Editing Christmas

This article appears in the December issue of Woman's Day Magazine:

The Best Christmas Ever

The kids were asleep, or at least faking it, as my husband and I pulled presents out of well-worn hiding places and stacked them under the Christmas tree. One after they other, out they came, wrapped in my cheap dime store paper. Some had my “Santa “ writing on little tags, others were designated with a black plain black marker.

I’m one of those Moms who buys Christmas present in July. But the problem with that is sometimes you forget how much you have. I had gone way over-board this year. There were lots of little things, nothing truly expensive. But by the time we finished unloading the stash it was an embarrassment of riches.

The next morning my kids’ eyes popped out when they spotted the tree. And as our slow, methodical way of opening them dragged on, even the younger ones lost enthusiasm for the pile. I snuck a few unopened presents away to stash for their birthday in April. So what if they were wrapped with snowman paper? I was practical and thrifty.

It wasn’t my kids who had asked for lots of stuff. This was me, trying to make it the best Christmas ever, hoping to add yet another wonderful remembrance to the family memory bank. “How did we get here?” I wondered, looking at the dozens of useless items strewn around the room.

When I thought back, my best Christmas ever had been the complete opposite of this past Christmas of excess. It had been the very first one my husband and I had spent as a married couple. Bob and I had just been married in the fall of 1988 and had moved to Beijing, China where he was teaching and I was working. Our “home” was a simple concrete dorm room with twin metal beds pushed together and no drinkable water in the bathrooms. We’d arrived in China with backpacks and had mailed a few boxes of other supplies by sea, which showed up months later. As the holidays approached, we realized we had no decorations, nothing in this communist country to make us feel like home. Both of us missed our families terribly. It would be the first Christmas each of us had spent away for them.

The week before Christmas, a box arrived from Bob’s mother packed with some practical items we’d requested like cereal, a warm vest and some tall flip flops to avoid the group bathroom’s filthy floors. Nestled between these gifts was an eight inch high, fake Christmas tree, complete with mini ornaments. Pulling the tree out of the box and unwrapping it, my heart soared. When an American couple at the school gave us an Amy Grant Christmas tape for our boom box, we had all that we needed.

I don’t remember what, if anything, I gave Bob or he gave me. It was a time in our life when we needed few possessions. We had nothing, just one another and the new foundation of marriage we were building. Our first four months in this very foreign land had been difficult in so many ways and magical in others. We had come to rely on each other, respect and love one another without the usual newlywed distractions of the brand new house, sparkling engagement ring, wedding presents, circle of friends and family in which to confide or vent.

I can still picture the room that Christmas morning in 1988 when we awoke. The song “Tennessee Christmas” will always take me back to that holiday, where we lit a candle under that miniature tree and played the Christmas tape that has now become part of our annual family ritual.

The little tree is still in our ornament box. Battered from having moved so much, it’s branches have opened and shut like a parasol for the last two decades. For the past five years, I’m not sure it has even been unpacked, so voluminous are our decorations.

In reaction to this past holiday, I have decided to make that little tree the centerpiece of our holiday this year. I will tell the story of that first Christmas to my children, explain to them that although there were no presents to unwrap, the gift to each other was the beginning of our family, the understanding that the best was yet to come as our life together stretched before us. This year there will be fewer items under the tree and more of the gifts that really count; love, music, togetherness, home-baked cookies, less rushing and more cherishing.

Of course, real life being what it is, it may not happen exactly the way I envision now in the months leading up to the holidays. But just the thought of slowing us down, of focusing on the simplicity and meaning of that little tree, rather than what lies under it may bring back some of the magic that the holidays offer to the very young and the very in love. I want to teach my children that the best gifts are the things we say and do for one another, the moments we can remember and hold in our minds long after the present has passed. These are the greatest treasures of families throughout the world, the gifts that evoke the magic of that long ago, very first tree.

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The Women's Sports Pages

Last Sunday I was reading the Woman’s Sports Pages in the New York Times. For the uninitiated, that’s the wedding section; the part where a happy duo smiles blithely and innocently from their cropped photo on the page.

Much had changed since my own face beamed out from my engagement photo, a rite of passage with the formal wedding announcement. For starters, in the olden days, proper etiquette dictated that the photo contain only the bride. Hence the pejorative term, in reference to the accomplishment of having “bagged” a husband. The sport was in catching a man.

Today, those same pages spill over with lesbian and gay couples, hetero duos with bright faces beaming, unaware that they are about to climb on the rollercoaster of life together, certain their love will bring them only good things and eternal happiness. There are older couples too—couples stunned with the brilliance of their good fortune at meeting so late in life or getting a second chance at marital bliss. These couples look less jaunty, perhaps more prepared. They understand that a percentage of this is simply up to the fates.

Perusing those pages I thought back to my own whirlwind wedding weekend, my open, apple-cheeked face as a new bride marrying “Robert Woodruff, of Birmingham, Michigan attorney at Sherman and Sterling” as if all of those NYT pedigreed descriptions could contain him.

Our wedding had been hasty. Although we’d dated for two years, Bob had the chance to go overseas and teach in China. He had asked me to go with him, to marry him first, a feat which we pulled off in three months, with not just a little angst on my mothers part and a lot of friction between us.

The morning after our wedding we woke up as husband and wife in a canopy bed in the Adirondacks and made our way down the Hudson River by train, holding hands as the light flashed through the window between the trees like an old newsreel. We were married. We were determined that our love was big enough and powerful enough and generous enough… was simply enough, to forge a wonderful life together. Tragedy and misfortune were for people who didn’t follow the rules, who were mean and colored outside of the lines, who disrespected others and harbored black places in their heart.

I thought about all of this last weekend as I let my eye trail down the page at the images of all those happy, expectant people. These were folks who had just gotten engaged or married, who wanted to announce it to the world with their photos, to gleefully make us a party to all that happiness and hopefulness.

Thank goodness that the world kept turning out couples like that. I reveled for a moment in the prospect of all that boundless optimism to believe that life would deal you a good hand, that love kept regenerating, even while others battled loss and depression, disappointment and sorrow.

A silly thought flashed through my mind. I pictured us now, today, on those pages, envisioning how we would appear; the set of a jaw, the look in our eyes. Our love was richer, deeper, it hid more in the folds inside of us. It was no longer moonfaced and expectant. We were long past the point where we couldn’t touch each other enough or held hands on every sidewalk. Our love had mellowed into something with real texture; the fibers of the tapestry tough and tenacious from a marriage woven of good and bad, joy and sorrow, loss and abundance.

Thinking about the miscarriages, the loss, the injury, the fear, the things we had endured together I could touch the parts in me where dreams had been compromised. I could articulate what a parallel life would look like, one in which my husband was not injured in Iraq, one in which life had kept moving forward as he flew to all the worlds breaking events, covered the 2008 election, interviewed world leaders.

How do you live in the shadow of what might have been after something big and bad happens? How do you grocery shop and car pool and cut up the salad and not let your mind wander to that parallel life, the one where only good things happen, where good people are rewarded?

And in any marriage you play the hand you are dealt. Wherever that may take you. And yet, as my friend Jim told me once, you never stop trying to get your hands on the deck.

That, I think, is the lesson we all learn, in one form or another as we struggle to make sense of what it means to choose a mate, to hitch a star to pull a collective wagon, to overcome or to simply endure.

And as we move, day in and day out into a familiar orbit, one with duller colors and smoother edges smoothed by the passage of time, we are no longer that expectant couple looking hopefully out of the engagement photo. But the rewards of the journey, are often full of unexpected goodness, beauty and moments of grace.

My two sisters and I were recently in Hawaii to celebrate my 50^th year. We shared the resort with conference attendees and honeymooners and we watched with amusement and nostalgia as they draped themselves around one another in the elevators or gazed dreamily at each other during breakfast.

“Enjoy it now!” we joked under our breath.

“This is the fantasy island part,” my sister Nan said in a feigned warning. “The rest is all downhill.” We cracked ourselves up.

But lurking under our pretend cynicism was a moment where each one of us took stock. The children, the years logged, the good health, the close family, the new families we had built. We’d all three weathered the good and the bad. We were here. We were celebrating, each raising a glass, ultimately eager to get home to our house, home to our kids, and home to our men.

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