CHRISTMAS FUN, FAMILIES, FRICTION AND FLIGHT

I write this Christmas blog on Christmas Day aboard a Delta flight en route to Tokyo, Thailand, Viet Nam and Cambodia. Well, the plane is only going to stop in Tokyo, and then we will get out for a few days before heading on to the other stops.

For the last ten years we tend to go away for Christmas as the family friction eventually became too much to deal with and I wanted to have peaceful holidays.

Since writing this blog many people have come up to me and voluntarily admitted how many problems they have with their own families, how many of them don’t speak to one parent or sometimes both. How many women suffer emotional battering by mothers who they only want to love them.

And then they are faced with the burden of having to be jolly and pretend all is well in this happy, cheery, family friendly time of year.

It’s a lot of pressure and many who can choose to escape do. Others endure and the lucky ones have families they are thrilled to see. And the joviality is for real and not painted on.

I have a love-hate relationship with the holidays. I love them because they are well, the holidays– I love the lights and the trees and, God knows, the gifts. I kind of hate the songs; there are days I can take them but sometimes I will be in a store and HARK THE HERALD ANGEL comes blaring through the speakers and I get weepy.

My holidays as long as I can remember have been a mixture of fun and friction.

My mother who I was deeply close to for decades had a profound  fondness for Christmas. And she set out to make Christmas a fun event even if often times it was just the two of us.

We started celebrating the end of November when we would go to San Francisco for a few days. This always signaled to me that the holidays were about to begin.

We always stayed at the Clift Hotel and headed straight for Blums where I would down a giant peppermint sundae. The next stop was City of Paris, a department store that has now morphed into Neimans, but back in the olden days it was a grand store with a giant tree. She would hold my hand and we would gaze at the magnificent  tree; year after year, tree after tree it always amazed us. These were the good days for the most part, days that would turn into decades and while problems existed like in every relationship it seemed too close to imagine it would explode the way it ultimately did.  But back in the late sixties it was a little girl and her mother totally mesmerized by a giant tree and mutually excited by the upcoming holiday.  For many years my mother was steadfast in her commitment  that she would give me a good holiday regardless, trees and trips and gifts and cheer, no matter what the price.

See my mother loved Christmas and really loved a Christmas tree. She loved looking at them, thinking about them and most of all assembling her own. She didn’t just buy a tree and throw on some lights and balls, it was a one week affair that required step ladders, gloves and rolls and rolls of pink angel hair. The tree had to be white and big and it sat in the window for all to see. She covered it with pink lights and then covered each light with a handmade pink angel hair ball, so it gave off this ethereal pink light and made the whole thing look like a giant confection.  The angel hair was the icing on the cake so to speak, now angel hair was spun glass or something and it looked just like cotton candy.  I think it has been taken off the market as it proved to be toxic. Perhaps a metaphor for things to come.

Mom needed to wear gloves as the angel hair was anything but angelic and would cut your hands if you touched it. But it made a beautiful tree and she was always so proud of it and I was always delighted by it. I think she put so much work into it as not only did she love it herself,  she wanted me to have good Christmases since her own as a child were either non- existent or fraught with issues.

While the tree itself gave us both great pleasure it was the source of tremendous family friction. The tree was always the beginning of the fun and the beginning of the annual holiday family feud. My grandparents who for the most part were our only family did not like or approve of the tree. I don’t think Grandma could have cared less as she just wanted some family fun, though at the end of the day she was incapable of really having it, but it drove my grandfather around the bend. While he was a Jew, he was not an observant one in any way.  They were not members of a Temple nor did they ever celebrate any of the Jewish holidays. In fact I did not know such holidays even existed until I hit my twenties.

I am still shocked that everyone does not have a tree. But my grandfather, while not observant, was attentive to certain details and one of those was the tree. It represented something to him that still doesn’t entirely make sense to me as he never cared about anything else and while not denying certainly down played his Judaism.  I don’t know if it had to do with his mother, or he wanted in some way to upset my mother, it gave her so much pleasure he should have just left it all alone. But he couldn’t, I think it was a holdover from when she was a girl and wanted a tree, now she had her own house, her own child and she wanted her own tree and she was capable of making the prettiest one in town.

But he was so distressed by the tree he would not come in the house while it was up. This caused endless arguments, weeks without communication between my mother and her parents and ultimately some sort of détente was reached, at least in the early years of my childhood.   It was usually resolved by them coming to Santa Barbara and all of us having dinner at Biltmore; then my mother and I opening our presents under our tree without them in the morning.  I don’t remember this being a problem, as somehow my mother’s holiday exuberance overrode the need to open presents with her parents.

I do remember one year when détente could not be reached for some reason and my grandparents drove up in the Cadillac full of gifts, grandma schlepped all the gifts in the house while grandpa stayed in the car reading the newspaper.

But most years we worked it out and would end up around noon on Christmas morning over at the Biltmore opening presents with them and if I was speaking to my father I would go to his house and have a portion of Christmas with his family. Another story all together…..

Strangely despite all the to and fro and multiple family events that always had some tension around them I remember Christmases being fun. There was one year we all went to Palm Springs and mom snuck a fake tree in our room so grandpa couldn’t see it. I remember us getting up at four am and turning on the lights and giggling about it. Eventually the tree fight was avoided all together and we would simply meet my grandparents either the day before or the day after and do a meal and gift exchange with them.

The Christmases after that revolved around friends and parties and endless gifts. My mother was very popular back then and had a job that made many want favors from her, so that resulted in loads of people giving gifts to both of us.On Christmas Eve she and I would drive around Santa Barbara delivering gifts and singing carols; perhaps why I get teary when I hear certain songs.

How could love so right turn out to be so wrong?

After my grandfather died we made a few attempts to have Christmas meals with grandma, but she would inevitably cause some scene or have some fake illness that would totally throw a grenade into the whole holiday.

So my mother, still soldiering on in search of the perfect holiday, decided we would have a giant Christmas party on Christmas Day. This became a big event and one that went on for years. I think it still does without me there, but it’s become more of an institution of a Santa Barbara of years gone by. Those memories of Christmas remain good: we didn’t have much of a family but we made one of all our friends. Always trying to overcome the family issues, overcome the lack of members, keep some spirit alive and gather many to admire the tree. I give her credit for it and there were many memorable Christmases because of her energy and devotion to the spirit of Christmas.

We tried to include Grandma but by that point she was deeply committed to a holiday marked by misery.  The final straw with Christmas withGrandma came the year she was coming to the party with great enthusiasm to meet Robert Mitchum. This is not name dropping; the Mitchums were very good friends and a staple around our angel hair tree.  Grandma, who was movie star crazy, was dying to meet Bob. So she got a new dress, drove up and talked about it for weeks before.

The day of the party, we had spent the day with her and I imagine she was getting on our nerves a little, she was good at that, she’s a parent, it was the holidays– it’s like fruitcake you can’t avoid it. At around four we were going into full throttle getting our act together as people started to arrive at six or so.  Grandma wanted to hang out with us and watch us slice smoked salmon and I guess just be with us.  But we felt she should go back to the hotel and take a bath and a rest and I would come pick her up in an hour and a half.  At the time it didn’t seem like a big deal, an hour and a half, we’d get a breather and she could catch her breath.

I dropped her off and said I will be back at five –thirty.

At five-thirty I went back to collect her only to find she had checked out and driven back to LA. Not a good-bye, not a word, she just left. She was capable of odd behavior but this was really beyond the beyond.

I remember we were mad, confused, and then guilty– which might have been her goal. I don’t know what the reason was and it was never discussed or resolved. It think confusion and a certain resentment remained on all sides. And from that point on it became Christmas without her.  My mother figured she had made her choice, she did not want to be part of a group or maybe she couldn’t. Or maybe this was a lifelong family tradition- someone had to do something to detonate the joy.  There were not many of us so once Grandpa and his tree dilemma were gone Grandma had to take over.

After that my mother spent several Christmases with me in New York, and we had one heavenly New Years in Rio.  Grandma was left to her own devices which I think was alone and now I feel guilty. Though as I write this I realize we really had no choice. That is the thing with families and holidays. Should one or more be allowed to wreck it for the group?  Does being an unmitigated pain in the ass revoke your family holiday rights? There is a point when you can’t go on with people. But Christmas is this odd holiday where families feel compelled to suffer even though they should be joyful.

It’s a question that is hard to answer, but when you really think about it, it’s a holiday whose catchphrase is peace on earth- therefore those who don’t abide shouldn’t be allowed to participate.

What makes my family Christmas story doubly odd is the year my grandmother died was the year Taylor was born and the year my mother decided to pick up the family habit of destroying Christmas. The same ritual she had spent her life fighting she adopted with vigor.

Grandma had died in October, Taylor was eight months old for her first Christmas. I had a tree, my mother-in-law, a husband and the baby I had always wanted. We had new family of people to work with – a new type of tradition could now be formed.

While my ex-mother-in-law was not the most exuberant of personalities she required little attention and her habit was to be quiet and to herself, she was not demanding like my family. We had a new baby to celebrate and this Christmas was for her.

But my mother had been invited to a Christmas  luncheon where Sean Connery would be in attendance.  She told me new grandchild or not she would not miss that for the world.  In fact her exact words to me were “If I have the choice of spending Christmas with Sean Connery or you there is no choice.” She did drive to LA and we raced through gifts so she could be done and on the road by nine am to make it to Sean by noon. The stop watch was on, she tore through her gifts, we opened ours and she flew out of the house.  It didn’t dawn on me at that moment, but the habit of someone wrecking holidays was so ingrained in the family dynamic someone had to do it, so it would now be her.

I tried for several more years- a trip to Hawaii where she didn’t like the people we travelled with and complained endlessly. But I kept on trying, if she were going to be the destroyer I would take over the job of holiday creator.  Our new family was as lopsided as the old one only with different participants.

But I decided I would make the most of it – I would make great holidays.

One year I missed New York so much I planned that we would all meet there. I made meticulous plans, tickets for Radio City, a Broadway show, great restaurants and Christmas Eve I hired a limo to take us all to see the amazing lights in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. After dinner at Peter Luger, one of my ex’s favorites, a giant car came and collected us.  Everyone piled in the car all excited to go see the lights. Somehow my mother ended up on the jump seat. No one was paying attention and she never said a word, but she felt it was some conspiracy to ruin her evening as her back or leg hurt and she was uncomfortable, but instead of doing the adult thing and asking one of the younger people to take the jump seat she sat there harboring resentment and anger like her mother at the Biltmore years before.

By the time we returned to the hotel she wasn’t speaking to me or my mother in law, she stormed off to her room without  a word to anyone.  I then spent the night of this Christmas Eve I had spent so much time not to mention money arranging, fretting as to what I had done and why was she always so upset. I dreaded the next morning of gift opening as I knew it would just be a continuum of the night before – in fact it was worse, she pouted, and fumed and accused me of stomping on my gifts. She hated her gifts and headed to her room where she locked herself in for two days.

She would later boast to friends that she spent the days in the tub eating caviar and drinking champagne.

That was one of the last Christmases I spent with her. Much like the stance she took with her parents decades before I would not allow my children’s holidays to be spoiled. And I do not.

There are four of us now, and we always go away. It’s become our tradition. When the kids were younger we did the resort thing, but now that they are old enough we go somewhere exotic where we all see and learn new things as a family.

It’s not very Norman Rockwell but it’s become our tradition and no one has spoiled it yet.

I wish things were different and my mother behaved in such a way that she was sitting in seat 11 F next to Lucy.  She was always great fun to travel with and it would be swell if she could see her grandchildren’s faces the first time they see The Ginza or  we all see the sunrise over Ankor Wat together.But life did not conspire to make that happen and in the same way she saved and made happy holidays for me it’s my job and my delight to do that with Lucy and Taylor.

I think we go to exotic places because not only do we like them, but they remain the best memories I have with my mother. When I take the girls to the fish market in Tokyo day after tomorrow part of her will be there with me.  When I show them the giant golden Buddha in Bangkok, I will remember the first time I saw it with her.

There are some things nothing can destroy.