“I see a vacant seat,” replied the Ghost.
In the grey foothills on the edges of Eugene, among impossibly tall trees that are older than any of us can even imagine, on a steep street that is often populated with two dozen or more wild turkeys, fat and happy with the knowledge that there are few predators to thin their numbers, is my family's house.
It's creaky and leaky and there are a lot of quirks. There are memories quite literally burned into the blue formica countertops from when my mother left an unattended candle on New Year's Eve, 1999. As the rest of the world fretted that the world was going to go up in flames and I, around the corner at a friend's house, watched MTV, my mom nearly incinerated our kitchen. Fortunately, she didn't (and didn't in a handful of other near-misses), because the house is kind of the sixth member of our family.
My sister and her husband and daughter live there now. It's nice that another family is there, warming the place and keeping it properly noisy.
Next door is a similar house, which used to be full of barking dogs and quilting supplies and conversation, but which is very quiet now, except for the neighborhood cats who, on their rounds of begging, come and yowl at the back door, expecting tins of food from two people who will never return.
Our neighbors, Del and Marlene, are both dead. Married since their early twenties and longtime business partners in a locally-owned print shop, they lived a life that was truly together — and they died close together, too. They both contracted COVID-19; Marlene went first, in their home. Del went a little later. After living next door to my family for years and living in that house for even longer, they're both gone now.
Del and Marlene on their wedding day.
It's sad and it's hard to reconcile. They were old and sweet and from a different era — an era which included bringing traditional Christmas treats around to the neighbors on gift-wrapped squares of cardboard.
In college, I would come bounding in the door, having taken the Greyhound all the way from Bellingham, spending all day and sometimes much of the night on the bus to come home for the winter holidays (winter solstice, mostly, but also the nearly-religious and magical experience of seeing all of your old friends at a beer-stinking party and reveling in being back in your home town). After petting the dogs and hugging whoever was there, the next question would be: Where's the cherry thing?
The cherry thing, or cherry log, is, I've since learned, a Danish treat called a cherry almond braid. Marlene made one every year, delivering it to the house some time in December. The cherry thing was sacred; my mom would cut it into equal parts and everyone got one part BUT ONLY ONE. No one cheats when it comes to the cherry thing. It meant that it was December and we were together and oh my god it was so good.
This year, in creaky and leaky homes around the United States, there will be no cherry thing, whatever that family's cherry thing might be. Because of the pandemic — and, if we're being honest, because of the selfish actions of a relatively small number of people — there will be even more family tables with an empty chair, even more stockings that belong to someone who is no longer alive. There are going to be a lot of December traditions that are just different this year. Just sadder this year.
But I have to sort of stop myself from becoming enmeshed in grief— my own grief and also the collective grief that seems to have permeated the air and the water and the soil — because there is still so much.
My all-time favorite Christmas text, as a confirmed atheist who likes December for the treats and the trees and the increased donations to important non-profits, is and will always be A Christmas Carol. Most people have been one or more film version (the Muppet one is the best), but I think the text is so, so worthwhile.
If only because, like basically all other Christmas media — the Grinch, Christmas Vacation, Home Alone, Elf, just to name a few — the theme is about the absolutely critical role that community and people play in our everyday wellbeing.
From A Christmas Carol:
“Christmas a humbug, uncle!” said Scrooge’s nephew.
“You don’t mean that, I am sure?”
“I do,” said Scrooge. “Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry? You’re poor enough.”
“Come, then,” returned the nephew gaily. “What right have you to be dismal? What reason have you to be morose? You’re rich enough.”
Scrooge having no better answer ready on the spur of the moment, said, “Bah!” again; and followed it up with “Humbug.”
“Don’t be cross, uncle!” said the nephew.
“What else can I be,” returned the uncle, “when I live in such a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas! Out upon merry Christmas! What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in ’em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will,” said Scrooge indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!”
“Uncle!” pleaded the nephew.
“Nephew!” returned the uncle sternly, “keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine.”
“Keep it!” repeated Scrooge’s nephew. “But you don’t keep it.”
“Let me leave it alone, then,” said Scrooge. “Much good may it do you! Much good it has ever done you!”
Scrooge has become a shorthand for anyone who doesn't celebrate events or feel lively or chipper. We call someone a Scrooge if he's poor-natured or, maybe, if he's greedy. But what's been lost (I think) is the importance of his unrelenting capitalism — and how his pursuit of not just keeping his money, but making more of it at the expense of literally anyone else at all costs, is what has made him cold and alone.
Most Christmas movies are, if you distill them down, about this same idea — that capitalism (and capitalists) are essentially depraved, morally-bankrupt, and (because it's Christmas!), verifiably un-Christian. They are not members of their community. They aren't even reliable members of their family.
How, then, is it possible that so many people can sit down to watch It's "A Wonderful Life" and still vote for lawmakers who whittle away at the social safety net, who have created predatory systems of poverty, and who willfully refuse to address the very real needs of their constituents?
I have to think it's the same way that people will sit down at their Christmas table this year with an empty chair (or several) and still fail to take the necessary precautions to prevent further mortality. The unvaccinated people who, this year, will unpack a stocking from a cardboard box labeled "X-MAS DECORATIONS," inhale the smell of dust and pine and Bon Marche purchases of yore, and be overwhelmed by sadness, because the person who used to peer into this stocking on Christmas morning is in the ground. The ones who will complain of being "sick of mask mandates" on Friday and filled with sorrow on Saturday when a different relative has to cut the ham.
We are remarkably good at keeping our feelings and our reality separate. And we are so skilled and willfully avoiding connecting the outcomes with the causes, especially when the causes were ourselves. Like children, we cover our eyes and hope nothing can hurt us. We think that we can avoid empty chairs at our tables by ignoring the reasons they're empty.
But if our Christmas media has shown us anything, it's that we have to change if we want the outcome to change.
If we want cherry things and robust, warm homes for our kids (or each other's kids) in the Decembers Yet to Come, we have to think about the roles we play. We have to not burn down the house. We have to get our vaccines. We have to protect ourselves and others.
There are no ghosts to give us previews of how we're fucking up, except for the ghosts around the table who aren't there to tell their stories.