Woe, Woe, Woe, Merry Christmas

-- Robin Givhan

My American Holiday That Never Really Was

As a child of Russian immigrants, I wanted most what my parents couldn't provide -- a normal American Christmas. Our first Christmas tree came in a box from Sears. It was plastic. We decorated it with gaudy streamers, Russian ornaments and lights, only some of which actually worked. At Christmas dinner, instead of turkey and egg nog, we had borscht and beef stroganoff. The adults drank a vodka shot to toast my grandma's birthday, which fell on the same day. Eventually, I went away to college, my grandma passed and my family stopped eating Christmas dinner and exchanging presents. This year, I'll rise at dawn to catch the bus. And when I walk in the door, there won't be turkey or egg nog or anything of the things I wanted as a kid. But I'll be home for Christmas.

-- George Tarnow

The Dreidel And the Tree

As a teenage Jew in New York City, I liked to think of Christmas as national deprivation day, the time when the airwaves were filled wall to wall with images of happy families opening piles of gifts while I was left to play dreidel and warm myself by the light of a menorah. Oh joy. One year, I fished a tree out of the garbage, brought it up to my parents' living room and decorated it with used soda cans. I threw it out before they came home. Now that I'm married to a nice Catholic girl, I carry the real tree home, on my shoulder and festoon it not with empty soda cans but a Pat Nixon key chain, my kid's Superman and Batman, and other silly ephemera. I feel better. But only slightly. Maybe pain is my thing.

-- Paul Schwartzman

Looking Closer, Seeing a Smile

Pepa eluded me -- eludes me, still. I'm reminded of this every Christmas. I don't have much of her, don't know enough about her. When I was little, I slouched on the day after Christmas every year, grumbly and fidgety, to our Catholic church in central California for a special mass to commemorate her life on the anniversary of her death. Josefa Loredo Dominquez, Pepa for short. My Spanish grandmother, my abuela, the one all the old men call a saint. I have a painting of Pepa, a profile in thick oils of a woman seated with her back to me on a flowered Spanish balcony. For a long time, I thought it was sad. She is staring into the distance at a cloud holding an iconic image -- the Golden Gate Bridge -- of the state where her only son, my father, Manuel Roig Loredo, had left Spain to settle in.

On the day after Christmas 1972, I'm told, Pepa lay down for the siesta. She and my grandfather, my abuelo, had just bought airplane tickets to go to California the next Christmas -- her first overseas trip. I was 2 when my parents and I left Spain, six on that day after Christmas in 1972 when Pepa didn't wake up. Not long ago, around Christmastime, of course, I looked closer at my painting. For the first time, I detected something I'd missed before. If I really squinted, if I really concentrated, I could see it. She is smiling. Smiling at me.

-- Manuel Roig-Franzia

A Girl and Her Doll, A Survival Story

I couldn't wait. Christmas was coming and I just knew my parents were going to get me the talking Crickett doll I wanted.

She was a 5-year old's dream: She didn't care how much I blabbed and she talked back. And on Christmas morning, she was mine. After tearing open our gifts, my sister and I took them to my bedroom to play. Then, we heard my dad frantically calling for my mom.

"Valerie!" he screamed.

The end of the hallway was engulfed in flames from the floor to the ceiling. It turns out that he had mistakenly poured gasoline into the kerosene heater. As he tried to put out the fire, my mom yelled for my sister and me to get out of the house. Then, after pulling the rollers from her hair and changing out of her bathrobe, she fled, too, with my dad. Left behind were my beloved Crickett and our other new toys.

By the time I saw my doll again, her pale complexion and blond pigtails were covered with black ash. They cleaned her up as much as they could and gave her back to me. Somehow, I barely noticed the ashy tinge to her face. I loved her just the same.

-- January W. Payne

From the Basement Of My Heart

I begged my mother to marry him. Not so much because I liked him, but because he drove a sleek brown Monte Carlo, and his name was Mr. Brown. (My father's name was Mr. Brown too, but he and my mother had divorced long ago.) So if my mother married this new Mr. Brown, the white teachers would no longer ask me with condescension whether my mother's last name was Brown too.

I do not remember the wedding at the courthouse between my mother and Mr. Brown. What I do remember is when the new Mr. Brown moved into our little house, the house with four girls and Curtis Mayfield music and a red crushed velvet sofa and green shag wall-to-wall carpet, he was nice enough at first. Then he took away our Christmas.

My mother, trying to make him happy, complied with the demands of his religion. From that day forward, we didn't have a Christmas tree. We used to tell our friends that the tree was in the basement.

It wasn't.

But it was in the basement where we exchanged presents among my mother and my sisters, secretly unwrapping the secretly wrapped gifts. The cheap perfume we bought at Kmart for my mother. The Barbie dolls. The bell-bottom pants. The envelopes from my mother, each with a $100 bill tucked inside.

My mother and Mr. Brown would later divorce. My mother would not remember all those secret Christmases in the basement.

But as I sit at night, looking at my own Christmas tree with its white blinking lights, tall as the ceiling, as big a tree as I could carry off the lot, as many presents as I can stuff under the tree, standing as close to the picture window as possible, I remember emerging from the basement of my childhood, running up the stairs with my gifts.

-- DeNeen L. Brown