Until I was ten, Christmas was celebrated with a tree and gifts. I recall driving into Princeton to see the Christmas lights on all the houses. Those were magical times. I found a photo of what must have been the last Christmas we celebrated before my mother converted. I’m sure she was exhausted, trying to keep three children happy in an unhappy house. I wrote a pantoum about what I imagined her feeling:
The End of Santa
My mother looks disconsolate,
like crumpled wrapping paper.
Not what she got, not what she wanted,
not what she was hoping for.
Like crumpled wrapping paper,
as if she knew what was coming,
not what she was hoping for.
Next year, she’d no longer celebrate.
As if she knew what was coming--
her final Christmas Day. No Santa
Next year, she’d no longer celebrate
with cookies, gifts, good cheer.
Her final Christmas Day. No Santa.
Converted to Jehovah’s Witnesses.
No cookies, gifts, good cheer--
she’d exchange them for The Truth.
Converted to Jehovah’s Witnesses.
The coming war of Armageddon.
She’d exchange them for The Truth.
Convert her hapless children too.
The coming war of Armageddon.
Plaid-skirted on her chenille bedspread.
Convert her hapless children too,
looking woebegone and lost.
Plaid skirted on her chenille bedspread,
oblivious to the coming loss of hearth.
Looking woebegone and lost, the cookies
left for Santa on a small white plate
Connection to Recovery:
Today, I can feel compassion for my mother and understand her sadness of being married to an alcoholic and doubtless engineering Christmas all by herself (as I did when my children were young.) I can also be gentle with myself when I find my expectations of trying to create a good time for others results in my abandoning myself and my needs.
PROMPT:
1.Find a family photo from your childhood that stirs a memory of conflicted feelings. Write down one of those feelings and circle around it in the form of a pantoum.
2.Write about any holiday you can recall. See if you can capture the fun of a special day. Write about your parents or other caregivers and how hard they worked for you to have a nice holiday.
3. Write about what you expected from any particular Christmas or other important holiday and what actually happened. Find an image, like the cookies left for Santa, that fits the feeling of your piece.
note: A pantoum is a repeating form in poetry in which the second and fourth lines of a 4-line stanza are repeated as the 1st and 3rd stanzas of the next stanza, continuing through the poem. The final stanza often repeats lines from the first stanza, although I did not do that here. If it’s fun, try it.
