Then, with frozen fingers, we’d set about hanging the lights. I remember those moments as the best parts of my childhood. Even when he handed me a big tangled ball of last year’s lights. Maybe especially then because the tighter the knot, the more time we got to spend together.
I think he felt the same because when he climbed the ladder to staple the lights above the garage, he would redo it a dozen times to get it perfectly straight. He’d insist that he needed me to follow along beside him, holding the tail of the lights to keep it from dragging.
I know now it was never about getting a straight line. I probably knew it then too. But a chance to talk to him about what a waste of time I thought art class was, and my dreams of being a lawyer, and to state my case on why we should get a dog, or a cat, hell, even a bird . . .
We never talked about boys. Obviously. He didn’t ask, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell him that the handful of crushes I experienced were painfully intense. And even more painfully unrequited.
So, yeah, I loved those outdoor decorating sessions.
But the shining star of memories? Decorating the tree.
It was our tradition to wait until the second Sunday in December. Never before, never after. There was a Christmas tree lot an hour out of town. There were plenty of spots closer to our house, but my dad used to work with Big Rob, who owned this one, so we always got a Big Rob tree.
Every year, I’d want the biggest tree. And every year, my dad said he did too . . . before suddenly being disappointed when he realized that our ceilings were only so high and directing me to one with an appropriate height.
Still, he let me pick the fattest tree. Let me pick out an ornament from the tiny gift shop and help myself to one too many free candy canes while Big Rob’s son wrapped the tree in a big net and strapped it to our car.
When I was thirteen, Big Rob died of a heart attack sometime around Halloween. We still went out to his lot that year to support his family. I bought my usual ornament—a ballerina, because Dad had just taken me to The Nutcracker the weekend before and I was going through a phase.
By the next year, Big Rob’s lot had become a Dairy Queen, so Dad and I got our tree from a lot just up the street where all the proceeds went to charity.
It was nice. The trees weren’t as fat, and there were no ornaments to be purchased. But they still had candy canes, and the branches still held my beloved ballerina ornament.
The point of all this . . .
I didn’t always hate Christmas. Quite the opposite.
But.
Things change.
And sometimes they change slowly, so slowly that you let yourself cling to the hope that you can keep them the same with sheer force of will.
The first small, slow change started when I headed off to undergrad. I went to Harvard on scholarship. But my dad’s two jobs turned into three to be able to pay for my books and board, so I made damn sure that I saved every single penny from my job at the campus library to ensure that I could pay to come home at Thanksgiving and Christmas. A few changes had to be made to the routine, of course. We bought the tree the day after Thanksgiving instead of the second Sunday of December because I was home. We’d do the outdoor lights then too, and that part stayed blissfully the same, a chance for me to trail behind him pointlessly holding a string of twinkle lights while catching him up on my life.
And then . . . law school.
That’s where things started to go awry. Not simply because my schedule was more demanding, my expenses tighter than ever, and I met my first serious boyfriend and experienced loving a man other than my father.
All of that was true, but the real change, the kind that causes your entire world to crumble, had nothing to do with the slow, bittersweet transition from girl to young woman to woman.
It was a single phone call.
Cancer.
Now, my father’s not the first person to get that diagnosis, and I’m not the first daughter to get that phone call.
But let me tell you, in that moment? It feels like the universe is singling you out. Punishing you for something.
In that moment, everything seemed to fade away, and there was only me and Dad up against a brutal disease with a prognosis that felt like a punch in the gut. A punch in the pancreas, I guess you could say.
They gave him six months to a year. Two years, if we were really lucky.
Lucky, they said.
As though we should feel fortunate that a fifty-year-old man who’d never missed a day of work in his life would be dead in a year.
Dad made it three years.
And sure enough, I did feel lucky. That we had a few more months than expected.
Except when I felt horribly, uncontrollably angry.
Angry that he didn’t make it just a few more months to see me graduate from Harvard Law, something he’d wanted for me almost more than I did.
Angry, most especially, that the disease took him on his favorite holiday. Angry that on that particular December 25, he woke up only twice.
Once, to whisper, “Merry Christmas.”
And once more, toward the very end. To whisper that it was okay that he wouldn’t see me graduate, that he wouldn’t see me become a lawyer. It was okay because he’d dreamed it. Seen me in a cap and gown, seen me popping champagne the day I made partner at a fancy law firm in New York City, where I’d always wanted to live.
To this day, I’m not sure if he actually had that dream, or if he was just remembering that it had once been my dream—one of the “when I grow up” fantasies I’d shared while hanging Christmas lights with frozen fingers in Fort Wayne, Indiana, all those years ago.
I suppose it doesn’t matter. He saw what he wanted to see, whether it was a dream or a wish. And those last minutes gave my life purpose: to make that life he saw for me a reality.
So, go ahead. You can call me the Grinch. You can call me Scrooge. Because, no. I don’t love Christmas these days. No matter how firmly I remind myself that I don’t have to let my warm childhood be sullied by the one Christmas when pancreatic cancer won the day, I can’t quite get there.
But I think this might be my year. The year that I have a Christmas to reset all the Christmases.
The year my dad’s dream for me comes true. And maybe when it does, maybe when I make partner, I can finally ease up on being Katherine Tate, Esquire, and simply be . . .
Katherine.
But first, I’ve got to get the call.
Harry and Joe have this obnoxious tradition of naming partners the week of Christmas.
Only, they didn’t take a note from Santa’s book and do it the same precise time every year. Some years it’s December 21. Sometimes it’s Christmas Eve.
Last year, it was December 23.
Which is today’s date, and yes, I am obsessively glued to my phone.
Honestly, I don’t think they thought it through all the way. That not getting the call during what’s already a painful time of the year for some people is . . . excruciating.
I know because I’ve been through it a few years in a row now. Hoping. Waiting.
Crying.
Yes. Even Girl-Grinches can cry.