I Saw Mommy Frisking Santa Claus

My parents enjoyed one of those utterly content, and beyond that, actually happy, compatible companionships that endured for nearly fifty years before my mother died, leaving my father grief-stricken, suddenly bereft of his very best friend. As a family, whenever we had closed the car doors and headed for any destination, there they had been one step ahead of or behind me—holding hands.

But there was one time of year, every year, my father later confessed, when he had seriously considered renting a motel room to escape his better half’s insanity—from December 22 until December 26. He would simply vanish, so went his fantasy, and be back in plenty of time to help assemble the Rose Parade folding chairs. He’d have to drop in for Christmas dinner, however—just a drive by for his favorite roast. No doubt this was due to the fact that my mother, who academically thrived on common sense and logic, morphed into an emotional maniac—the dark side of Martha Stewart on drugs—at Christmas. I had only suspected half of it until Daddy revealed the whole truth she’d kept well secured behind closed doors.

She was one of those women whose bedroom appeared spotless and organized to the casual observer, but open a dresser drawer (if you could) and stand back; girdles and nylons sprung out like those toy snakes wedged into a can. It was all a surface thing, an act. The calendar on her desk with tidy penciling in little squares was there to fool me, and at this time of year, it was all a cover-up for the ghost of Christmas presents who would rise on Christmas Eve to haunt me with the residual chaos that lay beneath the surface layer of efficiency.

There was a pecking order to the gifts: the neighbors and friends enjoyed theirs early, wrapped and delivered to their front doors—all smiles and good cheer. Then came the extended family whose offerings lay nestled under the tree several days ahead of time, awaiting distribution at the annual festive dinner on Christmas night. To the naked eye, everything looked well planned. But last, and I do mean last, would come the Santa secret-stash, the surprises we weren’t supposed to see. Here the cheer was chucked and the stress stepped-up because she was running out of time…to wrap.

To complete the nursery-rhyme undercover operation, she would wait until everyone had hung their stockings with care and gone off to sleep before beginning the paper-roll frenzy. Light years before Martha even dreamed of sugarplums let alone knew how to make them, my mother’s wrapping skills were unrivaled.

Each gift had to have a different paper, every corner be stretched taut, no scotch tape showing. The ribbon must come from Stat’s, the do-it-yourself home-decoration chain store that carried everything from completely decorated floor plans to seasonal ornaments to Elmer’s glue. It had to be red, 3” thick, and its edges crisp enough to sever an artery with a paper cut in order to create the bow.

And the bow! If only I had taken the apprentice-time to learn from her, but then I was never allowed to observe, and to request instruction on, say, a random Saturday afternoon in April while preparing the average birthday gift would not have given her enough time to recover from the previous December 24th. She needed first to heal.

There was the inevitable running-short-on-ribbon crisis. Not to be outdone by any other Pasadena housewife, bolts and bolts had been used to tie each bulb to our tree (“those hooks are tacky”) and so, no matter how many additional spools she had purchased over last year’s inventory, there was never, ever enough. The panic attack was predictable: my father revving the station-wagon engine at about 4:30 P.M. (in those days stores actually closed at a decent hour on Christmas Eve) ready to haul buns for bolts—STAT to Stat’s. Another white-knuckle Christmas—just like the ones we used to know.

Each gift tag shimmered more stunning than any ball (that matched the trim color of our curtains) on the tree, and she would tie these greetings on as well; no “tawdry stickers” here. As the hours passed, she forsook dinner, would tiptoe as far as the crack in her bedroom door for quick kisses goodnight, then hunker down and wrap ‘til dawn, all the while weeping and wailing because she was certain once again she hadn’t purchased enough celebration.

“It’s going to look bare, sparse, chinchy.”

Forget that she had ordered virtually every item we’d circled in the Sears catalog, our annual North Pole yellow pages.

My father was helpless, exasperated by such uncharacteristic behavior, and when he would nervously finger a pair of scissors asking if there was anything he could do to help, she would break: shriek, sob, and beg him to leave her alone. It appears he seriously considered it.

So it was never the overwhelming task of shopping, nor the enormity of food preparation for the extended-family extravaganza that did her in; it was the packaging. By the time the cocktail hour arrived on Christmas night, all the gifts had been well-received, the trash bags were filled to the brim with papers and ribbons smashed in as tightly as Wick could stomp on them, and she needed a couple of Tangueray martinis to soothe nerves and sore fingers. As the dinner hour ran later and later, spirits ran higher and higher.

Occasionally this would lead to further trouble, like the time my father, a connoisseur of red meat whose favorite mid-morning snack was any old slab of beef he could scrounge from the back of the fridge, had an attack of what he called “per-plexia” following a few jiggers of rum. Seems my aunt Eileen had brought her childhood friend to dinner—Pierre, whose sister named France had not been feeling well and therefore elected to rest at home, whereupon my aunt suggested he take some of the leftover meat to her.

My father’s ears perked up from clear across the room behind the bar, although he claimed he was hard of hearing in a crowd.
“What was that?”

“Pierre is going to take the meat to France,” my aunt cupped her hand and called out to him.

On Dancer, on Comet, on Donner, on Blitzen—Daddy Dasher to the kitchen, knocking aside Pierre like a rag doll in what he thought was the roast-race, my mother in hot pursuit, fearful that he might disturb the juicy slumber of the now resting, ready-to-carve prime rib.

When I threw open the swinging kitchen door to see from whence arose such a clatter, what could be the matter, I first noticed my cousin Christopher drinking the butter-sherry sauce meant to top the dessert cranberry pudding, right from the saucepan on the stove (he had had a few beers, alright) and then my eyes swept the room. There they were, my mother stooped down behind my father, her fingers roving the inseam of his Christmas red and green plaid slacks while her voice raised several octaves.

“Come on Bill, where is it?”

She looked up to catch me, an innocent witness to this altogether uncompromising parental position.

“I’m just trying to get my hands on the meat.”


When I became a mother, I took an entirely different approach to Christmas—the flip-side of the flip-out, you might say. I stopped losing my mind or The Night-Before-Christmas sleep. I wrapped gifts to go, the drive-through decorating approach. There they remained, happy in the bags that had been slung to me over the counter when I’d bought them. A quick twist of any old drug-store curling ribbon to knot the handles together, a swift slap of the cartoon-reindeer, stick-on tag and I was good to go, ready for the First Noel and off to dream of sugarplums, humming that traditional carol immortalized by Van Morrison: “G-L-O-R-I-A…”

It was a wrap.