Saturday, November 7, 2009

7. Christmas Cookies

Cookies are what you leave on the plate for Santa Claus so he can find your Christmas tree and leave your presents. Cookies are what the website leaves on your computer so it can get back into your computer. It may leave a Barbie dream house or it may leave a Trojan or a worm. Either way, cookies are the bits of memory that can warm your heart or crash your internal hard drive. Some people leave unwelcome presents.


Holidays, especially Christmas, have always been a difficult time for me. I can never live up to the Hallmark card moments that the advertising industry thinks I should. I am always a day late and a dollar short. The turkey is still frozen, the Christmas lights don’t work and I’ve run out of scotch tape. No matter how much time and money I invest in these “festive events” they are anything but festive.

I’m not sure why on some particular day, at some designated hour, you MUST be happy. You must celebrate. It’s like the New Year’s Eve scam. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been scoring a ten on the happiness scale all year long, if at midnight on New Year’s Eve – you’re caught in a traffic jam, fighting with your lover or in the Emergency Room with a ruptured appendix – you are a failure and your year is doomed.

Starting before long before the infamous Penny Play Pal incident the holiday season was never really a time for celebration at our house. Christmas for any single parent is a struggle but especially for one who lives on tips. For them, it’s always a nail biter finish. In the effort to do the Santa magic, many of the frills are left out. No Christmas tree, no fireplace, no stockings on the mantle,

When we were kids, we didn’t have our own Christmas tree. Instead we would pile in the car and drive downtown to look at the lights. We’d sit huddled in the backseat trying to keep warm. Our tender legs would be frozen to the vinyl seats and our heads would try to crawl inside coat collars like turtles. We’d make the drive up to see the fancy decorations on the mansions of the Fords or Dodge’s in Grosse Pointe. The streets were lined with tiny lights that made it seem like you were driving into a magic fairy land. We’d sit bundled up in the backseat gushing with delight at each new house.

We always made a trip downtown to see Hudson’s department store. It was always the center point of Christmas celebration. The window displays had mechanical dolls dressed like elves. One window filled Santa’s bag and loaded his sleigh. Other windows had Mrs. Clause making cookies, and elves making Christmas stockings. The 13 floor was the North Pole where Santa Clause took requests and photographers took pictures for a fee. A weekend shopping trip to Hudson’s was a kind of rite of passage for young girls. It was the place to shop for perfume and scarves and stop for lunch on the mezzanine or get coney island hot dogs at Lafayette Coney Island.

Years after I was grown with kids of my own, I went home to Michigan for Christmas. On a lark I took the bus downtown and thought I’d stop in Hudson’s for some shopping and sightseeing. The bus trip was longer than I remembered but it was fine. I got off at the regular stop and walked towards Hudson’s. I walked past the building with the Coney Island hot dogs, the place where I worked when I was only eighteen and then found the Hudson building. The first door I tried was locked and the windows were empty. I tried another door, another door, turned the corner and tried again. I kept walking, round and round the building. No matter how many times I walked around it remained empty and bolted shut.

I finally gave up and took the bus home. On the way home I actually looked out the window. The city really is a wheel. Neighborhoods circle the city – with the low rent districts closest to the center. The farther out you go, the higher the rent and the whiter the tenants. Now, it looked like the city was ground zero from some atomic bomb. Concentric circles of empty boarded up buildings and tenement slums, invading even the white suburbs. That day was a rude awakening for me. I had no idea my city was so broken, that it had been left for dead.

Back the story. Shortly after my mother and stepfather married, we moved out of the inner-city. We moved from the upper and lower flat, Ma and Pop corner store, to the rows of single family houses and manicured lawns that were the reward for the WWII soldiers and their families. We moved to the city where all of my step-father’s family lived. He had a really big family – three brothers and two sisters and all of their kids. Suddenly, we were part of a big family.

That first year in the suburbs, I discovered the family Christmas party. My mother was home all the time because she no longer needed to work. She loved being at home and became the happy homemaker. She sewed and cooked and planted tomatoes in the back yard. She’d visit with the neighbors for coffee and bowl on the weekends with the Ladies League.

That first Christmas she was in her prime. She loved to sew and she made Christmas table linens and all the decorations. But her crowing glory was the baking. She made three kinds of fudge, sugar cookies that she decorated with sprinkles and icing, and those Swedish nut balls that kind of melt in your mouth. Oh yea, she made fruitcake too. I think someone is still using them as doorstops. But aside from the fruitcakes, the baking was great.

The week of Christmas was a week of parties. One night we’d all pile in the car and drive to a cousin or uncle’s house. My step-father would warm the car up first so it was nice and toasty. We’d pile in with stacks of presents and baked goods. When we got there, we’d walk up together and ring the door bell. When they answered we’d all say “Merry Christmas!” The next night it was a different relative, different food, different presents. One night it was our house. My mother was in heaven. So was I. I loved it all, the noise the family, the piles of coats on the bed. I loved feeling like I belonged somewhere.

Until that Christmas, I never really expected much. Santa came some years and some years it was a sock full of coal. But once those Christmas cookies got in my brain, once I knew the glow of lights from our own Christmas tree and the chatter of family feasts – I could not go back to the austerity of my early childhood. I would be forever yearning to repeat that Christmas and to know that feeling of being part of a family; the inclusiveness and security.

The first Christmas after the divorce, after my mother had been taken away to the mental institution, I stayed alone in the house. My half-a-sister Rayleen took baby sister Kitty to live with relatives. None of the relatives wanted me. They had been told that I drove my mother crazy. Who would want a girl who drove her mother crazy? So I walked home from the basketball game and went to bed. The next morning I dressed and went to school. I kept doing that until it was Christmas break. Days passed alone in the house.

They turned off the gas heat and water. Then they turned off the electricity. Some nights I stood at the picture window in the living room and looked at the houses that lined the street. They all had their trees sitting in front of their picture windows. Like the girls in the windows on the street in Amsterdam – each shouting “pick me! I’m the prettiest!’

The glow from the houses was a golden yellow. I could see people walking in and out of the rooms; wrapping gifts, greeting guests and sharing the holiday. A group of carolers came by and I stood in the dark and silent room trying not to let the frost from my breath escape. After they left, I leaned against the window and felt the icy cold on my forehead.

The giant walnut tree in the front yard was naked now. Its branches covered in ice. Last summer, when life seemed to hold so much promise, the tree was alive. Its leaves covered the yard and kept us cool during the Indian summer. That’s when I would lay on the cement porch, listen to the radio and daydream. I took a mental picture of those moments – as though I knew I’d need them later. Now the tree was stripped bare gleaming in the moonlight, all sparkly and strangely beautiful. It was as though all the buds and leaves, all the heat of that summer, all the promise of that beginning was locked inside the ice, never to age, never to fade, but never to grow beyond those early first buds. Like the tree I felt like I was encased in ice. Standing in that window that Christmas, is the last memory I have from that time. There are weeks after this that are blank space. The next thing I know Christmas vacation is over, I’m standing in the principal’s office and he says to me “you can’t come back to school until you have parents.”


This image, this event, is why Cheney calls me the “poor little match girl.” He says that this feeling of isolation and abandonment is as much a part of me as my eye color. I admit the girl in the window is dear to me.

Whenever anyone gets too close I am frozen in the window again waiting to be abandoned. I know that I have to let go of that image if I am to move forward. But I am tied to it until I can fill in the missing pieces of time.

A few years ago, the half-a-sister told me that she sent the step father over to visit me during that blank time. She and the rest of my family had abandoned. No one came to check on me. No one took me home with them for Christmas. But she told me that she sent my step father over to “visit me”. The idea tormented me. Then I realized that was just what she wanted. I began to remember all the mysterious lies that cluttered my life and as I searched my way through, she was always there, standing on the sidelines, popping her chewing gum.


Cookies. She left me poison cookies.

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