It's All Relative (2 page)

I knew the horror they contained.

And yet, ironically, the gifts I remember—and the few that I kept—were those my grandparents made for me: That little change purse still holds my toll change; those quilts made from suit scraps and feed sacks continue to warm me.

My grandma used to tell me: “I may not be able to give you
material things, but I can always let you know how much you are loved. And that will make you a very rich man.”

And yet after my grandparents died, I forgot the lessons I was taught and became obsessed with the materialism of the holidays, believing I was loved, or showing love, only if I purchased or received the greatest, latest, and most expensive trend. I believed a Christmas was not Christmas without a seven-hundred-dollar Burberry peacoat; that Thanksgiving was not Thanksgiving if a turkey was not presented on a Williams-Sonoma platter; that a birthday was not a birthday without being showered in gifts.

The presents were the reason for the season.

I was not alone, it seems.

Americans continuously try to fool themselves and everyone else into believing that their lives, families, and holidays are as golden as a Martha Stewart turkey by throwing cash at them. We send Xeroxed Christmas letters filled with blasphemous lies and spend weeks attempting to secure that one perfect gift, all the while knowing, deep down, it is just a ruse: While we love our families dearly and deeply, that doesn't mean money will transform them into different people or make our holidays perfect.

Even in a down economy, we remain a country obsessed with painting our holidays green: Be it birthdays or Halloween or Valentine's, we lavish gifts and food and attention on one another for a select few hours on a select few days, and then pretty much ignore each other the rest of the year.

According to the National Retail Federation, Americans recently spent a whopping $457.4 billion on Christmas gifts. That's approximately $1,052 for every American.

The National Retail Federation figures that Americans recently spent $13.7 billion to prove their love to their loved ones on Valentine's, an average of over one hundred dollars per consumer on anything sweet or heart-shaped.

Americans spend $1.9 billion on Easter candy every year, second only to the $2 billion we spend on Halloween.

And, according to the Consumer Expenditure Survey, American households collectively spend more than $420 million a year on fireworks.

At least if we can't buy love, or give it a cavity, it seems, we can blow the crap out of it.

Why?

Because we are, too often, a people scared. We crawl through life doubly defined by a fear of expressing our emotions and by a gnawing lack of self-esteem: We have trouble saying “I love you!” because we feel it's both wrong and not good enough. What we possess, what we do, what we have, who we wear and know mask our insecurities, make us seem worthwhile and loved, when really we are all united by one basic fact: We are someone's child, someone's brother or sister, someone's parent, part of someone's family. In truth, we are one big family. What we need is love and acceptance.

This dawned on me in my thirties, when I met my partner, Gary, and we began to alternate our holidays with our families. Like any newly married couple, we gleefully but silently welcomed each other into our families' madhouses, neither of us revealing the dark secrets that awaited until it was too late to escape. Perhaps we were scared the other might run. Perhaps we were scared our families weren't “good enough.”

What I learned was that, yes, our families were nuts, but, more important, that I was unconditionally loved and accepted. I belonged to something greater than myself.

What I learned, after our first dual Thanksgiving, was that holidays are typically how we introduce and bring those we love into our families.

It is tradition.

It is sadism.

My mother was the Erma Bombeck of our family, the female Mark Twain of the Rouse House. In the years when our family no longer worried about money, my mom returned to her roots and reinstated the traditions of my grandparents while also initiating a new tradition of her own.

In addition to a Banana Republic shirt or Kenneth Cole gift card, my mom would gift me and Gary with something she had created: a hand-painted ornament for our own tree, or a birdhouse wrapped in bittersweet she had foraged from her woods.

And she also celebrated each holiday with a story, a tale about our family.

“These are the gifts you will keep, the ones you will remember,” she told us, “because they are the ones that mean the most.”

And damned if I didn't shrink that shirt or grow tired of a shoe style, but I always kept her little presents, remembered her stories.

Each year at Christmas, Gary and I still hang those treasured ornaments from my mom (and his), pulling their delicate, round bodies from individual boxes, and we retell the story of how each came to be, or the four-hour family tale my mom had told the year she gave us that ornament.

I share these holiday tales with you because I believe that nothing defines the love, dysfunction, and evolution of American families more than its holidays: Each family not only comes together as one a few times a year—despite typically cavernous distances in geography, personality, and opinion—but each family also celebrates every holiday in its own unique way. But it is the simple fact that we gather, that we come together a few times a year despite these differences, that is magical, memorable, life-changing, and life-affirming.

This
is what calls us home.

Holidays are—like Campbell's soup—life condensed.

They are a time capsule.

They are when we notice the aging of our mother's face in the
reflection off the tree lights, how much our nieces and nephews have grown when a birthday is celebrated, and how much we miss those we have lost when the Thanksgiving table is arranged with one less place setting.

Yes, my family was, and still is, largely nuts.

But I remember to this day how much I was loved. And that will always carry me through the holidays.

My family's stories—no matter how unique, bizarre, beautiful—are my gift.

And I am pleased to pass them, like a fruitcake, along to you. May these tales help you remember what is truly important as you celebrate with family, no matter the holiday. And, most important, may these stories make you laugh when you want to cry, or cry when you want to laugh.

So happy hellidays, from my family to yours.

And may your jingle balls never be itchy!

“The only way to spend New Year's Eve is either quietly with friends or in a brothel. Otherwise when the evening ends and people pair off, someone is bound to be left in tears.”

–W. H. AUDEN

I
believed, for a good many years, that my mother was a witch because she levitated my bed on a New Year's Eve in the early 1970s after my parents had returned from a fancy party.

Before they left, I remember my mother sashaying from her bathroom smelling like Jean Naté. She had never looked more enchanting. She was wearing a plunging black blouse and shimmering pendant, black palazzo pants with legs so wide they ballooned whenever she walked, and very high cork platforms, all of which gave her the look of a sexy Endora.

My grandma had come over to babysit me and my brother, Todd, and—like any good grandmother—she had given us anything we wanted, including lethal doses of sugar. I had ingested, at least, two or three Nehi grape sodas, a quart of vanilla ice cream with chocolate syrup, a dozen or so chocolate-chip cookies, and a quarter of a homemade cherry-chip cake with sour-cream icing that my grandma had made.

I was more wired than a trapeze artist that New Year's, and could not sleep when my grandma tried to put me to bed. More than anything, though, I just wanted to see my mom when she arrived home from her party.

Glamorous nights were a rarity in our tiny Ozarks town, which made me sad for my mother, whom I believed had an otherworldly beauty. Maybe because she was a nurse who wore white uniforms all day, my mother tended to embrace a more sophisticated, darker look during her off-hours. She wore her black hair cropped short and her makeup thick, lips bright red and eyes catlike. She loved to dress in the latest fashions, and the early-seventies style, with its flowy fabrics, seemed to suit her personality well. Even as a kid I saw the joy it brought her when she got the chance to dress up, let loose, and be a different person than a mother or nurse.

My parents had just given me a Polaroid camera that Christmas, and I had instantly fallen in love with it. Holding that Polaroid was like holding Wonder Woman's lariat: It gave me a magical power to capture the truth in those around me, a chance to make sense of a world that captivated and scared me by looking at it from a different perspective.

I had already become obsessed with recording my life—writing simple stories and poems—and now with my Polaroid I could obsessively record other people's lives, too.

I loved that camera, with its aluminum-and-faux-leather body.

I slept with that camera the week following Christmas, clutching it tightly to my body like a teddy bear.

And I used that camera on New Year's to capture the resounding dullness of my life.

So while my grandma snored on the couch, I clicked a photo of her.

And while my brother slept—drooling like a rabid dog, a huge string of saliva concreting his mouth to the pillowcase—I snapped a Polaroid.

I remember lying in bed, waiting, watching the clock in my bedroom that New Year's night as it turned from eleven fifty-nine to midnight.

I took a Polaroid of the clock, of the new year.

And then I heard laughter, uproarious and ear-shattering—the kind of out-of-body laughter that I only heard on
Hee Haw
or
Laugh-In
. I jumped out of bed in my footed pj's and ran to the living room, where my mother was blowing not one but two New Year's noisemakers, the horns extending and then bending at grotesque angles from her mouth like devil tongues, one curling straight up into her nostrils, the other diving into her bosom.

“Mom?” I asked nervously, as if I didn't know this woman.

She bent down and looked at me. Her makeup was smudged and out of focus, like some of the Polaroids I would take that didn't develop correctly, and she smelled like all the old men who came out of the local liquor store. I had never seen my mother like this.

I snapped a Polaroid.

“Mom?” I asked again. “Is that you?”

“Why aren't you in bed, sweetie?”

I knew this voice.

“I missed you!” I screamed, hugging her leg. “I want to have fun, too! I want to go to a party!”

So my mom found two birthday hats, plopped them on our heads, poured me some apple cider, and then lifted me onto her feet and we danced as she sang “Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head.”

“Take our picture!” I yelled at my dad, handing him my Polaroid.

“Ready for bed now?” my mom asked when the song and picture were over.

“No! One more! ‘Candy Man!' ”

So my mother sang a little Sammy Davis Jr., and we shimmied around our tiny rental house.

I was giggling by then, spinning like a tiny top, when I looked up to see that my mom had turned the exact shade of the Wicked Witch of the West from
The Wizard of Oz
.

“Mommy?” I asked.

She was groaning now instead of singing, and she sprinted to the bathroom and slammed the door.

“Mommy? Are you okay?”

And then my mother coughed up her spleen.

She emerged from our lone bathroom a different woman, not laughing and singing but cursing and moaning.

“Champagne,” she moaned. “I can't drink champagne.”

“Let's dance, Mommy!” I said, trying to cheer her up.

She looked at me in a troubled sort of way, the way I look today at people who rave about the food at Applebee's or the Olive Garden.

And then I screamed like only a kid who is still jacked up on sugar and wants to play can scream.

My mother covered her ears and then rubbed her face, and when she dropped her hands she looked like a Picasso painting: Everything was distorted, a bit off.

She grabbed me by the arm and tugged me toward the bedroom, my footed pj's sliding along the wood floors.

“Stop screaming!” she begged. “Please, Wade. Stop screaming.”

Which made me scream even more.

“Stop! Stop! Stop!” my mom yelled.

Now, my brother could sleep through a tornado. Had, in fact, actually slept through a tornado, and he was still glued to his pillow by that thick layer of spit.

My mom forced me into bed while I continued to rage.

Then I started to cry, uncontrollably and loudly.

My mom sat on the edge of the bed and began to cry, turning green once again.