The Hauntings of Christmas, Part I: The Ghost of Christmas Past

Like Ebeneezer Scrooge in Dickens’ classic story “A Christmas Carol”, the first holiday spirit I encounter every December is the ghost of Christmas past. These days as my family begins to prepare for the holiday by setting colored lights and decorations about the house, I find myself remembering the Christmases of my younger years, and more significantly, those people who used to make my Christmases so merry and so bright.

I remember my grandmother, the chief keeper of Christmas in our household when I was a boy, for whom Christmas was a holy day. My grandparents shared a house with my immediate family from the time that I was ten until they both passed away when I was an adult, married, and a father myself. I remember the care with which she put out the wonderful, ornate Nativity scene on the large mantel in the living room. She would spend hours making sure the scene matched her wonder at the birth of Christ, and when finished her decorations would draw in my own wonder for weeks.

My grandmother would buy an extra bag of gifts and wrap them and keep them in her room, gifts for all ages of people. She would put a gift tag on each one that said From Gene and Mag, but would leave the To: part of the tag blank. Then when unexpected visitors dropped by during the holiday season, she would go get each one of them a gift from her hidden supply, quickly write names on gift tags, and tell them "Gene and I want to wish you a Merry Christmas", just so she could delight in the opportunity to give more. It didn't matter who you were or how well she knew you, when you entered her home at Christmas and sat at her table, no matter how briefly, you got something to eat, something to drink, and a gift. 

Though she has been gone many years now, her presence is still felt, and as December begins, her spirit is a strong visitor in my memories of what Christmas is supposed to feel like. I've never known another person like her, and I know I never will.

Gone too are other grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. Once a large family on the west side of Niles, we are down to precious few members of the oldest generation, and even of the generation immediately above mine. My mother still lives on the same short street where my family has lived for more than a century, but when a cousin moved earlier this year, she became the last one on the street, which once held close to two dozen family members from four generations at once. But, like families often must these days, our family has been blown about by the winds of modernism and the need for employment, often so hard to come by in small Michigan towns.

This will be my second Christmas without my father, and his spirit visited just the other day as my brother, my son, and I helped my mother get her own boxes of decorations down from the attic. I found a box my father had labeled “random Christmas crap”, in his specific handwriting, and I laughed at the old humbug. My father was a famous Grinch of the family during the Christmas season, calling it “a commercialized farce”, and keeping it in his own peculiar way. He didn’t stop us from being merry, but he’d stomp around for a week or two before and after Christmas, and as a child I never understood that Christmas was the time that he remembered the pain of his own childhood most acutely, his often frustrated upbringing in an alcoholic household, the angels and demons of his life. The ghost of Christmas past that visited my father every holiday season was hard on him, and he kept to himself a great deal so as not to burden his own children with his own childhood memories.

It’s so easy to get swept up in the weeks approaching Christmas with the joy of it all; it’s so easy to feel again that excitement we all felt as children, and that our children still feel, making lists for Santa, planning parties and visits, singing along to carols and watching the old programs on television. Yet Christmas isn’t just a time of joy. Because it’s a time of rich memories, it’s a time of pain as well, and part of that is the yearly visit by this ghost of Christmas past, who makes us remember the people and places in our pasts, many of whom will not, or cannot, be part of this upcoming season. And it’s not just those people who have passed on from whom we feel removed; if there are other separations between loved ones, they are felt acutely during the Christmas season: spouse from spouse, parent from child, brother from sister, friend from friend, many people will be blue, as the old Christmas song goes, “so blue, just thinking about you.”

But again, like Ebeneezer Scrooge, we are compelled to take this spirit by the hand, and to remember the joy and pain of it all. I understand at forty-two that if a person is blessed enough to live a long life, that loss of and separation from loved ones is part of the price that person must pay. Happy memories can hold some sadness, and sad memories can hold some happy; in fact, the one helps us know the other and see it for what it is.

The other day when my brother and I brought boxes down for our mom, we also brought down that same Nativity scene my grandmother so loved, and when I next visit my mother’s home, I know the work and wonder of my grandmother’s hands will be on display in the work of own mother. For a while that evening I watched my twelve-year- old daughter help my mother open boxes and begin to place ornaments on the tree, many of them half-a- century old, or more. Emma would hold each one up to light and delight, and as I watched her I knew that many years from now, when my own mother is part of the ghost of Christmas past for my daughter, this scene will replay itself in memory of love and family for Emma, memory that stretches back in a long line to a time before she was born, before I was born, before my mother was born, or any of us: to a story of redemption and keeping Christmas well, to a tradition of candy and toys stuffed in stockings, to a child in a manger, and a star burning brightly in a clear winter sky.