I don’t know how to celebrate Christmas
I love the Christmas season. I love most Christmas movies and music, Christmas lights and decorations (especially when wrapped around bare trees—it makes the trees look brighter, cooler, and futuristic), and the smell of pine trees. Is it just me, or do people seem to be kinder this time of year? There is one thing that makes my crisp, pure snow idea of Christmas into a dirty pile of slush—I don’t know how to celebrate Christmas.
It wasn’t always like this…
The earliest memory I have of Christmas is of a large cardboard box. This cardboard box contained my family’s old plastic Christmas tree, along with lines of flashy tinsel, different types of glass ornaments, and other festive decorations. When I was five years old, I remember rummaging through that box while my father and sister were putting up the tree. I found a small spiral notebook and a sheet of angel stickers. I peeled each sticker and placed them on their page and I wrote down an elemental name for each one. As soon as my dad and my sister put up the tree, I would help them with the decorations. Remembering those ornaments had a special uniqueness that other modern decorations cannot compare. Even though according to my dad this plastic tree was bought from The Salvation Army. There were two ornaments I can still feel and see to this day. One was a royal blue spherical ornament with snowflakes painted with white sparkles and another was the Nativity scene carved in this smooth corse white rock. When the lights were plugged in and the star was placed on top, all the little fairy lights lit up and the tinsel strings glittered. The Christmas tree looked like it jumped out of the pages of a fairytale.
My family and I did not celebrate Christmas the traditional American way, we celebrated Wigilia! Wigilia is Christmas Eve supper in Polish Culture. The supper includes red borscht, uszkas, fish fillet, gefilet fish, and sauerkraut. I was never a fan of the supper, the food never sat right with me. I looked forward to seeing my cousins at my grandmother’s apartment. After the meal, we would open our gifts. There was one Christmas when one of our cousin's family gifted all the kids toys from the Burger King promotion of Pokemon the First Movie, even 24 carrot gold cards. I thought this was the greatest event ever hanging out with my cousins and just opening presents in that railroad apartment. Little did I know that life was going to chuck an icy hard snowball right in the back of my head.
The downfall...
As a child, the adults around you knew how to hide strained relationships. Long story short, everything broke one day in early 2001, after that nothing was the same. That same year that same trusty Christmas tree we had suddenly broke, it was replaced by an animatronic Santa Claus that danced to Jingle Bell Rock. I hated it, it felt like a downgrade from the old Christmas tree. No more gifts, no more going over my Grandmother’s apartment and hanging out with my cousins. My family still did Wigilia supper, I still had to eat bland fish. It felt like the bright lights of Christmas were extinguished from me like the Grinch stole my Christmas spirit. I resented the Wigilia supper. I tried to keep the Christmas spirit alive in my room by making my decorations, but it was more like a bandaid than a cure. As I got older, I treated Christmas like any other day. One Christmas in high school, I got AIM/MySpace messages from friends saying “Merry Christmas” while watching Dario Argento’s Phenomenon on my laptop.
It gets better!
When I began to date I would go to their Christmas celebrations. We would eat delectable food, play games, and hang out with family and friends. It felt like my family’s celebrations at my grandmother’s apartment. I met my boyfriend (soon-to-be husband) and for my first birthday together (my birthday falls in the Christmas season) he took me to an office building in Melville and outside of it were trees covered in strings of sparkling lights. This scene was so ethereal, it reminded me of the lyrics to Ceremony by New Order “Avenues all lined with trees, Picture me and then you start watching”. Those lights reminded me how bright and cheerful Christmas can be.
After my husband and I got married, I tried my best to celebrate. We bought a fake tree and we decorated it. We wrapped gifts up and put them under the tree. We put up some decorations around the house and made some Christmas food, my husband enjoyed it, but I felt like I could do more for the Christmas spirit.
I gave birth at the beginning of 2024. My husband always told me stories about how grand his Christmases used to be as a kid. I remember the Christmases I spent with my cousins. I want that for my daughter, I want her lights of Christmas to never go out.