The scent of pine needles was always a frightening one, the aroma creeping up the stairs – signaling alarm for me. I would peer over the sides of the handrail as my father violently dragged a rope-bound tree through the front door. He would then put on a cheerful Christmas record, and holler from the foyer: “it’s time to decorate the tree!”
We were young then, but both my sisters and I knew that the boxes of gleaming decorations and cheesy Christmas music were a facade… a front for the ensuing horror. You see, my mother has always been a meticulous decorator. Hers was the home where none of our schoolmates would want to play. Most of the rooms were insidiously crafted, each arrangement of art and furniture calculated, and every fabric and fixture fragile. Her house was not particularly a home, but a canvas upon which my mother expressed herself, every detail a personal declaration, an intentional memento to my mother’s flamboyance.
My father would be the first to take decorating initiative. My mother would stand behind him in her nightgown, already plotting a vision of the tree, simultaneously drafting my father’s demise. I could see her cringe as my father clumsily strung pearls on the tree, and as my sister incongruously and unthoughtfully hung colorful glass balls from the tree limbs. It was through those Christmas globes that I saw the reflection of my mother, the boiling enmity in her eyes that would manifest itself moments later.
Moments later: my mother is furiously removing the strands of pearls from the trees… sending some of the porcelain decorations crashing down to the marble floor. And when it seemed nothing could make the moment worse, the tree comes crashing down to the floor, covering us all in prickly pine needles and shattered glass. My mother croons, “fuck Christmas!” as we run for cover in the upstairs family room.
The following Christmas found my mother out of her blue period and into her days of whim and abstraction. I arrived in my yearly visit to see dozens of crisp, white feather pillows surrounding the tree. In the corner of the room, I saw my mother with metal sheers in her hand, hacking away at the pillows. I felt like Cristina in Mommie Dearest, being woken up by the maid in the middle of the night to help my mother (Ms. Crawford) hack away at the rose garden.
“Get a pair of sheers from the kitchen and help me rip out the feathers from these pillows.” I would do as ordered, and without question. Hours later, the living room looked as if it had been the scene of a Mexican chicken fight, ending morosely as the winning chicken, seconds after victory, fell to its death. We decorated the entire tree with the feathers, a minimal expression which my family didn’t understand, but pretended to, relieved that we would at least have a Christmas tree, and that it wouldn’t end up in the driveway on December 23.
Luckily, this Christmas, years after a lesson should have already been learned, they purchased a fake Christmas tree from some obscure mail catalog . It’s abstract, and looks like something that would be in a Tim Burton Christmas movie, but at least it requires no decoration, and hence can’t provoke tumult and dysfunction.
Another aspect of the holiday season that would have my sisters and I trembling in our knickers, despite the cold, was our Christmas card photo shoot. We never had the typical holiday cards (the hallmark sort with the glossy cover, Biblical verse, and holly border.) Our photo sessions had the stress of a Vogue spread, my grandmother directing us as if we were Kate Moss and she was David LaChapelle. We would sit on Louis XVI armchairs, our bare feet awkwardly embracing the French rug, with a disenchanted gaze at anything but the camera lens. The resulting photograph would be in black and white, enveloped in a crisp card wrapped tautly in tulle. Her friends would receive the cards, to which they would reply, “why do you look so sad?” Not undermining the artistic integrity of our grandmother, we would shrug our shoulders as if to say we were much too worldly and sophisticated at age eight to be enamored by the clearly superficial commercialization of the holiday season.
One Christmas our photographer called to say he couldn’t take our pictures due to overbooking. My grandmother, in a state of desperation and frenzy, gave a call to the local Motophoto, the scene of many criminal holiday shots of babies with Santa Claus, and toddlers prancing around gauzy wrapped cardboard boxes. “We need to make a house call,” my grandmother whispered cryptically over the line.
The next day an average looking man appeared at our doorstep. Forgetting my grandmother’s phone call, I assumed he was the new dry-cleaner, or perhaps the exterminator coming to the save the house from vermin. My grandmother answered the door, wearing a sultry red gown. “Why don’t you set up in the living room,” she delicately ordered as she glanced through the arched entry way. The man walked through the door with a look of mesmerization. I could tell he had never seen a house as fanciful as ours, with all of the antiques dripping in gold leaf, the baroque ornamentation of the curtains dancing in his periphery. Punch-drunk, he walked into the living room and set up his equipment.
For a man used to frustrated attempts at calming babies (by making funny faces and shaking rattles) and backdrops of poorly painted circus scenes, we were quite the spectacle. But he had the equipment, my grandmother had the vision, and by God we were going to get a good shot out of this. After several shots of us sprawling despairingly on the limestone floors, in Morrissey inspired gestures (“oh, what difference does it make?”) my grandmother decided to have a photoshoot of her own. Wearing multiple gowns, she posed on chaise lounges, herself reflecting in numerous mirrors, the Marie Antoinette of Mexican heritage. And then of course there’s the classic shot of her holding my grandfather’s foot, in a Mary Magadeline gesture of adoration. Maybe he left our house that day thinking we were the craziest family we had ever met, pitying my sisters and I for not having a traditional Christmas card. Or maybe he left that day with a skip in his step, plotting his flight to Manhattan with the wings of inspiration. He could certainly never return to that poorly lit Motophoto studio, squeezing rubber ducks at rotten children.
I recently returned home for Thanksgiving, which in the past was the time we would begin to think about our Christmas card, and start to dread the delivery of the tree to my mothers house. Now we’re much too old to be photographed and placed in a card to be sent to friends and family. And despite the chaos that surrounded the card production, I think I miss those photo sessions – those long nights of acting woebegone in church clothes in front of a feather-doused Christmas tree.
