that by letting others know how I felt, that they could somehow take it away from me. For my entire life, the people I cared about had let me down when I needed them most. It became my emotional defense to deny having any feelings at all – even to my own mother.

      “Do you think we should get rid of it, Dave?”

      “Nah. It’s still got all it’s stuffing.”

      “It’s pretty ratty.”

      “That’s okay. Just give it to me.”

      Mom gave me the toy and walked away. I took it to my room and placed it in the top of the closet in a box of things I had brought back from college that mom would not go through. My reindeer was no longer safe to be packed away with the family Christmas decorations even though it was my reminder of what a perfect family Christmas could be.

      The morning of Christmas Eve I pulled out the box from the top of the closet where I had hidden the few gifts I had purchased for Elizabeth. I retrieved two rectangular boxes and one cylinder wrapped in red foil like a giant tootsie roll. One of the boxes contained a jigsaw puzzle while the other was similarly inexpensive. The tube, however, contained a special gift. When I had purchased Elizabeth’s engagement ring in August, the jeweler had offered to sell me a pair of diamond stud earrings at a huge discount. They were very small stones in austere settings, but they were still diamonds. I bought them confident that my proposal would be accepted and we would be spending Christmas together.

      I put the packages in my car and drove the 65 minutes it took to get to her folk’s house in Palmyra. I had nothing to look back to and everything to look forward to. The hour was spent trying to forget about the old holiday feelings and just think about being part of a family.

      Elizabeth greeted me at the door with a big smile on her face. Her brother and sister-in-law were already there with their newborn son. The rest of the family had arrived by mid-afternoon.

      Food was everywhere. Plates of shrimp and cold cuts mixed with trays of fruit filled cookies and other pastries native to Elizabeth’s heritage freely circulated among the adults gathered in the living room. I wasn’t sure if this was a typical holiday gathering or if they had escalated the abundance of refreshments for my sake. Elizabeth claimed that they had actually toned down their holiday practice for fear of offending my non-Catholic upbringing. I was both impressed with their concern for me and a little uneasy to imagine what a Christmas might be like, fully immersed in this family.

      The sun set and everyone gathered around the tree. Elizabeth’s mother lit the branch of a fir tree to fill the air with the balsam smoke and tuned a radio to the local station in search of carols. The lights were dimmed and someone brought a plastic trash bag inside the circle of people for the anticipated disposal of torn wrapping paper. I sat next to Elizabeth with my two boxes for her resting comfortably under the tree, intermingled with everyone else’s packages. The red foil cylinder was still in my coat hanging in the closet.

      I did not feel comfortable giving that gift to her in front of her entire family. Perhaps I didn’t want to put her on the spot with a gift that she had not anticipated and had no way to reciprocate. Perhaps I didn’t want to appear extravagant to her parents who had made it clear that they were not used to the finer things in life. Whatever the reason, I was saving it for a more intimate exchange.

      The gift giving ritual took less than twenty minutes to complete. Each person received a gift in the order they were seated in the circle. Elizabeth had made sure there were a few items there with my name on it. Once the cycle had been completed, it was repeated until there was nothing left under the tree at which time, Elizabeth’s mother handed each one of her children an envelope containing cash. The package was the symbol, the cash was the gift.

      There were no “oohs” or “ahs” and no exclamations of surprise. It was a precisely organized and faithfully executed exchange, with each participant following the family guidelines and instructing me on the necessary protocols when it looked like I was in need of help. What Elizabeth’s family tradition lacked in youthful exuberance joyous festivity, it more than made up for with rigid compliance and brevity.

      A few minutes later I excused myself to go to the bathroom and when I returned Elizabeth was alone in the living room sitting on the piano bench in front of the family organ. I stepped back into the dark hallway before she saw me and slipped my hand into the inner pocket of my overcoat. I removed the package hidden there and returned to my fiancée with my hand concealing the gift behind my back.

      “Elizabeth.”

      “Yes, David?”

      “Merry Christmas.”

      It was one of the few times in my life I didn’t feel like a hypocrite uttering those two words. My feelings for her were genuine, as was my desire for her to have the merriest of Christmases. I gave her the oddly wrapped package.

      “What’s this.”

      “Just something that Santa was saving for later. It’s later.”

      Elizabeth tugged on the ribbon I had used to tie the ends of the paper closed around the cardboard tube. It stretched but didn’t break and the paper on the end popped off. She pulled out the wad of tissue paper I had stuffed inside to keep the contents from bouncing around and tilted the tube, allowing the small box to slide out into her hand. She pressed the tiny metal button on the front of the velvet covered box and the lid sprung open revealing two small diamonds glittering in their gold settings.

      Elizabeth blushed. Her expression changed from surprise to happiness and then from happiness to a wry grin. She lifted herself off the piano bench a few inches and tilted the lid. She reached inside and produced a small wrapped package for me.

      “Santa has been very sneaky this year.”

      I wasn’t as careful with the wrapping on her gift as Elizabeth had been with mine. I found the seam of the paper and ripped it off of the box with one swift tug. I was dumbfounded to see my own astonishment reflected back at me in the crystal face of the gold and silver watch we had seen at Macy’s a few weeks ago. My silence must have given Elizabeth cause for concern since she seemed to find it necessary to explain immediately that she did not buy the gift at Macy’s but instead had found the same watch in a different store for much less. 

      We exchanged “you shouldn’t have’s” even though each of us was secretly glad that we did, and spent the rest of Christmas Eve discussing or future together. Elizabeth never shared the private gift with the rest of her family and I kept my gift discretely out of sight as well.

      I left a little after 10:00 p.m. and arrived at my mother’s house well before midnight. She had returned from New Jersey earlier that afternoon and fell asleep on the sofa waiting for me to return from Elizabeth’s family’s house.

      “I’m home, mom.”

      “Merry Christmas, David.”

      It was the last time that I would call my mother’s house “home” at Christmas.

     The rest I have forgotten. It’s a sad testament to our tradition when the best you can hope for is another event to displace the memory of Christmas in your mind.

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