Round Two: Christmas, like Hanukkah, can offer a lesson in resilience

It’s been the better part of 40 to 50 years now, but I still vividly remember the big Christmas Day family gatherings at my grandparents’ house in Brimfield.

The excitement of pulling into the driveway already filled with cars. Walking into the house and seeing everyone wearing spiffy new clothes that up until a few hours earlier had been sitting wrapped in a box under their Christmas tree. A cacophony of conversation reverberating throughout the house while we kids snooped around Grandma and Grandpa’s tree, looking for gifts with our names on them. And eating Christmas dinner in the dining room, with my cousins and I relegated to the flimsy little card table designated for the youngest generation while the older members of the family ate at the large table in the middle of the room.

In fact, I can remember being in high school and trying to wedge myself in at the card table, even though by then I was bigger than most of the people who were sitting at the adults table.

A table that would be largely empty today. Many of my family members who occupied it during those Christmases of yesteryear are gone now, and they have been for decades.

That memory of me sitting at that little card table is like my Ghost of Christmas Past, showing up every year at this time to remind me of what’s really important – not just at Christmas, but every day of the year: Appreciating every minute, every second, we have with our loved ones, because one of the harshest lessons we learn as we go through life is that our time with them is short and can be snuffed out in an instant.

My wife and I experienced that excruciating pain last winter – twice in 12 days. Even before then, we had buried most of those closest to us in our lives, leaving gaping holes in our souls from which you never really recover, you only learn to cope. But that 1-2 punch was different: We had barely begun to process the first death before we were blindsided by the second.

This is our first Christmas since it all happened. Christmas magnifies everything; it magnifies love, it magnifies loss, it magnifies life. It shines a spotlight on everything that’s right in our lives, and everything that’s not. It’s a time of reflection, the same as Hanukkah is for those of the Jewish faith, where the holiday emphasizes resilience, faith and the triumph of light over darkness.

Resilience can be elusive, particularly when we are forced to deal with loss or regret. It’s easy, maybe even natural, to give in and let the loss or regret control us. On the one hand, part of us doesn’t want, or know how, to move on. On the other, we feel that by moving on we are leaving our deceased loved ones behind. Either way, our emotions become frozen in time and we relive the pain of a loss over and over.

Christmas magnifies all of that. Absences are more noticeable, particularly if our loved one was just here last Christmas. The loss gives it a different feel. It can make Christmas … sad.

But that’s when my Ghost of Christmas Past points to that vision of our big family get-togethers in Brimfield: I see smiles, I hear laughter, I smell delicious food. The house is a warm, vibrant hub of activity. They were great times, and thinking of them makes me smile.

And maybe that’s the key to resilience: focusing on specific memories as they happened in time, rather than taking a big-picture approach that emphasizes the fact that our loved ones are no longer here. Memories for me like:

– Going shopping with my dad on Christmas Eve back when I was in junior high and high school. Let me be very clear on this: Dad wasn’t finishing up his shopping on Christmas Eve, he was just starting his shopping on Christmas Eve. I mean, he hadn’t bought anything prior to 9 a.m. Dec. 24. So he would enlist yours truly to be his wingman on trips to Chapel Hill and Rolling Acres for a long day of last-minute, pressure-packed, full-contact Christmas shopping, a real-life Clark and Rusty Griswold excursion to the local malls.

Dad would have a dog-eared piece of paper with Mom’s Christmas wish list scribbled on it clenched in his hand the entire day. Only Dad had convinced himself that he had to buy absolutely everything on it – which ratcheted up the pressure another 10 levels. Therefore, we spent an alarming amount of time browsing through women’s undergarment sections where Dad would pick something off the rack, push it in front of my face and ask me, “Do you think your mom would wear this?”

After managing not to faint, I would say, “That’s not really my department, Dad.” He would promptly move on to the next rack of undergarments, and the horror would start anew.

Mom’s notes included all kinds of clothing-related jargon and numbers so indecipherable that if the Germans could have used her list instead of the Enigma code, they might have won World War II.

It was during those Christmas Eve pressure-cookers at the malls with Dad that I learned the complexities of things like sizes, fits, fabrics, styles, textures and everything else that goes into picking out clothing – of which I still don’t know much. Which is a lot more than I know about perfume and jewelry.

Somehow, we always headed back to Mogadore with a carload of shopping bags – and a long night of wrapping ahead of us. Check that: a long night of wrapping ahead of me, because an exhausted Dad usually nodded off before the wrapping started, and I wanted to make sure Mom had actual gifts to open in the morning instead of bags to rummage through.

Dad’s annual Christmas Eve mall pilgrimage to buy all of Mom’s presents in a span of a few harrowing hours has become the stuff of family legend. My parents are gone now, Dad dying in 2005 and Mom in 2014, but there hasn’t been a Christmas yet when I haven’t thought back on those frantic shopping trips and smiled. There might be some head-shaking and a little eye-rolling in there, but I smile.

– Dad setting up my first Electric Football game on Christmas morning when I was around 4 or 5 years old. Anyone who knew my dad knows he wasn’t very handy with tools – and that included any item that said “Some Assembly Required” on the box. For Dad, if it said “Some Assembly Required,” it was irrelevant if that referred to Electric Football or the Empire State Building, because either way nothing was going to get assembled. And I’m every bit as inept, if not more so, than Dad in that regard.

So on the Christmas morning in question, Dad was tasked with setting up my new Electric Football game. I watched excitedly as Dad did what dads do: put their son’s Christmas toys together. Dad powered through, and my own little personal football stadium started to take shape. All it needed was the goal posts to be stuck into the end zones, and it was game time.

Except Dad had trouble getting the little plastic goal posts out of their molding. Not wanting to wrench on them and risk breaking them, he gently used the corkscrew method, twisting them over and over in the same direction until they would, theoretically, separate from the molding.

So there we were on the living room floor of our apartment in front of the tree, shredded wrapping paper everywhere (mostly my handiwork), Dad in his robe and me in my pajamas, Mom watching from the couch, while Dad diligently worked on twisting the first goal post out of its molding. He twisted. And twisted. And twisted. And twisted. And …

… SNAP. He twisted an upright completely off the goal post. So now it was half a goal post.

“Doug!” my mom exclaimed, horrified. “You broke it! You broke Tommy’s game!”

I didn’t care. I wasn’t planning on kicking field goals anyway.

I look back on that day and smile, recalling that for the first time in football history, the goal posts were torn down before the game.

– The year Mom and Dad drove down to Columbus to do all of their Christmas shopping. It was 1984, I was a junior in high school, the Buckeyes were Rose Bowl-bound (sound familiar?) behind names like Mike Tomczak, Jim Lachey, Keith Byars, Cris Carter and Chris Spielman, and Mom and Dad decided that some one-stop shopping at Conrads ought to cover it that year.

Did it ever.

And four decades later, I still have most of those gifts from that Christmas: A gray Ohio State jacket, a white Ohio State Rose Bowl jersey with big, beautiful rose patches on the shoulders, a red Ohio State Rose Bowl pennant, a little plastic white Ohio State Rose Bowl football and a bunch of other Ohio State/Rose Bowl gear. I can’t possibly fit into the jacket or jersey now – after all, I was 16 when I got them – but I still have them hanging proudly in our house.

I think back to that trek down I-71 to Columbus that Mom and Dad made for their only child in December 1984, and I smile. Yes, I loved the presents, but they’re not just objects to me anymore and haven’t been for a long time. The fact that Mom and Dad would drive a few hundred miles just to make my Christmas special, cobbling together the hard-earned money they made at their stressful, demanding jobs … well, 40 years later it’s still overwhelming.

I look back on that Christmas and smile, the way I want to look back and smile when I think of the two loved ones we lost earlier this year. But I’m not there yet. Someday, though, my Ghost of Christmas Past will point to specific visions of the fun times and heartwarming moments we had, scenes not unlike the card table but with their own set and setting, and the message will be the same because it’s universal: It’s the time we have together with our loved ones, not the time we won’t have, that matters most.

And when that day comes, it will be the greatest Christmas gift of all.

Finally, then, I’ll smile.