Our plan for Christmas and why

The Column: 12.18.23

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I love Christmas, coming as I do from fundamentalists, a bunch who don’t score high on the Festivity Scale. My mother hugged me only once, to keep me from falling out of a moving vehicle. I don’t recall my father ever telling a joke. So Christmas was a brief episode of flamboyant frivolity in an otherwise solemn life in which we looked forward to End Times and our flight up out of Minnesota into paradise, just us, not the Catholics.

This year my little family is taking a vacation from the holiday and on December 25 we’ll be on a ship out on the Atlantic. It’s our gift to us. No tree with a pile of gifts under it. We’ve done that and we need a reset. I used to roam through little shops buying Slovakian soufflé pans or Peruvian porcelain trivets and presenting them to folks who were not trivet-type people and whose annual soufflé output was approximately zero so the gifts wound up in storage, and when the recipients went off to Happydale, teenagers snapped up the soufflé pans for 15¢ and used them to heat up frozen pizzas and the trivets wound up as doorstops.

I don’t do heroic Christmases anymore. One year I made a bouillabaisse with a saffron I sent away to Bangkok for and I made the broth by boiling swordfish carcasses and there were chubs and grubs and sprats tied up in cheesecloth and mulled millet and I culled the fat with a glass refractor and reduced it in a chafing dish and it took four days to make and I set it in front of people and they took a spoonful and said, “Oh. Nice.” I gave that up, too.

I’m an old man. I’m in the deacquisitioning stage of life. No more gifts, please. One candle, one gingerbread cookie, fried Spam with canned turkey gravy and tater tots and a Fudgsicle. Done.

Christmas at sea with my wife and daughter is a beautiful idea. One hopes for calm seas and not thirty-foot waves that leave us kneeling at plumbing fixtures, one hopes for quiet places where one is safe from the jingling and fa-la-laing, where we can simply recall Christmases past.

I have two in mind. One was in 1997 when my wife was four days away from delivering a tiny infant girl and the two of us sat in a New York apartment in quiet anticipation of this marvelous gift. No need for anything else, it was Christmas in its purest form, awaiting a new life. And the other was when I was 13 and my father was in the hospital with a fractured skull, having fallen off a barn while reroofing it. My mother warned us that Dad had been off work for months, recuperation was complicated, so we six children should not expect our usual fancy Christmas.

I was okay with that. I didn’t crave stuff, I didn’t care about clothes, I was a reader, a borrower of library books. But one Sunday at church, I noticed a box in the cloakroom marked “For the Keillor family at Christmas,” and I shrank in horror at being a charity case. I felt offended. Charity was for starving children in Africa, for the bums at the gospel mission, for cripples and the deranged and old people. Not for us.

I think it made me ungracious about accepting generosity. I became a habitual grabber of the check at lunches. I felt embarrassed when complimented. I am not a good guest. I am still trying to correct this defect.

So our little trio is going to sea and my New Year’s resolution, as the ship heads back to New York, is to be grateful for life itself and love and friendship. I was lucky to have a life as a writer and drift through the outskirts of the arts, music especially, and when you hang with musicians, you never lack for friendship. They are an aristocracy well acquainted with poverty and so they learn to graciously accept help when needed and offer it when possible. I married a musician, which let me into this charmed circle. When we sail away on the ship, a musician and her child — who were in need of a place to stay — will come stay in our apartment. We offered, she graciously accepted. Grace is my goal, grace and gratitude. Grace is my daughter’s middle name and I intend to make it mine.

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