Happy holiday dregs! I’m ending the year with a follow-up to the story of my children ruining Easter. But I get 2022’s last laugh. Lo, the tale of a mother quiet-quitting Christmas.
The let-down began in mid-November. I was busy scrubbing a pan when Max cornered me at the sink: “Is Santa real? Mom, if he’s not, please tell me.” He looked at me hard. “I need to know,” he said. “Don’t lie.”
“Okay,” I swallowed. “When Dad is done bathing your brothers, meet us in our bedroom.”
I felt nervous: like palms were sweaty, mom’s spaghetti, the opportunity to ruin Santa comes once in a kid’s lifetime. It was an unpleasant job, but one I wanted. I would not have Max’s dreams dashed by some jeering twerps on the playground—nor would I miss a chance to show Max that he can count on me, as I constantly profess. But I never realized that telling him the truth might also break his heart.
I stomped up the stairs. “We have to tell Max,” I said to Christopher as Augie and Clyde climbed out of the bath. “About Santa,” I mouthed as he toweled their heads. He let them sprint away with sudsy butts.
“Tonight?” Christopher looked weary. Seven p.m. on a school night is a hard time for big, emotional lifts.
“He staged a stand-off. Says he needs the truth,” I explained.
“I’ll be down in twenty-minutes,” Christopher said.
“Great,” I replied. “You do the talking.”
Max sat at the foot of our bed while we hovered around, wiping our hands on our pants.
“Max,” Christopher started. “Mom and I know you’re ready for what we’re going to tell you. Because you’re big now, and you’re asking for the truth.” Long pause. “We are Santa.”
Max laughed.
“We put the presents under the tree,” Dad went on. Max curled into the fetal position.
“There’s no Santa?” he asked, peering up at me, pleading. He reverse-aged before my eyes: a toddler; an infant; a tiny, breakable baby.
“There is a Santa,” I squeaked, too cheerfully. “He’s us!”
Max laughed until he shook. Tears poured down his face.
“What about the elves?” He managed through his hyperventilation.
“YOU’RE an elf now!” I told him, which meant nothing compared to our magical doll, Juanito, who appears in the mornings in humorous, tortured places: in the mounted shark jaw; impaled on a candlestick; dangling from the light fixture. How could Max be as magic as that? We blah blah blah’d about giving being more fun than receiving. Max went still, his arms over his chest, his tilde-smile trembling beneath a stream of tears.
“It’s okay, I’m okay,” he nodded and laugh-cried some more. It scared me, what we’d done.
I did not tell Max that Christmas is actually a six-week period of agita. Did I get it all done? (No.) Is there something I’m forgetting? (Obviously.) The season is a special slog in our house because both Max and Augie have December birthdays, and it’s my absolute duty not to let the birth of Christ outshine them. I would like the season to be different, I really would. Every year I promise myself I’ll spend Advent listening to the Choir of Kings College on our Tivoli while reading by a fire. Instead, I scroll Amazon for bundled party favors.
This year was a special doozy. Christopher had a hip operation on December 1st—the day before Max’s ninth birthday. He was immobile for two weeks and during that time, the rest of us got the stomach flu: twice. One Saturday night I lay on the kitchen floor and hollered, “Kids, put yourselves to bed. And bring big bowls in case you barf!” As I listened to the distant squeak of Christopher’s hip-stretching machine—into which he lay strapped for six hours a day—I experienced a flash of genius: he could buy all the boys’ gifts… on his iPad… reclined! I presented this idea to him, worried he might object. He smiled at their lists and finished in thirty minutes.
The delegating continued. Two weeks before Christmas, I took Max to a toy store, where he filled his brother’s stockings with things they actually wanted. Duck-bill football hats (eew), sunglasses, water bounce-balls. He made no bad guesses, which meant zero instantaneous trash.
Previous years have been a battle of the values and wills: are we reenacting the Polish Wigilia on Christmas Eve the way our matriarch, Virginia Baranski, would have? Are we never allowing the mushroom soup to boil; hand-pinching our own pierogi; breading the fish with just the right amount of golden yolk? Are we fasting and keeping the house silent and still in anticipation of the holy arrival? Wigilia has always been important to us—me, my sister, Lily, and our mom still do all the things. Only this year, I forgot to pre-order the halibut.
The Wigilia feast begins when the youngest child spots the first star. Clyde came roaring in from the velvet dark: “I saw’d it, I saw’d it!” Just when I was about to portion out our simple mushroom soup, Christopher plopped a block of brie into a separate saucepan. “But it’s a day of fasting! A day of fish and vegetables—” I nearly protested, realizing, as I did, that I had a gob of Saint Andre triple-cream stuck to my thumb-knuckle. “Oh my God, the Bills beat the Bears!” My mother shrieked, leaping up and down and pumping her fists in the air.
I thought of the house where Lily and I grew up—where only choral music and church bells played on December 24th. Maybe the tension in a holiday isn’t the effort of our traditions so much as our fear of their loss. Every year is a struggle against change. But why? And even if we do pull off a perfect night, there remains a nagging question: was the production as special, as magical, as last year’s? Too late 2022: this year would be what it would be. Anyway, I couldn’t worry about things changing—they already had. We do cheese and football now, I thought, licking the gob off my thumb and dolling out the sacred soup.
Because I didn’t have the energy to become a Christmas tyrant this year, Christmas had…no tyrant. Somewhere in early motherhood, I developed the misbelief that executing a perfect Christmas meant embodying both the noble humility of my Polish ancestors AND the snazzy generosity of a flying fatman. Never did the untenable incompatibility of these symbols cross my mind. Finally, this year, they unraveled.
But without a production, I had an experience. We ate every meal at the kitchen table instead of in the dining room. I didn’t ask anybody to clean up and found that, in the absence of my nagging, everybody did. Lily and I split the Wigilia meal and Christopher cooked Christmas dinner. And while he made the roast beast, I took a three-hour nap in a room heaped with boxes. Normally, I’d have spent that time tidying and felt both aggrieved and depleted afterwards. Instead, I popped up as rosy as our pink couch. Frankly, I felt abashed by the positive effect of me reaching my limit. By exhaustedly stepping (falling?) out of the middle, I gave everybody a chance to relax and fill in. And I got what I didn’t know I wanted—to be cared for back.
My friend Eric recently said to me: “you’re trying to be better than you are. You’re only human.” I do that a lot. I think many parents do—especially mothers—this time of year. Much as I love the magic of Santa, my relief began when that fiction ended for Max. As long as the mythical man existed, we made the human effort invisible. Max didn’t understand why we objected to him surveilling the tree at 5am. Why would he? We’d outsourced the scene to a giant fairy.
The morning after our hard conversation, I noticed Max standing taller, his shoulders flung back. He’s walked Frankie every day since without being asked. He accompanied Christopher and Lily on every pre-Christmas errand. After Wigilia, he shoo-d his brothers to bed so he could help wrap presents. (See below.) Adjacent to his let-down was a chance to rise to the occasion.
It was Max who gave me my favorite gift of all: a fuzzy pair of clogs he picked out with his brothers. “From Santa,” he whispered, handing me the box.
Isabel, this is the best. I love it! You nail all the love and pain and uncertainty around mothering a young child. Hope your son is looking forward to Christmas '23.
What a lovely piece you wrote. It both warmed my heart and made me tearful. Mothers are afraid to go wrong and disappoint or break the spell. It took Max courage to face the end of a dream, and of a certain kind of reassuring belief in which, like all kids, he could wrap himself into. Smart, sensitive child!. His emotional reaction says it all.
We had to tell Nicolas when he was 8 yo. His questions were accurate and suspicious. We, parents, began feeling stupid; the magic was disappearing on its own.
And when we finally confirmed his doubts, he first remained silent, then bombed us with a bunch of questions that aggravated our position ("so, who drank the glass of milk? Wait, YOU wrote the letter, not Santa? How about the money the toot fairy brought, it was YOURS?") .
Then he looked very upset and sad, and finally dropped the guillotine sentence, the one that turned my world around for a while: "It's not so much that Santa (and the fairy tooth) do not exist. It's the fact that all these years you have been lying to me. When you keep asking I always tell you the truth. Why does it not work both ways?"
It really hit me in the face. Guts. Heart. My guilt went wild. Were we wrong to lie, and therefore be unethical, under the pretext to maintain our kid's happiness, based on a lie ? There is so much we MUST protect kids from, all the ugly, violent, sordid, scary aspects of the grown ups' world. Each age has its (sometimes painful) learning curve an it's more than enough. But. Are we grown ups, behaving in a puerile way, pretending to believe in the unbelievable, while they, children, rise from our lies an surpass us at some point with an outstanding maturity (accepting and forgiving)? Is that a necessary path? Or a waste of time, as those generations are more and more realists, considering the new techs, AI and Internet?
And yet love remains unaltered. Kids grow up. Love grows up. We grow older and we watch them...rise, as you said!