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When I came out into the living room after rinsing the film of steamed milk off me from my morning shift at Mug Shots on Christmas Eve, it was to Christmas lights twinkling around the windows and The Ref queued up on the TV. On the kitchen counter stood a mini tree, also strung with lights—one of those rosemary trees you can get at the fancy grocery stores, the ones that smell like winter.
“You wanna order food?” Will asked casually from the couch, but he was twisting the waistband of his sweatpants in tight fingers, looking studiedly at the wall behind me.
I threw myself at him on the couch, hugging him and burying my face in his neck. He made a sound like he was annoyed, but his arms came around me, warm and sure, so I stayed put.
“So,” Will said once we were ensconced on the couch with Indian food, “you didn’t want to go to Michigan for Christmas?”
I shook my head, shoving some naan in my mouth to delay answering. I wasn’t sure how to explain it, exactly. Will never talked about his parents and in that avoidance I read that things were probably pretty bad. But I didn’t have a sob story. My parents hadn’t kicked me out or treated me terribly. They’d never said horrible things, never hit me. But the space between what I wanted a family to be and what mine was gaped like a wound that couldn’t heal. And nothing I put into it—not energy or time, patience or distance—could fill it.
“My mom wanted me to,” I said finally. “So did Janie.” Janie had texted me: Come for Xmas or itll be toooooo boooooring!!!
I’d spoken with everyone that afternoon after I got off work. My mom told me a long story involving one of their neighbors and a Christmas-decoration-related power outage. Janie expressed her annoyance that I hadn’t come home. Eric described some piece of hiking gear he’d gotten for our dad, and when I told him I’d PayPal him for my share, he seemed to have forgotten that we usually all gave our parents something together. My dad just told me to stay warm, the generic Michigan version of “see ya later” in the winter.
“It’s… I dunno, depressing. Last year was….” I shook my head at the memory. “It was just like this pale shadow of what Christmas is supposed to be. There was a tree and presents and carols and some of that eggnog in a carton.” I shuddered. “And my mom cooked this… ham thing that she always makes. With pineapple and like cream of mushroom soup or something. But it was just… all wrong. It didn’t feel right.”
Will had been watching me as he idly mixed saag paneer, chana masala, curried lamb, and chicken tikka masala together in his bowl until it was a brownish slurry. Then he’d dumped in rice and began attacking the whole thing with slabs of naan like I was going to snatch it away from him.
Now he rolled his eyes at me. “You’re such a fucking romantic,” he said with his mouth full.
“Charming.” I handed him a napkin. “It’s not… romantic, really. Just, it didn’t feel the way you think Christmas is supposed to feel. It never has.”
“It didn’t feel the way you thought Christmas was supposed to feel, which you got from fantasies. Books and movies and Thomas fucking Kinkade paintings and shit.”
“My parents have a poster of a Thomas Kinkade painting,” I said, grinning at him. “In the living room.”
“Case in point,” he said, rolling his eyes again and wiping the sides of his bowl with naan. “Growing up under the watchful eye of the Painter of Light, how could you help but turn out to want a Christmas out of a Nicholas Sparks movie? That’s what romanticizing something is, kiddo. Having the notion that it’ll be a certain, perfect way based on something fictional. Something idealized.”
“Maybe,” I allowed. I had kind of liked that Nicholas Sparks movie with the blonde girl from Dancing With the Stars. “But the fact remains that it felt shitty to be there. Depressing.”
“Fair enough,” Will said, reaching over to steal a bite of my chicken. “For you, if something doesn’t achieve this level of Woohoo! Fantasy! Perfect! then it immediately flips over to being depressing. For me… neutrality seems pretty good.”
I thought about that as I finished my food, swatting Will’s fork away when I noticed that his stolen bites were making a substantial dent in the tikka masala, which was my favorite. Will had called me a romantic before. Mostly in reference to actual romance and relationship stuff. I’d never really thought about what it might mean to be a romantic about other stuff.
“But then what’s the difference, really? I mean, I have that idea about what I want Christmas to be. What does it matter where it came from?”
