NOW I LAY ME DOWN TO SLEEP

 

The clock ticks over another minute. Thoughts spin round creakily like a hamster on its squeaky wheel. Fold the pillow, rearrange the blankets. Next to you your spouse sleeps peacefully. 3 a.m. Count sheep, count former lovers, count days left. Doze for a minute or two. 3:20 a.m. Get up. Check Facebook. Open the refrigerator door and peer in. Leftover pizza– ooh, chicken, bacon and spinach on white sauce, your favorite. Put a slice in the microwave. Eat the limp slice of pizza. Drink a glass of water. Brush teeth. Trundle back to bed. 4:16 a.m. Sigh. Turn over on your other side. Practice breathing. Think about your father, the bill you forgot to pay, the thing you said that time. Just as the sky begins to lighten in the east, sleep overtakes you at last. And then it’s time to get up.

We can’t fall asleep. Well, of course we do eventually lose consciousness, having worked until we’re bleary-eyed, or driven in straight-through from San Antonio, or had enough cocktails to fell a small horse. But we aren’t sleeping easily or well. 70 million people in the United States are believed to be afflicted with sleep troubles, generating some 43 million prescriptions for five billion dollars in sleep aids.

In 2006, when Lunesta first appeared on the market, people were so seduced by the lurid green butterfly floating across their television screen (promising them the good night’s sleep they deserved) it more than doubled the amount of money Americans spent on sleeping pills. One physician,David Claman, director of the UCSF sleep disorders center, told the San Francisco Chronicle “In the 12 years I’ve been in practice, this was the only time I’ve had a line of people out the door waiting to try a medicine.”

The National Sleep Foundation estimates that including health care costs we spend $14 billion dollars a year trying to fall asleep. When you add in indirect costs like loss productivity and property damage (i.e. from accidents caused by the sleep impaired) the number shoots to more than $35 billion dollars. Ad Age reports that the current recession has not affected the sales of sleeping pills (or antidepressants.)

43 percent of people aged 13 to 64 report that they rarely or never get “a good night’s sleep,” and 63 percent of American adults believe that their sleep needs are not adequately met during the week.  Between 2000 and 2004, prescriptions for hypnotics for individuals age 20 to 44 doubled and those for children age 10 to 19 increased by 85 percent.

We’re really in a state here, aren’t we?

The ability to transition from a busy day into a state of restful sleep is for many people a lifelong challenge, and trying to get children to fall asleep (and children arriving in your room wanting another story, a drink of water or the eviction of the monster from under the bed) contributes to our bedtime woes.

Nowhere has this been more humorously illustrated than in last year’s smash hit of Go the Fuck to Sleep, a children’s book for adults, written by Adam Mansbach, which reached number one on Amazon.com’s bestseller list  a month before it had even been published. (An email link sent to booksellers in advance of the book went “viral,” because anyone who has ever tried to get a toddler to go to sleep felt resonance with the book. The combined “hits” on YouTube for readings by Samuel L. Jackson or Werner Herzog are at 1.4 million.)

When my own son was an infant, he suffered from colic. Night after night, he wailed. My mother was staying with us and the three adults took turns walking the floor with him. I remember feeling asleep on my feet, it was all so exhausting. Then one night I put on some music and he stopped crying. Within a few minutes he’d settled down and fallen asleep.  It was a Billie Holiday record and over the next few days, we discovered that the child could be soothed and eased into sleep by Billie Holiday and nothing else.

I wonder if it would work now, as that baby boy is 17 years old, and he still doesn’t sleep much. I can hear him moving around in his room, listening to music or talking on the  phone. On mornings where he doesn’t have to get up, we won’t see him until noon at the earliest. At least we don’t have to walk the floor with him anymore.

It’s hard to put away your toys and go to bed. (And conversely, once we do fall asleep, it’s hard to stir out of that cozy and warm bed and face the day.)  But we need the sleep. That suspended sensory activity creates a heightened anabolic state which allows for the growth and rejuvenation of the immune, skeletal, muscular and central nervous systems. Many migraine sufferers find relief in a sleep state, and conversely  numerous studies show that wound healing is significantly slowed in the sleep deprived. A very rare and terrible inherited condition called “Fatal Familial Insomnia” has cruelly demonstrated that  we cannot survive without sleep.

While it is difficult to shift from the constant forward motion of our days to a good night’s sleep, anxiety is one of insidious components of insomnia that plagues us day and night. Not necessarily clinical anxiety, just the regular day-to-day worries can keep you awake. For instance, the number of people seeking assistance with insomnia jumped dramatically after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

When we are asleep we are vulnerable. We are not in control of the situation that surrounds us. We must be willing to let go and let nature take its course. It’s hard to do that if you don’t have faith that you will wake up again. People do die in their sleep. My own mother-in-law sat down for a nap in her recliner after a nice breakfast with her daughter, fell asleep and died so quietly that no one knew until they went to wake her. She was 94, but it can happen to people of any age. Every new parent knows the anxiety that lurks in the spectre of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Or pity the poor man or woman who awakes to find their spouse’s body cooling next to them. Each year 38,000 people die from sleep apnea. No wonder we’re reluctant to let go.

As a child I used to recite a bedtime prayer: “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” Well, honestly, I don’t know what my mother was thinking when she taught me this. We didn’t go to church on Sunday, we went to dog shows. The message I got from this little ritual was not “God will look after me no matter what” but “I could die before I wake up.” (I’ve noticed on a recent recording that the prayer’s been adjusted to the less worrying “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, Thy Love go with me through the night and wake me with the morning light.” ) But it was the prayer she’d been taught as a child and she simply handed it down. I counter-acted this by saying this little five-word spell  to my parents every single night “See you in the morning.”  I didn’t teach the bedtime prayer to my son, but I noticed that after my father died that he added that same promise each night before he went to bed. See you in the morning.

In addition to bedtime prayers, most of us had sleep rituals as children. We would put away our toys and start winding down for the day. We’d have a bath and put on our pajamas. We’d be tucked into bed. Perhaps there would be a story. I started thinking about this one night when the hamster wheel was going around and around in my head while I was struggling to get to sleep.

We pack our days full. An estimated 95 percent of us engage in some kind of electronic stimulation in the hour before bed– television, computer, cell phone, and sometimes we bring that stuff to bed too. We fall into bed exhausted, our brains still feverishly working on whatever dilemmas we faced in our waking hours. No wonder we aren’t falling asleep. Though my husband can fall asleep anywhere, he was game to try the experiment I suggested.

We cleared our bedroom of accumulated junk, books and newspapers stacked next to the bed, clothes left across a chair and never put away, things stuck in the room because we had no other place to put them. I cleared all the surfaces and put a vase of fresh flowers on a dresser. I made a point to actually pull together a complete set of sheets, lovely Egyptian cotton the color of hope. The bed was made up with the precision of hospital staff. (That would be my husband, I’ve never been any good with corners.)

We chose midnight as our bedtime. It might not be optimum, but it was realistic given our habits. An hour before bed we turned off the television and the computer. (Harder than you might think.) We put the phones on the charger and left them there.

Night-clothes were laid out on the bed. One of us brewed green tea. We had showers and put on our jammies and sat in bed together drinking our tea. We talked, but we agreed that we would not talk about the problems that had beset us during the day, whether in our own household or in the wider world of news and politics. We were gentle and quiet with each other. Occasionally we read, but again, we tried to choose carefully; a biography of John Wooden or a well-loved novel. No controversy, and no despair. Sometimes there was soothing music. Sometimes I had to make a conscious effort to settle my thoughts, but having the hour of bedtime preparation really helped. Occasionally I’d use breathing exercises to relax. The end result? We fell asleep. We slept well. We awoke in the morning refreshed and energized.

Then the inevitable happened. We got busy with other projects. We started using every last minute until the one where we fell into bed. Elmer started dozing off in front of the television. I started staying up all night writing. The room filled up with more stuff. The tea stayed in the cupboard. I was going to bed as my husband was getting up. (And I have to say I’m not beset with insomnia now, but only because I’m exhausted. I’m running on afterburners. When I wake up again, it might be three or four in the afternoon. And that’s no way to live.)

So to ring in the New Year, we are turning off the television at eleven. We are clearing our bedroom of accumulated junk, books and newspapers stacked next to the bed, clothes left across a chair and never put away, things stuck in the room because we had no other place to put them. Surfaces will be cleared and polished and there will be flowers again, and Egyptian cotton sheets the color of– spring. Maybe I’ll buy myself new pajamas. Santa brought a glass teapot and flowering tea with which to close the day. We will make an effort to be kind and gentle with each other for at least that last hour of the day. Thy love go with me through the night and wake me with the morning light.

 

BUTTER

In the second grade, under the watchful eye of Mrs. Opylacz, we made butter. We gathered around her desk to watch her peel open the carton of cream , pouring a thick ribbon into a sparkling clean glass mayonnaise jar. The metal lid was screwed on tight and then the jar was passed from hand to hand, each of us shaking it. One of the little girls in the class put a real shimmy into it, shaking allover with abandon and we laughed. It seems we shook that jar all afternoon before anything began to change, but of course it wasn’t nearly that long. When the transformation began, we were transfixed– in the bottom of the mayonnaise jar was a pale yellow fist of pure butter and a few ounces of palest buttermilk. We returned to our desks and awaited our reward, a Saltine liberally spread with the butter we’d just conjured out of a jar of cream. On the other side of the room a shy girl in a murky green dress declined the cracker, whispering “No thank you I’m not allowed” when Mrs. O stopped at her desk.

When I bit down on the cracker, it was as if I was tasting butter for the first time. The cracker crumbled in my mouth, but the butter was like sunshine on my tongue, sunshine and silky warmth. When I got home from school that afternoon I waltzed into the kitchen slamming the door behind me and demanded that we make butter.  My mother thought I was being silly and sent me up to change my clothes. In those days she might have bought “real butter” if we were having company for dinner, or if  a recipe demanded it. Otherwise, it was a pallid tub of Blue Bonnet or Parkay.

Then we moved to England and butter came to stay. The kitchen of our stone house at Buckley Hill was 300 years old, heated (somewhat) by an AGA coal stove and refrigeration limited to a tiny fridge, about two cubic feet. No matter, butter would stay cool on the counter on a day in high summer. Bread came from Pogson’s, unsliced and crusty. We’d saw off hunks of it, and carefully piece out bits of butter over the bread. The bread was no match for cold butter, but the combination of the two was sublime.  Pogson’s was also the source for “butties”– ham butties, cheese butties, jam butties. As a bakery, the atmosphere there was considerably warmer and their butter spread beautifully over the slice of bread, a thin gold sheen topped with ham, or cheese or whatever it was you wanted. That was it: bread, butter, and something. It was the best kind of food heaven — simple and perfect. Even now, if I am so lucky to have good bread and a good meat I’ll use just butter to wed the two. Otherwise, you have something that just tastes like condiments.

I’ve never brought margarine into my house. Even when I was so poor in Boston that I had to sell records to In Your Ear in order to buy groceries, I always made the grocery money stretch to buy at least a single quarter-pound stick. My first husband had grown up with Fleischmann’s margarine. When we moved in together, he fell in love with butter. He’d put a whole stick of it in a pot of brown rice, which meant there was one thing in the pot worth eating. That much butter made the rice almost palatable. Occasionally, he’d lift the lid of the butter dish, slice off a pat and pop it in his mouth, like a chocolate.

All of the best comfort foods are better because of butter. Butter in a little golden pool melting into clam chowder. Butter seeping down through a bowl of perfect southern white rice. Folding the melted butter into grits, watching it spread gently across a pan before laying in the eggs, or mushrooms, or sweet onions. Butter in a little pot for lobster. Oh, God.

The popularity of butter and oil coincides roughly with the development of spoken language. According to A History of Food by Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, the Indians of Vedic times (1100 BC) invoked butter as a primordial deity: ”Tongue of the Gods, navel of the immortal, let us praise the name of butter, let us maintain it with our sacrificial homage . . .” the Rig-Veda reads. “As a wild steed breaks through barriers so does melting butter caress the flaming logs and the fire, satisfied, accepts it.”

In many cultures, the offering of butter became a form of prayer. In Tibet, where a rancid cheese-like Yak milk butter was mixed with tea for consumption and spread on statues for worship, they also would simmer dead lamas in boiling butter prior to embalming them; a custom that only ended with the Chinese annexation of Tibet in 1951.

Ancient Romans and Greeks were less enthusiastic about butter, considering it a food of the “northern Barbarians,” an opinion probably influenced by butter’s rapid spoiling in the Meditteranean climate.  The Greek comic playwright Anaxandrides referred to Thracians, on the northern edge of the Aegean sea, as “the butter eaters.” (A real laugh and a half those Greeks.) But in the first century Pliny the Elder conceded that butter was “the most delicate food among the barbarous nations.” There were some physicians in early civilizations that considered that butter had medicinal properties, and Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat writes that it was “Not for nothing did Little Red Riding Hood take her grandmother a little pot of butter.”

Scandinavian countries were involved in the exportation of butter as early as the 12th century, and texts from Iceland document prayers around 700 AD to the God of the Forge, Gobhin, to watch over the butter . In medieval Ireland, firkins of buried butter were left to ferment in the Peat Bogs. This “bog butter” was more cheese-like in consistency and so immune to putrefaction, that some still exists in museum collections. By the 1500s, the Roman Catholic Church allowed for the consumption of butter during Lent, and within the century, melted butter had become a popular sauce for meat and vegetables among the English.

In “The King’s Breakfast,” A.A. Milne charmingly describes the popularity of butter with a member of the monarchy. The King requests butter for his breakfast, and it is suggested by the Alderney (the cow!) that he might prefer marmalade instead. In the end, he gets his butter:

The Queen took
The butter
And brought it to
His Majesty;
The King said,
“Butter, eh?”
And bounced out of bed.
“Nobody,” he said,
As he kissed her
Tenderly,
“Nobody,” he said,
As he slid down the banisters,
“Nobody,
My darling,
Could call me
A fussy man -
BUT
I do like a little bit of butter to my bread!”

In the 20th century, the consumption of butter in the western world has declined, due to the popularity of margarine, first introduced in the late 1800s as beef tallow worked with milk.  I’ve eaten margarine. Friends serve it and what can you do?  It was thought for a period of time that margarine was healthier than butter, until we sorted out “trans-fats” and how terrible hydrogenated oils are for our well-being.  Margarine puts up a good front– they’ve figured out how to make it look like butter, but as soon as you put in your mouth, there’s no mistaking that greasy mouth-feel. It’s always such a disappointment– like kissing someone for the first time and discovering that they don’t really know how. I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, my ass.

Missing is that glorious slippery spreading warmth on your tongue, that sense of langour, that delicate pale yellow perfection, that prayer. Butter is an offering, a culinary spell, bliss.  And margarine? Well,  margarine is just margarine.

These days I’ve been fortunate to have a first class ciabatta to serve as vehicle for my butter, but because I’m never happy, now I find the butter is not good enough for the bread. I’ve been practically living on toast. I love toast in all of its varieties– I can sing the praises of toast made from Wonder Bread if called upon– but this is really fine bread. This is the kind of bread that makes people feel humble and grateful and I think I’ll make another piece of toast all at once. It deserves better butter.

Better butter. The very concept takes my breath away.

AFTER

I could have been done with this hours ago.  The luminaria have all burned out. The guests have all gone home. Every living soul in the house is sound asleep. I’ve just sat here for three hours barefoot at my desk, in pajamas and a wool pullover because the house is cold at night, daydreaming.  In the shower I thought I knew what I was going to write, and I might still write that, just not tonight. Tonight I am something beyond tired– gone long past sleepy to something else. Even now, I’m just noodling away at this. There’s no story here, folks, move along.

It was a good party, our first in probably a decade. I don’t even remember which one was the last one. I think it could have been the year that I started out for Bozeman before dawn to pick up a last few things and the car shuddered to a stop on the pass when the gas lines froze. By the time someone stopped to help me, I was beginning to be hypothermic. The person who lifted me from the driver’s seat was an extraordinarily kind snowplow operator. He set me up in the cab of the plow and drove 15 miles straight down the hill  to the Bozeman ER .  In the emergency room, they rolled me up in layers of heated blankets, changing them out as they cooled.

That year, we put the party off for a day. There were times this week that I wished I could push back the start time a day or two or ten– and yet, we were reasonably presentable when the first guests stepped through the door. Presentable, but still cooking. Maybe that was an excuse. It gave me something to do with my hands, cutting up cantaloupe with woeful inelegance. It made people come to me, rather than making me choose. I think I’m a little rusty at this hostess business.  I was thrilled to see each one of those folks walk through the door, though.

William Faulkner once said “Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency to get the book written.”  I don’t think I’m quite there. (This is probably a relief to my husband as I understand old Bill was pretty difficult to live with when he was writing. And damn difficult when he wasn’t.) It’s getting better though– at least there is writing is going on. It may not be good writing, but it’s got little legs all the same.

Unlike Faulkner, I’m not willing to just dump everything else in my life. I would just as soon find time for  making eggnog for my friends; taking the coats, and bottles of wine and gingerbread from their arms; hearing about their children, and dogs and political campaigns. Even if finding the balance means too many late nights trudging along one after the other. I’ll get down to the business of the writing tomorrow, and might be able to transform that into something worth reading.

In the meantime, I’m just going to sit here at my desk, enjoying the kilim under my bare feet, remembering a splendid evening with friends, the magic of the lanterns in the garden – until I’m too sleepy to do so.

BABY TONY IN HEAVEN

Even with the air-conditioning going full blast, the truck is hot and the drive along I-20 out of northern Louisiana monotonous. It’s the end of Labor day weekend, and evacuees from the gulf coast are traveling north to escape Hurricane Gustav. When I left the motel in Monroe, a number of families have already set up camp in the parking lot.

We turn north out of Vicksburg on Highway 61. It runs along the Mississippi river from New Orleans to Minnesota. From the 1920s through the fifties, it was an important trail for blacks leaving the deep south for better prospects in Chicago.  The New York Times‘ music critic Robert Shelton wrote: “Jazz came up the river. Blues came up the river. A lot of great basic American culture came right up that highway and up that river.”

We went up  Highway 61 as far as Greenville, noting the first legal liquor store in Mississippi (the Jigger and Jug Package Store, which opened in 1966) and stopping for a hamburger. We’re on the west side of Greenville now, so we just meander over to State Highway 1, heading north through miles of cotton fields and sleepy little towns like Rosedale, Gunnison, Alligator.

Just north of Round Lake, a roadside shrine catches my attention. There is a life-size painted plywood silhouette of a little boy waving, and a little red chair. In the ten seconds it takes me to decide to stop, I’ve traveled another 800 feet. I find a place to turn the truck around.

“What’s going on,” my 13-year-old son asks sleepily, awakened by the change in momentum.

“Nothing, I just want to look at something.” He sighs and closes his eyes again. The roadside memorial consists of a large cross, a couple of concrete angels, the little red chair painted with the words “Baby Tony,” a hand-lettered sign that says “Pray for My Mama” and about a hundred red and white bicycle reflectors.

I am interested in roadside shrines. It seems strange to say that I admire them, given that they are landmarks to someone’s heartbreak, but the impulse to erect them feels entirely right to me. One mother said that she felt closer to her daughter on the narrow median strip where the girl died than in the cemetery where her body was laid to rest. “This is where her spirit left this earth,” she explained, and that is explanation enough.

My husband has no patience for such things. He is a champion of getting from point a to point b in the most efficient way possible and we would never stop, let alone turn around and go back for a pile of stuff on the side of the road. But when I am traveling alone (or with my kid) I often stop. I’ve photographed dozens of them, but the results are always flat. The energy that’s there can’t be captured by the camera, I suppose. I go on trying, though and I am composing a photo when an SUV stops alongside the truck.

A woman gets out of the vehicle and hurries towards me. There’s a twinge of anxiety– have I trespassed? Have I done something to offend?

“Hello! Hello!” she calls. “This is my grandson’s shrine, Baby Tony. I made this for him.”  She is standing in front of me now, a woman in late middle-age, her salt and pepper hair pulled off her face into a tidy bun, still in her denim dress and flat shoes from church this morning. “I am so glad you stopped!”

We chat a little about the shrine, and she asks if I have time to come back to her house for a minute. It would be easy to say no, I really have to get on the road. It would be prudent to say no, wouldn’t it? My husband would be stunned that I would even consider saying yes. But she looks so hopeful I find myself saying “Sure, you lead the way.”

Baby Tony’s grandmother’s home is a tidy one-story house I’d passed a mile or so back.  Other than the marquee in the neighbor’s yard (“Have you robbed God? You robbed him of tithes and offerings. Repent for Grace”) it seems entirely unremarkable.

“Come this way,” she says, “I want to show you something.” She sounds quite urgent and I hurry after her around the side of the house. There, in a grove of trees is a trampoline and around the trampoline are dozens and dozens of red tricycles.

“After Baby Tony died,” she says, “people just started bringing them to me.”  There are  67 tricycles arranged  one after the other in a large rectangle. Some face left, others face right. There’s no significance to the number, Janice says. Sometimes there are more, sometimes there are less. When she’s been given a particularly nice tricycle, she has passed it on to a child that didn’t have a trike. “That’s the way Baby Tony would have wanted it.”

One of the tricycles is cream-colored and quite old; the others are all red and white in various states of repair. Some are entirely covered in rust. An orphaned tricycle tire hangs on the handlebar of a neighboring trike. Her daughter and grandson had been over to the house the night before the accident, she tells me. Baby Tony was three years old.

“I was sitting in my chair and he was sitting in my lap. He was such a sweet little boy. His mama said to him, ‘Come on Baby Tony, we got to get home to make some supper for your Daddy.’  He leaned up next to me like this and he said “Gramma, I’m going to see God tomorrow.’ I just didn’t know what to say to that, but my hair just raised up like this on my neck, see. When Baby Tony and my daughter were about to go out the door, he ran over and held his arms up for me to pick him up. When I did he put his little arms around my neck and he said ‘Pray for my Mama.’”

And on the next day, there was an accident. Just a single car, just a little ways up the road. Her daughter drifted to one side, overcorrected, left the road, and rolled. She spent weeks in the hospital, but Baby Tony was killed immediately. The first tricycle was there in Janice’s yard when she got home from the hospital that night.

It wasn’t every day, but at least every week, that another tricycle would appear. Some old, some brand new. She knows the details about some of the trikes, but others are more obscure, arriving in the night, or when she is away. She started lining them up along the edge of her yard, and as the line grew, she had to turn a corner and then again, until the never-ending parade of tricycles was complete.

“It’s very peaceful out here,” she says. “And if I feel sad, I come out here and it feels like Baby Tony is still with me.” She excuses herself and goes into the house, returning a few minutes later with a much-larger-than-life painting of a little boy in a Hawaiian shirt. He looks like an old soul, I think. “This is Baby Tony!,” she says, and her voice is full of joy.

I’m astonished to see that I’ve been there for an hour, and I still have to get on up the road to Memphis. I give her my address and promise to send her a copy of the photograph of she and Tony in the garden of tricycles.

“Oh, please. Wait just a minute,” she says and runs into the house. When she returns she puts a golden pear in my hand. It’s heavy– plaster, I think. “You are supposed to have this,” she says. Pears– the symbol of motherhood and immortality. I thank her for the pear and for taking the time  to tell me about Baby Tony.

“Oh no,” she says, “thank you. Thank you so much for stopping.”

I climb into the truck, waving at her as I back out into the road.

“What was all that about?” my son asks, awake now. We are passing the spot where Baby Tony left this earth and I explain that the lady was the little boy’s grandmother. “Oh, that’s so sad,” my son says. He picks up the pear. “I can’t eat this, can I?”

“No, it’s not real.” If I didn’t have the photographs, it might all have been a dream.

LET EVERY BELL RING

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,

The faithless coldness of the times;

Ring out, ring out thy mournful rhymes,

But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Last Christmas was the very worst one ever. I couldn’t quite figure it out. There had been Christmases past that were poorer, lonelier, more bizarre. There was the year I knocked over a 100-year-old Chinese man with my mother’s cast-off Chevy Citation. (He lived.) Or that first Christmas in Montana when I only knew six people and none of them invited me over. Though I had no decorations, I picked up a bedraggled fir tree from an abandoned lot on Christmas eve (the sign said free) and set it up in a bucket of water in my apartment, festooning it with snowflakes cut from typing paper. Or that Christmas six years ago, when my father slipped away from us, unmooring me in ways I could not even fathom.

But since then there have been holidays full of joy, surprise, and adventure. I’d reclaimed the holiday I love best. I only had to look back through the photographs of grinning children, exquisite lights, Christmas cupcakes to remember.

But not last year. I went through the motions. My mother came to visit. I made cookies for friends and neighbors. We had a lovely tree and nice presents and the whole time I just felt dead inside. I did not keep Christmas in my heart. Hell, I couldn’t find it with both hands. I was as cold inside as icy rain. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t snap out of it. No matter what I did to kindle it, there was simply no joy.  When the season blessedly shuddered to a stop, it was with relief that I packed away each ornament, every strand of lights, the singing reindeer. I couldn’t wait to be done.

This autumn they seemed to be cranking up Christmas even sooner. I understand that with the economy teetering that merchants must wring every penny they can out of holiday shoppers. I understand that for many this is what keeps their doors open the rest of the year. But still, I resented Christmas rushing in before Halloween pumpkins had even been carved, let alone extinguished. The sight of people skipping autumn for glitter and tinsel foretold that grim drumbeat. I muttered and grumbled about the commercialization of the holiday until the  middle of November, when I turned up the Christmas music on the radio and gave in.

I am determined to make this Christmas different. I can’t survive another one like last year.

I’ve started really looking at decorations, not just seeing them. Santa perched atop a Columbus, OH candy factory, a life-size nativity scene, or a crazy mess of mismatched twinkling lights and plastic reindeer that still manage to look beautiful glowing in the night. I’m humming along to every schmaltzy Christmas song on the radio. (Except for “Home for the Holidays,” I still can’t stand that one. I said to my son the other night that Frank Sinatra must have stopped mid-phrase during recording and said “What is this slop?”) If I’m alone in the car, I’ll actually sing.  I took a donation to the soup kitchen around the corner, along with three bags of children’s books, because they said they needed them.  Though I have a dozen rolls of wrapping paper left from previous years, I bought some new rolls, and threw the old wrinkled stuff away.

There’s been a particular kind of pleasure in finding gifts. Not extravagant gifts perhaps, or even particularly expensive ones, but the sort of thing that one might open on Christmas morning  feeling surprise and delight. (And if one doesn’t, one should keep it to one’s self. And no, I’m not going to tell one where I got it so one can return it for cash.) When we were first married I was so taken with having a ready-made family of a husband and his two young daughters that I produced literally a small mountain of gifts for them. If they weren’t overwhelmed by the sheer number of presents, which took days to open, they were certainly stifled by my insistence that everyone take turns to open their gifts. That was a tradition in my childhood, but I think I must have terrified the girls, who had only previously known the rip-and-shred model.

They didn’t get what they wanted either. The daughter (with the word processor she’d asked for) eyed with naked envy her sister’s American Girl doll. The worst flop though was Jingle, the Welsh pony mare that I bought for my younger stepdaughter, who was horse-crazy. Except that somehow I’d failed to notice that the horses she was crazy for were the ones in her story books and lining her shelves. She didn’t really want a real pony– that was probably my leftover Christmas fantasy– and the cocktail of her dismay and my disappointment made for a grim time.

My husband is a wonderful man in many ways, but gift-giving is not one of them. The first year we were married he went to Wal-Mart on Christmas Eve and bought a huge stack of  well, stuff. A copy of National Enquirer, a polyester nightgown four sizes too big, a colander, a VHS movie we’d already bought a few weeks before.  Last year, when pressed, he came up with one thing, a grape-colored cotton turtleneck. I’ve tried a general list of things he might choose from. I’ve tried a specific list of the very thing I wanted and that didn’t work either. After nearly two decades, I’ve given up. He is a generous man at heart and I can help him choose. Surprise is highly overrated anyway.

I know some people get really hung up on what they get from their spouse, which may explain why Lexus has the audacity to suggest that you might not screw it up if you give your wife a $40,000 car. My old friend Kate spent every Christmas and birthday in tears because her husband Jeff  had screwed it up again. Though I never said it, I often wished she’d just cut him a break. If the only way you can validate your marriage is by the measure of what swell gifts you’ve been given, that’s a little pathetic.  I did once love a man who gave quite magical gifts. The only problem is that he was a total narcissistic ass. Once I told him that I thought it would be wonderful to have the last words of James Joyce’s Ulysses (“Yes, I said. Yes, I will. Yes.”) engraved on the inside of a wedding ring. That Christmas he gave me that very sentiment embroidered on a  . . . wait for it . . . bath towel.

Which reminds me of the Christmas that my mother really wanted a guitar and my father gave her a recorder. My father got better at Christmas, even though for most of my life “Christmas with my father” was represented by an enormous cardboard carton of gifts that arrived one day in December. My parents divorced when I was 10 and my mother and I moved to England. That Christmas the carton contained the boxed set of George Harrison’s “All Things Must Pass,” and all manner of other stuff one might send across the Atlantic ocean to your only child. Over the years the box contained a transistor radio, ice skates, horse books, cashmere sweaters, a Sony Walkman, a check for a Thoroughbred mare.  One year it held the wedding ring my mother had given him in 1960. I wore it on the middle finger of my left hand for fifteen years– until the day I married my husband and now he wears it.

In November of every year, my father would ask me for a list of what I wanted for Christmas. Over the years, with the addition of husband and stepchildren and our son, the lists became more elaborate, and I looked forward to making them. It wasn’t a matter of asking for something I wanted– though that was part of it. It was more like drafting a road map to Larkinland, full of clues and ciphers. It didn’t always work, because we are human, but it had its magic.  My mother would interject here, a little archly, that it did not make for much magic for the rest of my actual real-life family who sat around for hours watching me unwrap the things my father sent.

Then one Christmas Dad died. I don’t know if he hung on until the 26th on purpose or if it just worked out that way. It didn’t matter. We had been with him through the 17th, and went home to Montana because Julian was supposed to be in a school play and we expected Dad to live through January. The Doctors said he would. Was there a Christmas that year? I don’t remember. I’m sure we did something for Julian and his sisters. I remember that I absolutely could not stomach the idea of killing a living tree for something as superficial as Christmas, so we put up a little tree made of tinsel. When the call came on St. Stephen’s Day that he wasn’t going to make it, I couldn’t get to Missouri in time. The one flight was leaving in 40  minutes from an airport 120  miles away, and as it happened, even if I’d been on the plane I wouldn’t have made it in time.

I didn’t get over it. Yes, there had been holidays ”full of joy, surprise, and adventure.” I’d struggled for those, reaching up through a deep sea of melancholy.  But my grief stained so many things I’d loved about Christmas. And there was never another cardboard carton full of oddly shaped gifts wrapped with too much tape and witty clues written in Dad’s angular hand about the mysteries within.

The thing is that his death was really the last straw. My stepfather, HCB– the man who taught me to drive, gave me my first pony, my first pair of earrings, my first Martini– had died unexpectedly far, far away seven years before. When people die halfway round the world, it never feels like they’re really dead. They just feel gone. Though he’d never given me a cardboard carton full of stuff I thought I wanted, he’d given me self-confidence, determination, the art of debate, a well-honed sense of social justice and a trial run in grief. Christmas with HCB meant a houseful of people, a joint of  beef, the town brass-band playing “My Old Kentucky Home” in the kitchen, and the kind of gift you never knew you wanted because you did not know that it existed. And the very last time I saw him was at Christmastime, just before he went back to England, three years before he died. He and my mother came out to Montana to see us, and our brand new baby boy. He slipped me a hundred-dollar bill over dinner on Christmas eve. I had no pockets, so he suggested that I fold it up and put in my shoe.  He had long discussions with three-month-old Julian. He exclaimed over the square spot on the back of our hound dog. He sang bawdy English songs and Christmas carols and got on an airplane and went away forever.

Over Thanksgiving this year, a friend wrote that she’d enjoyed the best holiday she’d had in years, going out to NASA with a friend. She said that she’d felt down on every holiday since 1995 when her father died. 16 years.  A pet psychic once told me that my father  (in heaven,presumably) was so distressed by  my sadness– and that my dog was consumed by my grief, which the dog couldn’t  comprehend or understand. How large did I need this to be written?  It is, was, is time to get on with things.

So we go pick out a Christmas tree, one that touches the ceiling. I’m not sure I’d ever bring myself to cut down another tree, but when they’re standing outside the grocery store, they’re somewhat past saving. I’ve commandeered the guest room (which smells oddly like fruitcake– could that be a ghost?) for wrapping presents. I’m filling up a cardboard carton full of stuff for (as HCB would say) my “chosen” daughter and her children– that’s what he called me. Not his stepdaughter, but his chosen daughter, like he’d plucked me off a tree, or out of a lineup.

There are menus to be planned, Christmas cards to be written, school programs, carillon concerts, a trip to see the University of Dayton’s huge collection of crèches, even though I’ve seen them all twice before. There are photographs to take, of family and Christmas lights and friends, and scores of dogs with Santa Claus, a fundraiser for dog rescue. I think this is the year that we will turn our collection of plastic milk jugs into luminaria ringing the edges of the property.

I have learned something from my sorrow. Last Christmas was my fork in the road. I am not going to mourn for years to come. I choose life! I choose happiness. I am going to dance and sing (sometimes out loud even) and remember all the joy and sorrow in the past and look forward to both sweetness and tears in the days ahead. Let all the bells ring!  I am going to celebrate Christmas, falling open armed into the light.