The Christmas to Remember

another creative writing piece

 Christmas is the most hectic time of the year in my household. There is the frantic, last minute wrapping and the preparation of the family dinner. And when I say family, I mean everyone. Every aunt and uncle, cousin, and grandparent is at my house for Christmas Eve and Christmas dinner. To add to the chaos, they all spend the time that they are in Charleston at my house. So that meant that I had a huge group of crazy relatives in my house plus my husband and three kids.

Yes, Christmas is always an adventure for my family. Between the family gossip and drunken uncles, there is never any rest. Every year it is fun while everyone is here, but before they arrive and after they leave is the worst. Getting ready to house these bunch of lunatics is a challenge in itself. Each one of my relatives has a different preference for how where they are going to sleep and how what I cook should be prepared. My family is the kind of family that does not hide how they feel about something because they know you well. They will tell you flat out if they don’t like your cooking or how you decorate your house. Trust me; it has happened to me before.

   When they leave, they always leave a mess. My house ends up looking like a civil war occurred in it and I have to clean it all up. Plus, when they would leave, they would each tell me how they felt about the stay. They compared it to other stays like they were filling out one of those surveys that hotels always make you fill out before you check out.

There is one Christmas in particular that I will never forget everything that had happened. It was the Christmas where my dad reentered my life. It is strange for me to say that he reentered my life because three years before that Christmas, my dad had died.

He had had a heart attack at the age of fifty. His death was sudden yet anticipated and left a bunch of people, including my mother, in mourning. My dad was a smoker and had been one for most of his life. That’s why his death was anticipated. It was sudden because we all thought that he had more time before the smoking would kill him. What we didn’t know, because he hid it well, was that my dad had had lung cancer for about two years before he died. He would go to the doctor in secret by scheduling his appointments for when he knew we wouldn’t see him leave. The one thing I always thought he should have done before he died was meet his grandchildren. He never got the opportunity though.

 The Christmas that my dad came back into my life was going surprisingly well. It was my fourth year hosting the family for Christmas and I thought I had figured it out. When my dad died, my mom could not handle the Christmas dinners anymore, so the reins were passed on to me. My first year was a disaster, but now I had mastered the art of hosting the family for Christmas. I knew who liked what to eat and how everyone would be comfortable sleeping at night. I had a system that I made sure was never broken.

That Christmas, everything was going smoothly. Christmas Eve dinner was a success; which was the traditional baked ham, mashed potatoes, corn, and apple, blueberry, and cherry pie for dessert. There was never a quiet moment the whole dinner, which was a good sign. As I sat at the head of the table eating my dinner and looking at everyone in the family, I was confident that this was going to be the best Christmas ever, besides the one when I was six and got the dollhouse I had been asking for the whole year. That night at dinner, I would have never guessed that I could have been so wrong.

Christmas morning I woke up early for some reason. Normally it is my kids that wake me up, but that day I had this feeling that I needed to be up at around five in the morning. I felt like somebody was already up. I didn’t want to be a bad hostess, so I went downstairs to see if anybody was actually up. I walked into the living room to find that no one was there. I then checked the den; no one was there. The only other place was the kitchen. Maybe they had gone into the kitchen to get some food. But when I went into the kitchen, there wasn’t anybody there. There was only one little thing on the counter that was definitely not there last night and shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

 I had to look again at the counter to make sure that I was not hallucinating what I was seeing. But sure enough, I was not imagining it; I was seeing what I thought I was seeing. My dad’s World War II medal was on the counter right next to a small, rectangular box wrapped in gold paper with a white ribbon around it.

I walked over to the medal and box with skepticism. I kept asking myself why this box was on my counter and how could my dad’s medal be here, in my home? One of my dad’s last wishes was to be buried with his World War II medal around his neck and that he would be dressed in his military uniform. So obviously it is impossible for the medal to appear in my house seeing as my dad was buried with it on. I must have really been imagining this; there was no way that the medal was real.

I stood in front of the medal, just staring at it. I reached forward and touched it; the medal was real. This made no sense, how could it be real when it was six feet underground, buried with my dad? I reached for the box next and pulled on the ribbon. It was tied loosely and when I pulled it off, the ribbon fell gently to the floor. I pulled the top of the box off and placed it next to the medal. There was a note in it, placed directly in the center of the box. The note was written neatly in cursive and on stationery paper. There were initials at the top right hand corner of the paper. The initials were J.M., my dad’s initials.

 This was starting to become too weird. The medal I know my dad was buried with, now in my kitchen, and a note on his personal stationery. Now I was afraid to read the note; it could only add to the weirdness that had already happened. Even though I knew that looking at the note would make my morning worse than it already was, on the account that I woke up early, I glanced down at the neat penmanship. It looked so familiar, but I could not figure out whose it was. I sat down on one of the counter stools and stared at the penmanship. It was ironic that it looked so familiar to me, so familiar that I felt like I had seen it recently, but I could not figure out whom it belonged to.

 I must have been sitting there for a while because the next thing I knew my mother was looking over my shoulder at the note. The look on her face scared me; her face had turned ghostly white, her eyes were huge and popping out of her head, and her mouth was open. Her face was overall shocked, but there was a hint of extreme fear. 

“Mom, are you okay?” I asked, concerned that I would be going to the emergency room on Christmas.

“Yeah, I’m fine, I think.” she answered. But her expression never changed.

“Are you sure? You don’t look too good.”

It was as if she hadn’t heard me or that she had ignored my last question. “Why do you have that note?” she began. “And why is it in your father’s handwriting?”

“Mom, what are you talking about? There is no way dad could have written this note.”

“I know that. But, I can never forget the way your father’s handwriting looked. It was clear and gracefully written, kind of like a woman’s handwriting. It looked exactly like this.” She pointed at the note in my hand.

“There must be somebody who has handwriting similar to dad’s because we both know that there is no possible way that this could have been written by him.” I was looking for any explanation that would prove that I was basically insane and that someone was playing a trick on me. “Mom, can you think of anyone? Mom, Mom!”

She wasn’t listening again! I waved my hand in front of her face, but her gaze never wavered. She was now staring at my dad’s medal that had just glinted under the kitchen light.

“How did you get your father’s medal?” she asked.

“It was sitting on the counter when I got up this morning. I have no idea how it got here.”

“Do not play with me Sandra. Everyone in the family knows that he was buried with that medal around his neck.”

“Yeah I know Mom. That would be why I am trying to figure out how it got here and who went and got it from dad’s grave.” When I said the word grave there was a reaction in my mother’s face that I cannot describe. She reacted to the word like it hit her hard, like it cut into the deepest part of her heart and memory that she had been avoiding because she knew the pain that would come with it.

“I am going to go take a shower. I will be down in about thirty minutes and I’d love it if you had breakfast ready.” She just turned and walked out of the kitchen as fast as she could. As she was walking away, I heard her mumble something; but I couldn’t figure out what it was. I could hear her light footsteps on the stairs. They were so faint that it was as if she was a ghost herself.

Once I was sure she was up the stairs, I started to make breakfast. I was trying to keep my mind off the note and the medal as I flipped the pancakes and cooked the sausage and bacon. Within minutes the smell of the food was all around the kitchen and was moving to the rest of the house. The quiet was soon disturbed by the sound of people walking down the stairs and hallway. Most of my family entered the kitchen and began taking what I had laid out for food so far. They were talking about how they had slept and the presents that they were hoping to get. Before I knew it, the sink was full of dirty plates and everyone had returned to their rooms to get ready for the day.

The kitchen was once again filled with silence. I began to wash the dishes, trying to stay on top of things. But the silence became too much and I began to think about the note and medal again. I already knew that the medal was real and what it meant; but the note, however, I knew nothing about except that it was written in handwriting like my father’s and was on his stationery. It was beginning to annoy me that I did not know much about the note. I found myself wondering what it said and if what it said had anything to do with me.

I walked over to the note and picked it up. I began to read the note and the words became familiar to me. The note read:

Baby,

      I feel that this war will be over soon. There are so many signs of its end and it makes me excited. I never really wanted to be here in the first place. Not when it is keeping me from you. I would rather be with you than all of these guys. They are not very interesting or fun to be around. Sure they can be fun at times, when you want to goof off. But they do not seem to understand how serious the war is; how soon they can be separated from their families forever. When I think of that, I think of being away from you forever and it kills me. Baby I promise that as soon as this war is over I will return to you and be with you forever. We will have a family and a house, I promise. But for now, please just bare with me. I will be home as soon as God will allow me.

Forever yours,

Jonathan

These were the words that my mother had mumbled to herself as she was going upstairs to take a shower. The letter was beautiful. It seemed as if Jonathan really loved whomever he was writing to and that he really wanted to be with them. Then I realized that Jonathan was my father’s name and that he was in World War II. This must have been a letter that he had written my mom when he was in the war.  But why it had been in a box on my counter was beyond me. It just made me feel more at ease to know that I knew something about this strange situation. However, with one answer comes another question. I found out what the note was about but now I had to figure out why my mom had said she knew nothing about this. Wouldn’t she have noticed that the note was one that dad had written to her? 

This would be what troubled me all day and never left my mind.  I kept on making up different answers to why my mom would have acted like she knew nothing about the note, but nothing seemed to be the right answer. Because I was too wrapped in my thoughts, I don’t remember ever opening presents or cooking lunch. The next thing I knew it was around dinnertime and I found myself cooking the same dinner as the night before. No matter how hard I tried I could not remember what I had done before.

So I continued with what I was doing and set the dinner table. My family was soon seated at the table and my mind was back on the note and my mom. I spent all dinner trying to come up with ways to confront my mom on the situation. I could not come up with anything again. All I knew was that I had to talk to her after dinner or else it would bug me more to not know what was going on for another night. I also knew that if I didn’t find out, there was no way I would be able to sleep.

After dinner, I pulled my mom aside, determined to get a straight answer and put this thing behind me. “Mom,” I said. “I have this feeling that you know why dad’s medal and that note were on the counter.”

“What makes you think that I would know?” she asked with slight fear in her voice. The kind of fear that you have been discovered for something that you did not want anyone to know you did.

“When you went upstairs to take a shower, I read the note that was in the box and it turns out it is a letter that dad wrote while he was in World War II. And I’m just guessing but I figured that that letter was written to you.”

She looked around her really quick to make sure that no one was in earshot of our conversation. “Okay, I’ll admit it. That letter was written to me.”

“Then can you also tell me why dad’s medal is no longer buried with him like I thought it was?” This was the one question that I truly wanted answered.

“Yes I can answer that question too. But I am afraid to.”

“Mom, just tell me please. It will put me at ease. I really don’t care what the answer is, I just want to know so that everything can make sense.”

“Fine.” she said. “The night after the funeral I went to the cemetery when I knew that nobody would be able to see me. I knew that they hadn’t put him in the grave yet and I knew that I needed one thing to remember him by. So I opened the coffin and took the medal off of his neck. I quickly closed the coffin and ran as fast as I could out of the cemetery, afraid that someone had seen me. Ever since then I have taken out the medal and the letter your father wrote to me promising himself to me on Christmas Eve once everyone has gone to bed. I sit and read the letter a bunch of times, trace the outline of the medal, and think of your father. It is just my way of having him with me on Christmas. I am sorry if you are disappointed in me.”

“Disappointed in you Mom? I am not even close to disappointed. I actually admire what you did. I wish that I could have the guts to go to a cemetery at night and take the one thing that would remind me off my husband after he has died. I also think that it is sweet that you take it out every Christmas Eve and just sit and think about him. The main thing is that I am glad that there was an explanation for all this. I thought that I was going insane.”

That Christmas had to have been one of the biggest changing points in my life. I realized that you cannot shut out the ones that you have lost; they always find their way back into your life. It is never good to shut them out in the first place because they have obviously always been a part of you and should not be forgotten just because they are no longer living. I also found out what true love looks like. I can only hope that when I am older, I can have that same love for my own husband.