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Post by Deleted on Dec 22, 2009 17:57:14 GMT
Is there a certain year that stands out for you? A year where the Christmas season or Christmas day was just plain dismal for you?
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Post by Deleted on Dec 22, 2009 19:19:01 GMT
Well, the year my parents moved to France (where they stayed for 9 years) was a pretty dismal Christmas. It was the first Christmas that I did not spend with family, but what was even worse was that it was a horrible Christmas for my parents as well. They were staying with my mother's parents. It was bitterly cold with snow and ice everywhere, and my grandfather was in the final stages of dying of prostate cancer. He was in and out of the hospital, and the others had to follow on the dangerous roads. There was no celebration of any kind, and my grandmother got a bad case of bronchitis on the verge of pneumonia from going in and out to the hospital. The doctor was even afraid that my grandmother would die before her husband if he did not hurry up and die. My grandfather finally died on January 2nd (and my grandmother lived for almost another 20 years).
On the up side, this was back before the internet and phone calls at a reasonable price, and everything was on a one week postal delay for me, so I only learned the horrible details well after the fact. I was moving to France in February, and everything was settled by then, except that I helped my grandmother pick out a tombstone made of the red Vosges granite that she wanted, and my presence helped her resist my mother's claim that red granite was inappropriate. Since then, my grandmother and father have joined my grandfather under the red tombstone, and that's where my mother will go also. There is even a possibility that I will join them all some day.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 22, 2009 19:30:15 GMT
That does sound dismal, Kerouac. I bet your weren't used to such cold weather, coming from the area of the US you were in? And being away, for the first time, from family and everything famililar must have been hard.
We never really celebrated Christmas when I was a kid, so I never thought that I was missing anything, it was never a big deal.
But I think the worst Christmas was one year that my first son (only a few months old then) and myself spent in a motel room. We hardly knew anyone in town and it was bitterly cold, and I didn't have a vehicle either. Infact we had next to nothing, apart from each other. It was very difficult, but in itself a learning experience. And a lesson, in showing others we met years later, compassion and understanding. Having been there and done that was an eye opener for me.
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Post by tillystar on Dec 24, 2009 11:52:11 GMT
What a sad Christmas K and Deyana, that sounds grim. But at least your son was very small and didn’t know better and that you can look back and feel you took something positive from it. It makes me shiver to think of how you must have felt the two of you all alone that day.
On Christmas morning, in the middle of opening presents the phone rang and my brother who was 11 ran and answered it with a loud “Merry Christmas”, it was our Aunt who asked him to get my Mum as she had just found her husband dead in the bathroom (we found out later it was a heart attack). You cannot imagine the change in his face. To this day he has almost a phobia about answering the phone and I always put it down to that. Of course, the upset it caused him was no where near the devastation that it caused to my Aunt. She lived for another 15 years or so but she always spent Christmas alone after that, she said it was her day to sit in peace and think about her husband and indulge herself in her memories, look at photographs etc.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 24, 2009 18:50:07 GMT
That's really sad about your aunt and her husband, Tilly. I can imagine each Christmas must be particularly hard for her now...
Thanks for the kind words regarding that Christmas I mentioned, Tilly. But really it wasn't too bad, we were in that motel from Oct to January, when I finally did manage to get an old car and drive out of town. The worst thing was the motel owner was a pain in the ass, even though he was married, just wouldn't take no for an answer. That is until I got a friend to 'talk' to him.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 25, 2009 20:50:00 GMT
I absolutely can't wait for the movie about your life, Deyana.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 25, 2009 23:12:13 GMT
Well, if they ever make a movie of my book/life, they had better pay me big buckaroos for the privilege.  I don't come cheap, man.  |
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paristraveler
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Post by paristraveler on Dec 26, 2009 17:14:14 GMT
I don't really recall any "bad" Christmases, but I've had "lonely" ones. I've never been married or had any kids, so, the 21 years I lived in St. Louis, a ten-hour drive from my family, were sometimes devoid of anyone to spend Christmas with. I remember being invited to friends' or co-workers' homes for the day, but those invites just made me miss my family more. I remember one year on Christmas Day I went to the movies by myself and saw Jane Fonda and Anne Bancroft in The Turning Point. I felt more alone that day than any other I can remember.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 27, 2009 14:22:35 GMT
Christmas is fine, but some things about it are not what they should be. And one of them is the loneliness of single people without family who have no where to go on that day. Many older people like that around, and I'm sure all the festivities around this time must, understandably, make them feel worse...
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Post by Kimby on Dec 28, 2009 16:40:18 GMT
I don't remember a "bad" Christmas, but a bad memory associated with Christmas is one from my college days.
It was one of the last years my whole family went to Grandma's house in Michigan (see Ghosts of Christmas Past thread). Final exams had just concluded, term papers were being handed in, I'd pulled several "all-nighters" studying, and I had managed to fit in shopping for and wrapping Christmas gifts for my family members. I lived in a large house with 9(!) other college students, and we had a Christmas tree in our living room, where I deposited the gifts in the days before Christmas.
The day finally arrived to head home to Southern Wisconsin, a 3 hour drive, to meet up with my family for the 6 hour drive to Michigan. I had gotten a late start, the car (a VW squareback)was iced up and none of the doors could be opened except the rear hatch, so I climbed in over my luggage, and over the back seat and wedged myself into the drivers seat and headed for home, anxious about being late. (I have a family reputation for being late, ever since being born 6 days late, so even if a plane lands late I get in trouble for always being late.)
30 minutes down the road I suddenly remembered the Christmas presents under the tree! Oh no! What to do? Turn back and be even later? Go on to Christmas without any presents and mail them later? Damned if I do, damned if I don't. I decided to turn back, adding another hour to my already late arrival, and taking the flack from the family for making everyone late.
They eventually forgave me.
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