I’m Dreaming Of A White Christmas

Every year during the holiday season when we were growing up, my sister and I would stay up late to watch White Christmas. Long before video tapes and then DVDs, White Christmas would play just once a year and usually late at night. We both loved that movie and knew all the words to every song. As movies from the 1950s tended to go, it was pretty hokey and unbelievable. Chance meetings and instant connections, a retired general down on his luck, and snow magically appearing just in time to save the inn for the ski season. We didn’t care, though, about the unbelievable part of the movie. It was the hokey that was the attraction.

This year as the kids and I cried and stumbled through Thanksgiving, we convinced ourselves that Christmas without Mark would be easier. By far, Mark loved Thanksgiving more as a good turkey got him more excited than any present ever could. One year after having one at a Boy Scout campout, he deep-fried a turkey and never stopped talking about it. I wasn’t a fan because there was no dressing and no pan drippings to make the gravy but he didn’t care about that. Every Thanksgiving after that he’d say, “Remember that time I deep fried that turkey? Wouldn’t you say that’s the best turkey we ever had?” And I would say, “You mean when we had dressing from a box and gravy from a jar? That time? Yes, yes, I do remember that.” And I knew he wasn’t even listening to me as he recalled pulling that golden, beautiful turkey out of the fryer with nary an overboil of hot oil that would have burned the house down.

When the kids were young, Mark and I would take a day off work and Christmas shop, knocking it out in a single day. We always stayed on a pretty strict budget, spending the same amount on each of the kids and not going overboard with each other. As the kids got older we kept the same patterns, shopping together and staying in our budget except for the time a few years ago when he took Will to help him shop for me at a store where I used to work. He liked going there because the manager and I had worked together in two different places so he trusted Marianne when it came to picking things out for me. That year they picked out $700 worth of clothes and I would end up taking most of it back. I told Will his job was to keep his dad in line and he had failed. “I couldn’t stop him, Mom,” Will said. “Everything they said you’d like he put in the pile. I told him it was too much but he wouldn’t put anything back.” Budget shmudget was Mark’s response to me. What’s wrong with spoiling your girl at Christmas?

A few weeks ago I was at Target and bought two stockings. I knew it was dumb but I felt like the stockings represented that two people lived in this house, that it was filled with love and dreams and laughter, that there were plans made every day. A plan for dinner or laundry or yard work, a plan for the weekend, a plan for travel, a plan for the life ahead. The walls of this house held no plan for death, for being alone, for suicide.  

On my Facebook feed a link showed up for Oprah’s favorite things. I took the bait and one of the things on it was a bike helmet that had lights imbedded into the design. Mark would have loved this. All winter he rode home from work in the dark and being visible to drivers was necessary for his safety. He wore a neon jacket, had a light on the front and back of his bike, a light on the back of his helmet. This entire helmet, though, lit up from front to back and it is easy for me to imagine him being so enamored by it that he would show it to everyone, much like a kid with a new set of Legos.  

Watching t.v. and clicking around one night, I stumbled onto AMC where Christmas movies play around the clock this month. Twice I’ve watched White Christmas, captivated again by the hokeyness of this old movie where falling in love and snow drifting from the set of a musical during the finale saves the general’s inn from bankruptcy.

I ended up returning the stockings that I bought, but letting go of not needing to buy that helmet for Mark has been a different kind of loss – one that in the big picture of all that has happened seems like it belongs in its own special category of grief crazy. If I had a crystal ball last Christmas to show me what the following one was going to be like, I would have blown that budget to kingdom come for my favorite guy, and left it up to my dreams to figure out how to pay for what would come due.