A shriek of frustration came from the dining room.
I poked my head in from the kitchen, where I was drying dishes. The table was cluttered with wrapping paper, boxes, ribbons, bows, scissors, felt, thread, buttons and a sewing machine. Half draped across the sewing machine was a red felt Christmas stocking. It looked like my wife, Kate, had just thrown the stocking.
“It’s ruined!” she cried.
“What?” I asked.
“That.” She jabbed a finger at the stocking. “There are moth holes in the back. How could I not have noticed? Now Frances won’t have a stocking!”
Kate had been working on it for weeks. “My brothers and sister and I all had handmade stockings,” she’d explained. “So I have to sew Frances a stocking.”
Frances was our one-year-old daughter, at that moment asleep in her crib. It didn’t matter that Christmas is one of the busiest seasons for Kate, a priest at an Episcopal church. It didn’t matter that she’d had to trek all over Manhattan to finally find a tiny fabric store in Chinatown with the kind of wool felt she needed. It especially didn’t matter that I’d pointed out Frances was too young to care about stockings, or that I’d pleaded for a peaceful, stress-free Christmas.
“You could try being more supportive,” she’d replied.
Now Christmas was just days away. Soon my mom, her friend and my brother would be arriving to stay with us. Kate had to write a sermon. Gifts were waiting to be wrapped. And there was the stocking. Kate picked it up and ran her finger over the holes.
“The felt must have been old,” she said. She’d already sewn ribbon across the top. Flower-shaped buttons and gold thread to write Frances’ name lay on the table. “I don’t know if I have time to start over.” She looked at me. “Frances needs a stocking!”
“Well,” I said, “I tried to tell you—”
Her face hardened. “Jim, I don’t need a Christmas lecture right now. If you’re not going to help, let me figure it out.”
She turned back to the stocking. I retreated to the kitchen.
The counter was cluttered there too. Kate was baking sugar cookies to give to her colleagues. One batch cooled on a rack. Powdered sugar spilled from a bowl. The oven timer ticked down. Gift bags of chocolate from parishioners lined up next to presents for Frances, some from people I didn’t even know. The timer beeped.
“Could you take those cookies out?” Kate called. I set down the dishtowel. I don’t even like sugar cookies, I thought.
This wasn’t the first time Kate and I had disagreed about Christmas. I remembered airily telling her roommate when we were dating how foolish I thought it was for couples to argue over such a thing. “What’s to argue about? It’s just a holiday.”
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Well, the next year I did have a few objections. Why did Kate insist on getting a tree when we weren’t even going to be home? We were spending that Christmas with family on the West Coast.
Didn’t she know some of those ornaments she’d saved all those years were kind of tacky? I came home from work one day to hear Bing Crosby on the stereo. Bing Crosby’s not really my style. And this business of making cookies for everyone at church—what a hassle! Add to that hours of gift-wrapping and exhausting Christmas services. I felt like some sort of Christmas machine was taking over our lives.
Actually, there was more to it than that. I have a vexed relationship with Christmas. I’m not sure why. My own holiday memories are wonderful. I’d lie awake late into the night at my grandmother’s house, my brother in the next bed, both of us straining to hear the slightest rustle of Santa’s arrival.
We competed over who got to hang the final angel ornament on the Christmas tree advent calendar. We got to open one gift on Christmas Eve, a moment of exquisite, torturous deliberation. We ate roast beef and lots of pie.
Somehow, though, by the time I was grown up, I’d decided Christmas was one of my least favorite holidays. I love the church season of Advent. I love Christmas Eve services with all their candles and ancient carols. And I love especially the idea of setting time aside to remember that moment 2,000 years ago when everything changed.
I’m overcome staring at the slightly beat-up, out-of-scale crèche our church erects before the altar. I try to reconcile the enormity of the event with the tiny helplessness of the baby. Some vast mystery of God is expressed in that helplessness. What is it?
The rest of Christmas, though, I can do without. All the gift-giving feels like consumerism run amok. The cheer seems forced. People exhaust themselves lugging packages and fractious kids across the country. Where’s the God in that?
I took the cookies from the oven and set them on the cooling rack. Why did that stocking matter so much to Kate? Why, for that matter, were we arguing so much more this year? I’d made my peace with the Christmas ornaments. And I thought we’d solved the Bing Crosby problem—Kate played him when I wasn’t around.
Somehow, though, Frances’ arrival seemed to have ratcheted up the holiday tension. I dried the last of the dishes and decided to leave Kate alone. If she wanted to let the Christmas machine whip her into a frenzy, fine.
We got ready for bed, brushing our teeth in silence. I wandered into the living room and looked to where my old stocking—made by a friend of my parents’—and Kate’s hung, softly lit by Christmas tree lights.
Kate’s was pretty cute, I had to admit, with “Katie” sewn in felt letters and a little jingle bell on the toe. I tried to picture her all those years ago holding the stocking in her tiny hands. What would Frances look like holding hers?
We got into bed. Kate lay quietly, hands folded across her chest. I pretended to read. “I’m not going to make the stocking,” she said quietly. I put down my book. “I’d have to start from scratch and I don’t have time. I still have to write a sermon and wrap up those cookies.”
I was about to find a delicate way to say, “Told you so,” when I looked over and saw her tears. I took her hand. “Kate, what’s wrong?” She didn’t answer. “What’s wrong? Tell me.”
She was silent a while longer, then suddenly it all came out in a rush. “I’m a terrible mom and Frances is going to have the worst Christmas. I know you say she won’t know, but I’ll know. My mom always did so many great things for us at Christmas. She and Dad used to set up our little crèche, and late Christmas Eve night they’d put the baby Jesus in there and I always thought he appeared by magic. Now we’re so far away from them and you don’t even care about Christmas. How do I make all that happen for Frances by myself? If I was a better mom I could do it, but I can’t.”
She wiped her eyes. All my ranting about Christmas, my tsk-ing about to-do lists—it shriveled up. I reached over and put my arms around her. “Don’t say that,” I said. “You’re a great mom.” We lay like that a long time.
I thought about the messy dining room table, the sugar cookies, the gifts. And I thought about the stocking. How on earth could I ever have objected to giving Frances, no matter how old, a taste of beloved Christmas memories?
That wasn’t the Christmas machine. That was love, as clear an expression of God’s vast mystery as anyone could ask for. Besides, it mattered to Kate and Kate mattered to me. I held her tight. And I told her we were all—yes, all of us—going to have a wonderful Christmas.
