(christmas)

I’m not spending Christmas in Illinois this year. It’s almost too much to wrap my head around.

Christmas hasn’t been the same since my mother died, so I suppose it makes no difference. I could look around every corner of that house on Pine and she still wouldn’t magically appear.

I remember how claustrophobic and sharp the edges of the walls felt the first Christmas after she passed. How cumbersome it felt making French Onion Soup in that kitchen so overwhelmed with grief, the amount of Pinot Noir and whiskey I needed just to not feel the pangs of my heartbreak.

It didn’t dull over the years, either. It just kept getting sharper, the knife in my chest kept turning, the way her ghost haunted the walls but she never seemed to pass through them.

My roommates and I still haven’t gotten a Christmas tree yet. I suppose I could hang an aluminum bauble on my orchid.

I tried listening to the Christmas albums of my childhood and adolescence and kept replaying how those memories seemed to cling to those songs and evaporate as quickly as the minutes sped by the canals of my ears.

Briefly, ever so briefly, I entertained the idea of making my mother’s Peanut Brittle in the microwave, before I remembered it wouldn’t get frigid enough here for me to freeze and crackle them outside like I did with my mother on our porch before we sealed them up in tins to give to my teachers.

I suppose I’ll make sugar cookies (K’s favorite) and gingerbread men (M’s favorite) instead, and chocolate chocolate cookies for myself.

What do you do when Christmas doesn’t feel like Christmas anymore?

I bought a copy of The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan for $2 the other day at the thrift store across the railroad tracks from me. I like that it’s about mothers and daughters.