How I Learned to Love Being Single For the Christmas Holiday

Somewhere, at the back of my mind, there’s a huge “HUMBUG” sign flashing red, green, and white. It’s not a figment of my imagination. When I was a kid, my Dad, horrified by twinkling Christmas lights everywhere, erected a Marquis-sized “HUMBUG” sign over the front doorway of our house.  I pulled on my mother’s hand, cocked my head upward and pointed to the sign, “What’s that say, Ma?” I had just emerged from toddler stage and was still stumbling through Green Eggs and Ham, so the sign was a mystery to me.

“Hmmmughhh,” said my Mother, her lips clenched so tightly the sounds got trapped behind her teeth. She was glaring at my Father as he charged through the crowd of perfectly respectable, Christmas-loving neighbors who had gathered to tsk-tsk and oh-my.

I tugged on her hand again. “What?”

“It means Daddy’s off his rocker and we’re getting a divorce.”  She crossed her arms with a harrumph.

Well, she didn’t actually say that but she must have been thinking it as she looked over to see ol’ Scrooge waving to a reporter he recognized from a local newspaper. Seconds later, blinding white camera lights flashed. The next day, there we were on the front cover of the paper’s lifestyle section— “The Family That Hated Christmas.”

Ever since then, it’s been downhill when it comes to me and Christmas. It’s not like I haven’t tried. After my parents divorced (who saw that coming?), my Mother remarried a Jewish guy and they spent the holidays in Florida. That left my sister and me with Dad, and what I would later refer to as his freewheeling bohemian life. The Christmas after I turned eight, for instance, we went sailing in the British Virgin Island—the guilt trip from Dad that said, sorry for wrecking the family, kids. It was my first plane ride and taking off, I discovered, was more thrilling than terrorizing babysitters. It felt like a thousand years of boredom after that, though, made worse by having to listen to my Dad’s James-Bond-with-children routine.

“Come fly away with me on the wings of love,” he crooned to the smiling stewardess with the  short honey blond hair. She had draped herself over the headrest of his seat, a steaming coffee pot dangling from a couple of fingers. Having assigned myself the role of Dad Manager since the so called adult-in-charge had lost control of his senses, I poked him hard with my elbow. “Daaaadddd! Stop this insanity!” He guffawed. The stewardess giggled and they kept making goo-goo eyes at each other. I sucked back the rising vomit.

“I’ll be back in a flash,” the stewardess said blowing him a kiss and spinning around to head back to the galley.

“Okay, Pammy,” Dad said, his eyes glued to the swaying hips in the tight navy skirt, “Go to the bathroom and if she asks, tell her you kids desperately need a mother.” I picked out the party wieners from the gray scrambled eggs going cold from breakfast and  jammed one in each ear. “I would rather die,” I said.

It never got any better, which made me long for—no, obsess over—the perfect Christmas. By the time I was in my late teens, I was addicted to the idea, which after I threw in the love interest, looked like Staying Alive meets Miracle on 34h Street with maybe a little Doctor Zhivago thrown in for atmosphere. By my twenties, it was pretty clear to me that my Christmas Miracle wasn’t about to happen—at least, not in my family. So I started crashing other people’s holiday celebrations. Yup, I had a turkey on my back and nothing was going to stop me.

First, there was a Dutch family who lived on a farm and didn’t believe in central heating or drinking anything stronger than herbal tea. Then the Chinese family who served 89 courses, leaving me to wonder worriedly if my stomach would explode. The Tibetans who drank beer, sang folk songs, and danced all night. The Korean twins who suddenly whipped out a tape to measure me up for a silk dress. The French Canadians who drank beer as strong as vodka and ran outside to piss their names in the snow. The Germans who drank beer the way I drink water and pissed in the right place. The Italians who after drinking too much wine, wanted to find some stop signs to shoot out, only this was Canada and no one had a gun. And finally, the Armenians—the family that made me really question my ways.

I’d met the son of the Armenian family at a shoe store where he was a salesman. After chatting for half an hour, he said, “Come walk away with me on the soles of love,” and I was his.

The Christmas dinner was a simple affair. His mother kept up a steady stream of Farsi, her eyes fixed on the platter of basmati rice as though it were the only thing that could really understand. After dinner, a pound of lamb kebab fermenting away noisily in my gut, we watched television for 300 years. Forced to stifle the gas I so badly wanted to let rip, I caused myself permanent damage, the effects of which still torment me to this day.

After that, I went cold turkey on the Christmas crashing. But then something happened that started the festive itch back up again. I joined a dating service in September and decided right then and there that this would be the Christmas I’d give myself the gift of marriage.

Jeremy was the fourth date the service set me up with. He had kids. They were crazy about Christmas. Oh my gawd, I thought to myself, I have so hit the jackpot. After dating a month, he proposed to me as we stood staring out at the ocean from the edge of a precipice (mere coincidence?). Placing a ring of white gold bands that formed an “X” on my finger, he said, “Come sail away with me and be my first mate on the ship of life.” I think I saluted and said, “Reel me in, Captain.”

That Christmas dinner, I flipped out somewhere between Grandpa’s head making a crash landing in his plate of turkey and gravy soaked potatoes; Jeremy escaping during cleanup to make an emergency call to his therapist; and my trying separate the kids sparring like cage fighters over the TV remote.

We decided a fast split was best.

For the longest time after that, I felt I’d failed. Crazy as it sounds, Christmas had come to symbolize the tip of the iceberg—if the holiday was great, it meant your life was, too. It was one of those beliefs that I’d formed at age two and just couldn’t shake. My rational mind was telling me to give up and become an atheist. My heart said, like one more turkey dinner’s going to kill you? So I went back to Christmas crashing. It was better than facing the holidays alone.

It all came to a crashing halt, though, the day my Dad told me he had cancer. We were sitting on opposite sides of his desk, as though I were one of his advertising clients and he had to break the news that the campaign just wasn’t working. I burst into tears and he got up to hug me as I fell to my knees, holding onto his legs as though that would stop him from leaving. A year later, he was dead with Christmas just two weeks away.

Grief obliterated all thoughts of the holidays that year. On Christmas day, I went for a run in the park. It was  windy cold and snowy dark outside. I ran until I couldn’t feel my toes in my icy wet running shoes. I ran until exhaustion made hazy the memory of Dad’s dying face and that sound of his last breathe—the exhale that never knew another inhale.

At some point, maybe after a couple of hours, I dropped onto a park bench, sharp icicles hanging from its edges. That’s when it happened. All the tears, from all those times—the words spoken and not, things I should of done or did, people I tried to get close to but couldn’t, every hurt I’d felt or caused, all those lonely silent moments, and all that pretending that a Christmas Miracle would fill in the hole like concrete being poured into a chasm. It all came up, sitting on that bench, that cold Christmas day. And then, after a while, it just stopped. I inhaled deeply, breath shocking my lungs to attention, and then it hit me. Hey, I’m breathing. I’m here. And even in those moments when I feel as thin as air, it’s nothing compared the nothingness of death. So long as one breath leads to another, I realized, there’s still a me filling the moment.

Seems so simple, doesn’t it? Finally getting the next breath is the only gift that matters after glimpsing the infinite emptiness that death can make. But it helped. I got up, slapped some feeling back into my frozen thighs, wiped my face, and started on my way back. By the time I got home, I had planned out the details of what has since become an annual tradition, The Feast of Miracles. If you have no where to go and are big on the miracle of breathing, you’re invited. Just be sure to leave your humbug’s at the door.

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