Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [73]
I love Christmas. I love the decorations and the music and the smell of the kitchen. I love the caroling and the Hallelujah Chorus and the live nativity, the little girls draped in sheets with tinsel and coat-hanger halos and little boys in their fathers’ shirts and mothers’ scarves around their heads, broom handles for staffs. I love the wrapping paper and the elegant lights and the gaudy ones, too. Every Christmas for the previous twelve years we had had an open house. It was one of the best-known parties in Raleigh because we invited children as well as adults. How often we heard from parents that their children wanted to know if the family Christmas party invitation had come yet. The children liked to think they were coming to an adult party, but in truth the children were upstairs with cookies and punch and the adults were downstairs with slightly better food. We started it when Wade and Cate were small and we had to hire sitters for upstairs, who were given the instruction not to let any of the older children throw any of the younger children out the windows, and if possible no blood. The year before, Wade had been the primary sitter—and he had spent a good deal of the night, his last Christmas party, trying to find a lost Barbie doll. We would send four hundred or five hundred invitations, maybe more—I would handwrite each one—and usually about eight hundred people came. I would make all the food myself and never pretended to be a hostess. If you wanted to talk to me, come to the kitchen. It was loud and happy, and it was a hard tradition to give up, but it was an impossible tradition to repeat this year. Cate relented and agreed that we could forgo the party. But the truth was that I didn’t want Christmas at all this year.
Sally and Gwynn, then Tricia and Ellan, came by to help decorate the tree. The usual three trees—one for the children that they decorated themselves, one for Hallmarks and other ornaments, like the children’s old mittens and handmade ornaments, and the last for my glass ornaments—would be reduced to one tree for Christmas 1996. The glass tree had fallen three times in recent years and the sight of smashed Radko ornaments that I had collected and cherished had been hard in easier times, so I left the remaining Radkos in a box, and we hung the more unbreakable ornaments on a single tree. If it is possible to decorate a joyless Christmas tree, we were doing it.
We used a check we got from Wade’s small life insurance policy to buy Cate a pearl necklace. It was her present from Wade. As far as I was concerned, there was no other gift in the room. Christmas began and ended with opening that box, fixing that clasp, and imagining a brother’s pride in his beautiful sister. The rest of the days were minutes to get through. There were nice things: Jim, the columnist who wrote about Wade, had his articles framed for us. I do not wear jewelry, but I asked for and received the obligatory bereaved mother’s locket. And more books. I even bought us new bookshelves, for the floor in the bedroom was nearly covered. We ate a late Christmas dinner with Gwynn and her daughters.
Driving home Cate asked if my Christmas was merry.
“I loved being with you.”
“It is not what I asked.”
Caught. “Merry is too much to ask. I don’t know when I will be able to describe myself as merry again. You made it the best it could have been made. I hope that is