Unbroken By Laura J. Oliver

Leah is on the rug in the foyer, licking her paws nonstop. The terrier mix is hard at work giving herself a…  mani? pedi? Your guess is as good as mine, but she draws my attention to something on the floor next to the door, near the crack that lets the cold air in. I bend down and discover that Baby Jesus has fallen out of the trash bag I took out earlier. Good heavens. It feels like a sign.

He’s made of pottery and painted brown to look like wood. I bought him in Barcelona, Spain, the first Christmas I was married. He is part of a creche set, and if you look closely, you notice he has the vacant gaze of a Roman statue, and now, with a major chip out of his manger, Baby J has to go.

I feel a little squeamish dispensing with Jesus (or trying to). It’s similar to deciding what to do with the eight Bibles you’ve accumulated.

Leave them in hotel rooms, Gideon!

But I never had a good surface area on which to display the creche, and over the decades, the cows lost their horns; Mary seems to have had a MOHS procedure on her nose, and her halo is chipped. Joseph, inordinately tall, can’t stand up unassisted now. The arm he extends down toward the manger looks like he’s saying, “Woah Nelly…”  not, “Behold the King of kings.”

I’ve been hanging on to the whole broken holy family because that’s what I do– hang on to family– only in some sense of late that has become the family of man.

Hello you.

Thanks to the internet, I’ve been reconnecting with people I knew only briefly, say in eighth grade, or tangentially, as in my best friend’s friend, and those rediscovered relationships feel very much like Christmas, like the most unanticipated of gifts. Maybe it’s because who we grew up with shaped who we became, and there are days, or moments anyway, where reconnecting with our points of origin feels disarming, even charming.

Eventually, we grow up, and our life companions become our kids. I bought each of my children a Christmas ornament the year they were born and one every year thereafter until they left home. So, each child took a collection of memories from childhood into their future. Audra’s ornaments were always a bell of some kind—silver, gold. Andrew’s were made of china—a polar bear, a reindeer, and Emily’s ornaments were made of crystal—stars, icicles, and angels. That’s nearly 60 ornaments that have come and gone from my tree, which I guess means 60 years of parenting in a way. It’s a 60-year big hole, anyway. Chicxulub comes to mind—the asteroid that had been on a collision course with the Earth for centuries and then left a hole nearly 100 miles wide and at least 12 miles deep.

That sounds about right.

The tree is out on the porch waiting for recycling. When I was little, we cut our tree down from the pasture, but the selection was limited to scraggly white pines. We carried our choice back to the house, with its white shingles and green shutters, and watched my father drill holes in the trunk he then filled with extra branches he’d trimmed in the woods. Eventually, the tree was lush and beautiful. The first artificial Christmas tree!

I decide to keep Mary and one of the cows from the original creche as I finish packing away Christmas. Who hasn’t had MOHS, and who doesn’t have a broken halo? I also keep the angel because who doesn’t need an extra angel?

I vow I will throw out everything that hasn’t been used this year—the rejected decorations left in the 12 storage boxes in the linen closet— again… The garish ornaments from friends I dearly love, the balls from the year I thought I’d do Christmas in blue and white….

I cram all the bows in a box, knowing I have friends who put their bows away stuffed with tissue to retain their shape. Friends who don’t find candles in the box labeled garlands. And who don’t find the box marked “precious kids’ ornaments” empty. But holidays evolve, as do planets, solar systems, feelings, and family.

Christmas has changed for me in many ways and in other ways, not at all. This year, the tree had new ornaments filling out the bare spots where the bells, polar bears, and crystal angels once hung. Six hand-sewn wives of Henry the Eighth, which I bought in London, take their place, plus King Henry himself, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson. But the truth is that most of those boxes I planned to eliminate are back in the closet. I just smush the stuff in tighter so it appears consolidated.

I’ll let go of more next year, and one day, I will let go of everything. We all will.

But today, I hang on to the love story we just celebrated, to the lives that I made, to every sacred reminder of the life that made me.

 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.