The Christmas Story I Revisit Every Year
pour some tea and settle in for "I Knew All Along"
Happy Holiday Season Dear Ones,
How is December unfolding in your home? I don’t have a tree, lights, or decorations up, but I’m part of a choir practicing beautiful carols for our annual Festival of Lessons and Carols. Christmas songs have been allowed airtime since the day after Thanksgiving. And, I’m trying to binge the latest crop of holiday movies, but can’t make it past the 10 minute mark on most of them. Here’s what made the cut this weekend: Our Little Secret, Christmas at the Biltmore, and Meet Me Next Christmas. I’m up for recommendations (new or old) if you’ve got them.
I haven’t dipped into my tried-and-true favorites, but it’s good to know I can still stream: While You Were Sleeping, Serendipity, The Santa Clause, Elf, Deck the Halls, Christmas with the Kranks, and I’ll Be Home for Christmas. I first saw those films with my husband and daughters, so watching them evokes the town and home once ours, brings to mind dear family who lived just minutes away, and have all since died, and delightful friends our families celebrated holidays with year after year.
Isn’t it miraculous how a single Christmas song, or movie, or recipe, or book, or story can open portals to our past, connect us with our own, often almost forgotten stories, and the larger history we’re all part of? I think that’s part of our desire to keep up traditions. What traditions feed you?
Twenty-years ago, or so, I wrote a short story, that, though fiction, reflects much of my own experience as an expectant mother set against the backdrop of the Christmas story. I re-read “I Knew All Along” every year. It is one of the few Advent traditions I have managed to keep since it’s not dependent on location, or circumstances. Like the best traditions, something in it always sparks a memory or an insight. And unlike many contemporary short stories, this one has a happy/hopeful ending. And who doesn’t need that right now?
Here’s “I Knew All Along” (I think it’s about a 10 minute read). And some photos from way-way back to set the mood.
I Knew All Along
I knew all along that this baby I was carrying, this child who was growing large within me, kicking my ribs, shrinking my bladder, straining my back, wasn’t really mine. But I didn’t want to think about that because I was already so completely, thoroughly in love with this person who was coming.
I changed for this baby. Before I even met him, or her. I swallowed vitamins the size of dachshunds. I gave up champagne and all my friends were getting married. I gave up my morning coffee, which wasn’t a pretty sight. I gave up my afternoon Diet Coke, even chocolate. Chinese food too, after the kid spent a night doing in-utero flips on an MSG high.
The only thing I’d given up for Jeff when we got married was my apartment. This was way different, and I didn’t want to think about how this kid wasn’t really mine.
Sure, it was mine to incubate, birth, breastfeed, diaper, drive to soccer practice, swim lessons, and the orthodontist. Mine to rock during months of colic. Mine to teach songs about popping weasels and teapots stout. Mine to explain about the birds, the bees, the poison oak, manual transmissions, and college admissions. Mine, ours if you like, to pay for school pictures, summer camp, prom wear, and tuition. But not mine to keep.
And I didn’t want to know this. Because I knew how much it would stab at my heart and make me want to squeeze my baby, once it was born, against my chest so tightly that neither one of us could breathe.
That morning I’d seen a holiday commercial where the perfect mom has cookies baking in the oven and two kids playing under the Christmas tree. She answers the phone with her oven mitts on, smiles that sweet, sad smile, sits at the kitchen table, and rests her elbow next to the flour canister.
So, I dialed my mother and sobbed while I told her that I was fine and did she know how much I loved her? And did I ever tell her, really tell her, that she was a good mother, despite her faults, of which there were many? Did she know that I knew, that despite all that, I was so lucky to have her for a mother?
How I wish you were here with me, I said, even though we both knew she was going to fly out the second the baby was born. In short, I was a mess.
It was Christmas Eve, and Jeff and I were busy accommodating each other’s seasonal traditions, of which mine was last-minute shopping. All the stores were open late, and I waddled along in my red velveteen jumper with the embroidered holly looking like a modern Santa in the land of gender equity. Jeff tucked small bags into the big one from Hickory Farms. I always got my grandmother Beef Stick and smoked cheddar.
We were strolling, having completed the shopping, through the animated Christmas display in the plaza. Robotic reindeer and motorized Santas shook tinny bells and ho-hoed while Jingle Bells and Silver Bells and Frosty the Snowman played on outdoor speakers. The tip of my nose was getting red, so Jeff suggested we go to the Hilton Bar.
We sat next to the window, stirring hot chocolate, and sniffed at the fresh pine and peppermint candy wreath wrapped around the little oil lamp at our table.
“We could make one of these and take it to my parents’ tomorrow,” Jeff said.
Our first Christmas as official marrieds, and we’d impress the relatives with our own holiday creations.
“Here’s to the three of us,” I said, and patted my belly.
Now have you ever felt a pregnant woman’s stomach? There’s a reason it looks like a basketball. It’s packed solid with amniotic fluid. About ten gallons, it felt like, in my case. But I liked knowing there was this shield, the Kendra force field around my baby. An entire womb universe where my voice echoed in the baby’s ears at all hours assuring him or her that he or she was perfectly loved and perfectly safe.
Jeff reached across the table, put his hand on my hand and looked deep into my eyes and smiled. And it would’ve been really sappy, the kind of thing that made me reach for Kleenex, except at that moment, the baby scraped something sharp, like an elbow, across the width of my belly and we both felt it. Even my jumper twitched.
“Youch,” I said. “How many times have I told you, no roughhousing inside?”
“That’s my Sumo baby,” Jeff said.
I slipped my feet out of my loafers and onto Jeff’s thighs. He rubbed my feet. Then we settled back and watched people walk across the plaza.
Jeff said, “What sort of parents keep their kids out so late on Christmas Eve?” about this family on the sidewalk in front of us.
There was a boy about two, I think, who refused to climb in his stroller and kept stretching up his arms to be carried. We could see his mother, who had a baby strapped to her chest, shake her head no. She pushed the empty stroller in front of her and walked away. The kid threw himself on the cement lashing. You could tell he was wailing. The mother turned around, tapped her foot, and held up one finger, then two, then three. The kid stopped thrashing, but he lay face down on the cement. The mother folded each finger back into her fist.
Please don’t hit him, I thought, because you wouldn’t believe what I’d seen and heard since I started paying attention to kids and their parents. Jeff squeezed my feet so hard, I thought he might cut off the circulation.
Then the mother unzipped the baby carrier and lifted the baby out. It stiffened and opened its mouth, crying. She strapped the baby into the stroller, then wheeled back toward her son, sat next to him, wiped his cheeks and nose on her sleeve, and kissed the top of his head. After a minute or so, they both stood up. She hoisted him onto one hip, put one arm around his waist and grabbed the stroller with the other.
“Whew,” I said.
Jeff loosened his grip on my feet and took one last sip of his drink. “Ready to go?”
“Sure,” I answered. “After I visit the ladies’ room for the eighth time tonight.”
“Let me know how you rate the ambience in this one,” he said.
Afterward we held hands and walked outside toward the parking garage.
Then we heard real bells, and the sound was so much deeper, richer than the piped in music that Jeff said, “Let’s find out.”
So, we ended up outside Saint Joseph’s Cathedral. The music stopped just after we got there.
“Bummer,” I said and looked at Jeff who was looking at the stone steps that led up to massive wooden doors that were thrown open, rectangles of honeyed light seeping out.
“My parents were married here,” he said.
“No way,” I said.
“Way. They took me here once.”
Some people walked past us and into the church.
“Want to go in?” I asked.
“Just a peek,” he answered.
We walked inside. “Cool lobby,” I said, looking at the tile mosaics on the floor.
“They call it something else,” Jeff said. “Narthex, maybe.”
“Okay.” I stepped toward another set of open doors.
There were small sinks near each one with wet sponges like they were expecting a lot of people with unsealed envelopes.
“It’s holy water,” Jeff said, and switched the Hickory Farms bag to his left hand. “You cross yourself, like this.” He pressed his right hand on the sponge, and then touched his forehead, his chest and each of his shoulders.
“What’s it for?”
“I don’t remember.”
We stepped through the next set of doors onto a red carpet that ran between rows of polished wooden benches with magazine racks on the backs. Before I could see anything else a scrawny old man in a faded pinstripe suit appeared.
“Let me help you to a seat,” he said. “The service starts in fifteen minutes.”
Jeff and I started to say, No really, that’s okay, we’re just looking. But the man looked so unsteady we thought he’d sink to the floor if we said no. He walked us down about twenty rows and said, “How’s this pew?”
“This is fine,” Jeff answered.
The man walked away. Then Jeff did this little bob thing, where one knee touched the ground on the carpet, he touched his head, chest, and shoulders again, then slid into the pew with the bag banging on his knees.
I sat next to him. “What was that?”
“You’re supposed to kneel before you sit down, a sign of respect for God, or something like that.”
“You didn’t do that at The Chapel,” I said.
“We weren’t in a Catholic church.”
“I didn’t know it made a difference,” I said. This was only the fourth time I’d been inside a church. Once on a grade school field trip to one of the Missions. Then twice in the past year to The Chapel in Orange Heights which looked a lot like the conference rooms in my office building, same padded chairs, same patterned carpet. The only difference was that there was a piano in one corner with a small brass cross on top and lots of flowers up front. My cousin, Marla, got married there last month, and before that, in March, was my grandfather’s funeral, right before Jeff and I got married.
“You want to stay?” Jeff asked. “I haven’t been to Mass since I was ten. It might be kind of fun.”
“What the heck,” I said, wondering if we were starting another family tradition.
I looked around. One whole wall had huge metal pipes, like in some old black and white movie. There were stained glass windows along the sidewalls, with pictures of sheep and Jesus wearing a toga. There were rows of candles in glass holders on either side of the stage. Some women put money in a bucket, lit candles, knelt in front of them, and folded their hands.
“Did you see that?” I asked Jeff. “Like God doesn’t listen unless you pay?”
“Weird, I know,” he said. “Check this out.” He showed me the magazine from the rack. “It used to crack me up that it was called the Missal,” he said, “But then I didn’t know how to spell.” He flipped through the pages. “And see this, Preface. I read it wrong once. I thought it said Pie Face, so I told Gary and every time we’d get to that part we’d laugh, and Mom would glare at us and say if we didn’t simmer down we couldn’t go out for donuts.”
“And you’re always telling me you were a perfect little angel,” I said.
When the place was about half full, a dozen people dressed in red robes filed onto the stage and sat on two benches behind one of the podiums. There was a long wooden table in the middle of the stage with two big silver cups and trays with room service covers.
“That’s for Communion,” Jeff said. “The priest puts wafers on your tongue. They taste like wallpaper paste. But you can’t have any unless you go through catechism, and then you’re supposed to go to confession first.” He pointed to some carved wooden booths in one corner.
“Sounds complicated,” I said.
“It is.”
Above the stage was a huge cross, about twenty feet tall with a bigger than life Jesus hanging from it with an agonized expression, head drooping toward his bare chest. His eyes were open, and blood trickled down his forehead from the thorny wreath around his head. His hands were nailed to the arms of the cross, a sheet was tied around his waist, and his ankles were tied together. It was gruesome. It was huge. There was no escaping it. My eyes kept coming back even though I didn’t want to look.
“That’s horrible,” I said. “How can you stand to look at it?”
“I know,” Jeff said. “The one at Saint Anne’s scared the crap out of me at first. But you learn to tune it out. You learn to look at it and not think about what you’re seeing.”
The organ started. The choir sang. Two priests walked down the middle aisle in fancy robes, and I followed along with Jeff in the booklet. He knew all this stuff, when to stand, when to kneel, what to sing, what to say. Things I never even knew he knew. Things he thought he’d forgotten.
Then some kids came on stage dressed like sheep and donkeys, and others came in wearing little white robes and halos and began to sing. Mary and Joseph walked in next to a kid in brown sweats who brayed and crawled on all fours beside them.
Now, I didn’t know much about church, but I did know the Christmas story wasn’t all Santa and Rudolph. I’d seen It’s Christmas, Charlie Brown. Plus, my grandma had little manger scenes and I used to play with the figurines, sprinkling excelsior and moving them all around the top of her grand piano. And I knew that Mary was supposed to be pregnant, just like me, only more so, and this Mary definitely did not have a pillow in her costume.
But then I cut her some slack, because this was church after all, not Lamaze, and they probably didn’t want to muck up the story with lots of groaning and an actual birth scene, because there was no way that Joseph, who looked like he was about six, was going to hold Mary––who was probably twelve judging by her gaudy makeup––under the shoulders and say, “Now honey, breathe with me.”
Sure enough, Joseph and Mary kneeled by the empty manger while a soloist came forward from the choir and sang O Holy Night. She had a voice that made the hair on the back of my neck prickle, in a good way. When she finished, I looked over at Jeff and he smiled, like church was even better than he remembered it.
Then a woman got up from the front row and handed a baby to Mary. I could tell by the way Mary rocked back on her heels that this was a live baby, not some doll. The kids in the halos stood around Mary, and the choir lit candles circling behind them, and someone lowered the lights and shone a spotlight down on Mary, Joseph, and the baby. Everyone stood up and sang Joy To the World.
I felt a little wobbly because it had been a really long day. If pregnancy was this exhausting, childbirth was going to wipe me out. Maybe, I could get in on Mary’s deal, and just get handed a baby, easy as pie. But I could see that huge cross in the background behind the spotlight, while everyone sang and smiled, trying to pretend that Jesus wasn’t up there dying in plain sight.
I thought about the real Mary and how she certainly hadn’t signed up for this cross thing. One of the priests had read something like: An angel came to Mary and said don’t be afraid because you are going to have a child. God says name him Jesus and he will be a great king.
Isn’t it like that for every woman who is going to have a baby? Mothers and grandmothers and friends and coworkers and total strangers gather around. Don’t be afraid, they say. If natural childbirth doesn’t work, there’s always an epidural, and if that doesn’t work, a cesarean isn’t really the worst thing in the world. A healthy baby, that’s all that matters. And your baby will be healthy, don’t worry. And he or she will be smart and brilliant because you are giving him or her the highest quality prenatal care and you will no doubt pick the right preschool and sports programs and AP courses and college, and your child can grow up to be anything they set their sights on.
And if it isn’t true, if you know someone whose kid is unable to speak, or walk, or was killed by a drunk driver in high school, or became a cocaine addict and flunked out of rehab and committed suicide, or got killed in some war in a country no one ever heard of for a reason no one can even recall, well you just don’t talk about it.
What if Mary had known?
What if she’d been standing here and looked up and saw the future, this huge cross and her son hanging from it? Would she have named him something else? Paul, John, or Ringo to confuse the angel? Would she have taken off on that donkey to hide out in the mountains, like some crazy hermit, living where the world couldn’t find her son, where she could keep him safe?
She risked it. She had her baby boy. She loved him, she treasured him, and he died. Before her. It wasn’t supposed to happen that way.
I put my hands on my baby shield, and thought about how much I loved my baby, how I felt like I already knew it, how I was the entire universe to it. It won’t always be this way, I thought. I won’t be pregnant forever. Someday, sooner than I think, I will push this baby out and it won’t be mine anymore. The world will have its way.
I started crying and rummaged through my purse for a Kleenex when Jeff pulled one of those little purse packs from his pocket. The thought that he’d been carrying them all night for me made me even weepier. He really did love me. And he was ready to love our baby. If I refused to let this baby out into the world where all these bad things could happen, then nothing good could happen either. This tiny creature would never get to be loved by someone else. Would never get to be held by Jeff, or by my mother, or by my grandmother, or by Jeff’s parents, or his brother Gary, or Gary’s wife and daughter, or by my cousin Marla. My child would miss all the people who would love him or her, people we didn’t even know yet.
And that’s how it came to me, this idea that having a baby is the ultimate act of hope. It felt sudden, and I don’t believe in sudden. I hate it when I read a book and someone writes, suddenly it started to rain. Because if the people had been paying any attention, instead of being wrapped up in their own little worlds, they would’ve noticed clues long before the drops fell. Clouds rolling in, the sky getting darker, the barometer dropping, the temperature getting colder, wind whipping up, and the too calm before the storm. If they weren’t so clueless, they would’ve grabbed an umbrella instead of getting drenched.
And so, I felt that maybe my realization wasn’t sudden at all. Maybe there had been clues. Maybe it was the words Faith, Hope, and Love gold leafed in big letters on the wooden doors. Or maybe it was because this was our first Christmas being married, and it felt like the start of a history for Jeff and me. One that I wouldn’t screw up just because my parents were divorced. Or maybe it was because my whole life had been building up to this moment when I––well Jeff too––when we would give the most precious gift we had, our baby, and trust the world to love it.
And so, watching that preteen Mary on the stage bopping to Joy To the World with little baby Jesus starting to squirm in her arms, I thought about God, for about the fourth time ever, and wondered if I had the slightest clue. It seemed to me that God sent children into the world to be loved. And it also seemed to me that things hadn’t worked out the way God would’ve liked. But we were all still here, trying to figure out how to get love right. And I guess that’s hope. And I guess that’s enough.
Thanks for sharing your beautiful story, Cathy!
Absolutely love this. Thank you!