IN MY SHOES: An Untraditional Christmas Tradition
The New York Times’ Wendell Jamieson reminisces about Christmas dinner with his sister Lindsay, mother Bess and Bob, his erstwhile not-quite-stepfather, father and stepmother:
The fact that Bob hated Christmas was, to my sister and me, one of his charms. We’d try to get him to say it, and laugh every time he did. He liked getting laughs out of us. He liked getting a rise out of my mother. He liked being outrageous. His outrageousness made the house come alive. Bob’s “I hate Christmas trees” speech was as much a part of our holidays as stockings and gifts beneath the hated tree. …
He’d sit at the head of the table for Christmas dinner, surrounded by me; my younger sister, Lindsay; my mother; my father and stepmother; and maybe one or two guests. This was an arrangement tearfully requested by my sister and me when our parents told us a few days after Christmas in 1977 that they were splitting after 14 years: could we all still have that one annual dinner together? It was the only thing we asked. For some reason, it seemed incredibly important to us, at ages 7 and 10, and, perhaps to avoid any more tears, they quickly nodded in agreement.
The guest list might seem strange, and a recipe for disaster, but it was nothing unusual in our neighborhood, even before Park Slope was the Park Slope of today. The traditional Christmas that the neighborhood presented - the half-hidden trees in parlor floor windows, the lights on Seventh Avenue, the occasional hints of wood smoke - contrasted with the unorthodox ways it was celebrated inside so many of those homes. …
Bob would fully embrace his outrageous inner core at our dinners. He was, in many ways, just a big kid. On our first Christmas with Bob, in 1978, any tensions that may have existed, at least to my childhood eyes - eyes that wanted everything to be O.K. and everyone to get along - dissolved in the deluge of his stories and opinions and curses, all delivered behind a veil of smoke and laughter. He steamrolled over any discomfort.
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