Extended Family Values

Stepfather Christmas

Christmas, 1989 — Me, the Christmas Bitch, probably said something like “Smile for the camera! Or I’m calling Santa!”

Everything changed for me exactly 17 years ago, on Christmas Eve, 2005.

That morning, I woke before dawn, my mind swirling in the darkness, telling me what I needed to do right then. What I wanted to do.

I gently shook my husband’s shoulder until his sleepy eyes opened. “Hank, cover for me,” I whispered so as not to wake two of our adult children, who were home from college and asleep in their childhood bedrooms.  “Put the goose in the oven if I don’t get back before noon.”

He gave me a hug. “I’ve got it covered. But you sure you want to drive there and back this morning?”

“Something is pulling me. I need to go.”

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Every year, the Holiday Season was upon me like the plague. “Black Friday,” “Cyber Monday,” “Shop Small (stores)” and “Free Shipping.” It was all about the rush to the finish line on December 25th.

My friend, Cindy, called it, “Doing Christmas.” It was a verb, something to be completed. But the focus was always on objects. Did I remember to send a gift to…? Did I tip fairly? Will my husband, who’s like a kid himself on Christmas morning, be disappointed by the little nothings in his stocking?

Christmas, for me, was like final exams.  I crammed for a month. Steadfast. The Holiday Cards, the gifts, the festivities. It’s as if I was back in college before the big test. Did I get everything right? Check all those Christmas boxes?

I kept receipts in a big envelope that grew fatter by the day while my bank account got thinner by the minute. For years, my oldest son, Allan, teased me whenever I got uptight, no matter the time of the year. “Hey, Mom, have you bought the tree, yet?” It was code for…you are such a stressed-out bitch at Christmas. Not something I was proud of.

When the kids were school aged, Hank had asked if we had to be the first on the block to put the lights out.

“Yes!”

“Well,” he said, zipping his suitcase for a short business trip, “Please wait to do the tree until I get back. I mean, this is supposed to be fun.”

“Fun?!” 

When Allan was ten, he asked why we didn’t have a birthday cake for Jesus on Christmas.

I barely looked up. “Why?!” I was confounded by his question.

“Because it’s Jesus’ birthday.”

I put my pen down and looked up at him, little freckles dotting the bridge of his nose.  “You’re right. It is.”        

I stopped in my tracks that day. But only for a moment and then I was back to addressing the cards.

To ease the holiday stress, I conceded to a fake tree. Now, we haul out the faux fir from the garage, wrestle it across the house to the living room and remove the heavy canvas cover like tugging off a tight dress without the Spanx.

The fake tree is an improvement. No more worries about the Christmas tree drying out and keeping the thermostat down to the likes of our refrigerator to make it last. No more feeling under the tree to check the water in the base, or feel the needles for dryness, or dropping an aspirin in the water to prolong that fresh evergreen suppleness and smell just one more day. I thought I’d never go fake, but oh how merry it is. I just light a Frasier Fir candle and get the smell, too.

However, the phony fir didn’t dent my holiday fervor. Why couldn’t I just relax and heed the wise words of that wonderful Erma Bombeck, the American humorist who is rumored to have said on her dying days that if she’d only known life was so short, she wouldn’t have worried so much about the dust?

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My stepfather Allan and me, June 30, 1979

That Christmas Eve in 2005, I slipped out of the house to drive two hours south to Rancho Bernardo to see my stepfather, Allan, who was in a Senior Care Living Facility. I’d visited him frequently, but I just didn’t feel “finished” with my holiday plans that December 24th.

There was one more gift I needed to give.

I needed to pay homage to Allan, who’d stood up to my birth father so long ago. My father, having divorced my mother to marry my mother’s wealthy best friend, had disowned my sister at sixteen and me at eleven, handing us to Allan over a drink at Scandia on The Sunset Strip. I’m finished, he’d said. They’re yours. Allan then had the heartbreaking job of telling my sister and me that night. Our father wanted nothing more to do with us. 

I’d felt so heavy that night after the news. They’re yours. Not the heaviness from being fat, which I was used to as a kid. This was different, as if someone had placed a heavy stone on my heart. Allan had tried to soften the blow, but those words landed hard. When I looked at my stepfather and saw the pain in his face, my tears spilled over, the salt stinging my skin.

 Allan committed to take on the role my father had abdicated that same night. I love your mother. I love you girls. Your father wants to be out of the picture. I am in the picture and want to be a part of your lives.

I recalled those sweet, sacred words as the sun came up on an empty Interstate 15, thinking about all the material “stuff” associated with “Doing Christmas.” I’d always wanted the holiday to be “perfect” for my family because my own family had been so imperfect. Yet, did anyone really care if it was “perfect?” If the garland sagged? If the tree dried out? If we were out of the eggnog our youngest seemed to devour? I realized I didn’t want to be the Christmas Bitch any longer.

That morning, I sat with Allan in the common room at Silverado Senior Care. He was in a wheelchair; his Parkinson’s having progressed further. Though he and my mother had divorced eighteen years after they married, he’d always been the one father figure who’d stood by me. I inched the steel-framed chair closer to hear him speak through clenched teeth, another byproduct of the disease.  I’d brought him his favorite chocolate bar that he held in his hand, unwrapped, unable to eat it.  A newspaper lay neatly in his lap, perfectly folded. He always loved a newspaper.

After an hour of sitting with each other, a kind of non-conversation in which our hearts spoke to each other, he looked tired. I put my hand on his and said, “It’s ok. You don’t have to try to talk.”

We sat in silence for another hour, but I didn’t care. I was there. In a chair beside the man who’d had been so good to me when my own father chose not to. In those two precious hours together, we said little, and yet, so much.

It was Allan’s last Christmas.

And, in a way, my first.

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In addition to dozens of published essays, Heather Haldeman is the author of the Award-winning 2021 Kids & Cocktails Don’t Mix: A Memoir, a poignant, page-turning remembrance of her life growing up with a larger-than-life mother—after having been disowned by her lawyer father. Heather lives in Pasadena and can be found at Heatherhaldeman.com and Heatherwrites on Instagram.

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