A Ghastly Little Christmas

 

We have always been warned of the dangers of the Christmas season.  Stress, rushing around shopping and meeting others, trying to keep pace with the relentless joy and well wishing of the season, wrapping, planning, spending too much money on too many people.

 

   For many the experience of depression intensifies during the holidays.  For some, sadness emerges from having too little face-to-face contact with those we care most about.  For others, the challenge is dealing with an excess of personal interaction among those near and dear.  But for almost everyone, everything we know about this season of birth points us toward family.  No group of people has more power to affirm and sustain us.  However, family relations also have the capacity to excoriate and explode.

    My family Christmas in the late 70s remains frozen in time as the single worst Christmas ever.  For weeks after the event, my wife would periodically intone an adapted carol of her own creation.  “Have Yourself A Ghastly Little Christmas.”   The episode involved my wife Anita, my older sister Mary, and my mother.  The four of us gathered in my sister’s residence in Rogers Park.  Anita and I were living in Oak Park.  My mother flew in from California.

  

   Invective, harsh words and angry feelings constituted the main course of our bitter banquet. When I taught Irish Literature courses, I used  this personal anecdote to help students grasp some of the elements of the Christmas dinner scene in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  That’s a famous donnybrook in modern fiction.  A major bone of contention in it is the divisive impact of opposing views on religion.

 

 

   I feel free to set this down in written form now since my mother and sister are deceased. Some of my living relatives may be hearing about this for the first time.  To the possible objection, “Don’t air your dirty laundry in public,” I reply, “Bah, Humbug!”  Christmas is far too fraught with expectations of sweetness and light.  No season of the year cries out more for a bit of besmirching.  I loved my mother and sister deeply and I believe that their flare-up shows them in fascinating weakness and strength.

 

 

     We opened presents on Christmas eve.  Talk then turned to plans for Christmas morning.  While Anita roamed with her camera, snapping pictures, Mom inquired about the schedule of Masses nearby.  I thought to myself  “Oh Crap.”  I knew that my sister had left the church (as had I).  My mother was directing her questions to Mary.  I exhaled when Mary explained that she would take Mom to the 10:00 AM Mass at the local Catholic church.  But then she stated, “I’ll take you inside and get you settled, but I won’t stay.  I’ll come back later and pick you up.”  I thought, OK Mary, now make the excuse, the sick friend you have to visit, the earlier Mass you’ll have attended.  Just tell the lie well.  But she didn’t lie at all. She said, "I’ve left the  Church.  I don’t go to Mass any more.”
 

 

    Mom was aghast.  “What?  You’re not going to Mass?”  A stunned pause.  And then she screeched: “The blackest atheist would go to Mass on Christmas Day!”  Mary turned away.  “I can’t stay here, I can’t stay here--not in this house!” my mother ranted.  Chaos ensued. Coats and luggage were collected.  My mother’s outburst had deeply offended Mary.

 

 

  I was oddly puzzled by the particular words my mother had used.  I could not shake the thought, “I’ve heard that condemnation before.”  Later of course I remembered.  In Joyce’s Christmas dinner scene, Mr. Casey (no relation) and Dante have a ferocious quarrel over the subjects of God, priests and religion in Ireland.  Dante attacks Casey’s credentials as a Catholic.  “--Catholic indeed! repeated Dante . . . The blackest protestant in the land would not speak the language I have heard this evening.”   Joyce published those words in his novel in 1916. My mother was a ten year old in County Galway at the time.  I guarantee she did not read the new book then or during any of the years that followed.  But through a kind of osmosis, she absorbed useful expressions from the cultural storehouse of epithets and imprecations that were part and parcel of Irish common parlance during the first half of the twentieth century.

   The curse itself is both illogical and bigoted.  No atheist of any stripe would feel obliged to go to Mass on Christmas Day.  And black and “blackest” are gradations of “evil” color symbology that persisted for some time in catechetical instruction.  Even as late as the 1950s I remember being taught that sin was a “black mark” on the soul.  The sin-free soul was pure white. 

   Anita and I ferried Mom from Rogers Park to Oak Park. She stayed with us. We took her to Mass saying nothing about our apostate status or lack of same. She did not press the matter.  She knew there was no more family lodging available in the Chicago area.  But when my mother was upset about an issue that involved a personal connection, she was like a dog with a bone.  She could never let it go.  For days we were forced to hear her rehash and repeat the outrage of her firstborn’s shocking candor. 

 

    A fear my mother always had was that one or more of her children would lose the faith. Even worse, that we would “fall away” and go public with the scandal. These fears were real for many Irish Catholic immigrants in the early decades of the 20th century.  My mother's generation were strangers in a strange land, and religion provided an important foundational component of identity.  It also served as a way to identify or espy potential allies.  The Irish, Italians and Poles could relax somewhat despite ethnic difference because they knew the other folks also held tight to the "one true faith."

    To be a fallen away Catholic was a family disaster.  Spiritual prognosis: terminal.  Amazingly, in our case, recovery occurred.  My mother and sister were eventually reconciled.  Mary became an exemplum of the progressive Catholic, and a mentor for me on how to "fall back" as a Catholic revert.  Our mother did not live to witness all these happenings.  Now that I have blogged the whole affair and the "dirty laundry" is flapping in the breeze, hell may well await me, I know.  But I will be at Mass on Christmas Day.  I don’t want anyone dubbing me “the blackest atheist.”  I’ll have my phone in my pocket with text on the screen. If the homily is awful, my head will be down and--you guessed it--I’ll be re-reading Joyce’s Christmas dinner scene.

 Nollaig Shona Dhaoibh!