COMFORT AND JOY

By SARAH BALDWIN-BENEICH 

December 19, 1993 

Publication: Providence Journal (RI) 

IN THE ATTIC OF MY PARENTS’ HOUSE is an enormous box with lots of smaller boxes inside it, one of which is marked “Uglies.” This is the carton containing all the funny-looking Christmas ornaments that my brother and I made as children, and this is the one that each year I open first. There are red-paper cutouts meant to look like Santas, oddly shaped blobs of clay trying to be reindeer, and, from our glitter period, balls of blue and green glass that we inscribed with “Mom” and “Dad” in glue and then doused in sparkly stuff.

If I insist on putting these atrocities on an otherwise respectable Christmas tree, it is because they represent a treasured timelessness. They are symbols of something that seems to resist change – something that, I at last understand, it is my duty to preserve.

I am talking about tradition: that set of seemingly meaningless gestures that define a moment by giving it its own look, sound, smell, taste, and feel – by filling the present with both an overwhelming awareness of the past and an electric sense of the future.

The first time I brought my husband home for Christmas, I led him into a sort of simultaneous universe, a place that, for a short time each year, existed on a parallel plane with our own reality. And because he is French, everything to him was doubly foreign. Luckily for me, he let himself be immersed in our unconscious family folklore, participating in customs that to an outsider make no sense but to which, year after year, I cling with more rigor than one of Gogol’s bureaucrats adhering to office protocol. My husband helped me light a fire, although it was fifty degrees outdoors. He listened to stories of my brother’s silently sliding down the banister and falling asleep under the china cabinet as he lay in ambush for Santa. He put the jelly on Santa’s peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and placed it near the fireplace, exactly where I showed him. Best of all, he uttered an admiring “Ah]” when I lifted the lid from the box of uglies and hung them on the tree, as my mother, gazing heavenward, feigned discountenance.

Christmas time, a season charged with personal ritual, is one of the few occasions in life when we allow ourselves a departure from reason. It provides a hiatus in adulthood when we are not only permitted but in fact obliged to forget about rationality and embrace all that is magical. It is the one moment in the year when we call a truce with exigencies and choose to favor hope, even when so little in the world seems promising.

Which is why, every year, I sneak down the basement steps, pretending I’ve got a load of colors to wash when what I’ve really got is a date with the elves at the present-wrapping table. Which is why, every year, when my father bursts through the same door holding the same platter with Tom the Turkey on it, we all ooh and ahh as though we’d never seen such a thing before. Which is why, every year, my mother politely asks if I’d care for some creamed onions, although I’ve been politely declining them for thirty years. And which is why, every year, I creep downstairs on Christmas morning hoping against hope that Santa’s milk glass will be empty and his plate covered with nothing but crumbs.

ADMITTEDLY, THESE ACTS no longer have any inherent sense. The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty defined tradition as the forgetting of origins; although I can’t always explain to my husband why my family does something, he nonetheless understands that we must do it. Repetition over the years is what transforms these gestures into sacred motions, no matter how secular the times in which we live. Going through the rituals of family tradition is like moving through a familiar house in the dark: reaching out, the hand is reassured to find every curve, every edge, every texture exactly where it belongs.

Now we are preparing to make the trek from Paris to Providence for the fourth time as a couple and for the first time as a family – with our son, Ulysses. My parents may not measure the value of what they offer by every year inviting us back to their red-brick house, but my husband and I do. Remaining faithful to this convention is a responsibility we embrace wholeheartedly; it is also a gift for Ulysses. One day, he will take an active part in these annual traditions, and we hope that for him they will become what they are for us: a kind of sextant with which to gaze skyward so that we might better navigate our earthly affairs.