Collaging Christmases

Making new memories out of old during the holidays

My sister at work on the floor. 12.24.22

The week before Christmas of 2019, mom spent hours cutting, gluing, taping, and transcribing gifts for everyone in the family.

That year was like most Christmas Eves of my memory. A cheese board on the coffee table, a sea of tissue paper beneath my grandmother’s tree, parents filling every seat and children sprawled on the floor.

Each year’s schedule was different, but the pattern was usually the same. We’d all attend church service at St. John’s Episcopal, our family taking up two or three pews. We’d sing “Silent Night” and “Gloria in Excelsis.” I remember once my mother and I stood together singing, loud and clear and remarkably similar in voice. The woman in front of us ran the choir and turned round to say, “Well I wish y’all would just move back here.”

Usually, mom would lock herself in a back room all morning to rapidly wrap gifts. That year she was squirreling away with a trove of magazines and scissors. Christmas Eve is when our extended family gathers. She hardly slept the night before in order to finish everything in time.

The youngest always unwrapped the first gift. Round the room, we cycled by age, opened presents, chattered and thanked. We usually kept the order for at least two passes around the room until everyone got tired or impatient or lost track in conversation, devolving into a wrapping paper free-for-all.

Before we got to that stage, mom pulled out a massive stack of books. Each of them was the same thickness and width. After re-reading Harriet the Spy, she loved standard black-and-white marbled composition notebooks. (A copy of Harriet had been everyone’s gift the year before.)

But that year, our last Christmas with her, she’d spent hours collaging and designing each member of the family a personalized notebook.

Each was inscribed with quotes that she found funny or relevant to every person, ranging from television show dialogue to psychology tidbits to poetry. The pages were interspersed with bizarre magazine clippings that were beautiful, funny, and bizarre in turn.

We were all grateful to her, in the same mildly numb way that sets in after such a consumer-driven holiday. They were beautiful and weird and thoughtful. But they were also undoubtedly a consequence of her poverty: there was no way for her and her husband to afford gifts.

We all flipped through our new journals, delighted over the hilarious quotes and lovely pictures. We all took them home with whatever other new trinkets and scarves exchanged, set our book on a desk or a bookshelf or side table, and mostly ignored them. Until she died.

Then, these books became priceless. The swirl of her cursive in glittery gel pen, the laugh-out-loud quips she included, the insightful quotes that she pulled from a lifetime immersed in books. All of it brought me to tears, connected me to her, and inspired me to fill the book’s empty pages.

Santa’s Elves? 12.24.22

“Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting their be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”

–Pema Chödron

A project for all ages. 12.24.22

Last year, my aunt and I decided we needed to continue the tradition. It was a ludicrous amount of work. Even with enlisting the help of cousins, we struggled to finish them in time for a gift swap. There we were, squirreling away with Modge-Podge behind a locked door, tearing out goofy advertisements of people looking over-posed and slapping them in books with glue sticks. As fun as it sounds, it was stressful as hell.

So this year, we fine-tuned the tradition. Each person makes one book. We randomized it, drawing names out of a hat to decide whose book we would make. We’re still tweaking the details—next year, we’ll do the hat draw at Thanksgiving to give more time for everyone to specialize the quotes for their person’s book.

But we decided as a family that the gift exchange wasn’t necessary this year. We feel burdened by, well, stuff. The homeowners’ homes are full. My grandmother is worried about how to will things away, not how to add a new book to her shelves. I’ve been living in Thailand, stressed out by having more objects than I can fit in a backpack.

As always, things are changing. We had no gift swap, no go-around-by-age-and-unwrap-your-gift tradition. No chaos of wrapping paper. Instead, it was the chaos of cut-out New York Times cartoons and scrap National Geographics.

But the gifts were never the good bit—the great part was the catching up, the laughter, the sight of people’s smiles as they unwrapped something that thrilled them. Or, better, the feeling you get when someone really loved your gift, a sign you know them well, an expression of your love.

Gifts like those are treasures. And making something, even something shoddy or strange or predictable, holds more meaning than anything. None of us needs more stuff. But we sure do need each other.

My sister and I before the christmas madness began! 12.24.22