Holiday Blues

My husband hates the holidays. Not the normal "Can you believe that they're putting up Santas in October" or "Christmas is too commercial" beefs, but an active disdain for year-end merriment. His mother died on Christmas Eve when he was 13. He said he knew she was sick -- she'd been in and out of hospitals, she wore a wig because she lost her hair -- but no one told him how sick she was. So he went to bed thinking that he was going to wake up to a house full of presents, and woke up instead to the news that he'd never see his mother again.

Ever since, he can't think about Christmas without feeling an overwhelming sense of loss and abandonment. He told me that when his kids were little, he'd push down all his bad feelings and do everything he could to make the holidays fun for them -- decorating a tree, icing cookies, dressing up like Santa, attending pagents at school and church, making the rounds to the relatives' homes. All at the same time he was dying inside.

He warned me shortly after we met that he would go into a funk in late November and not emerge until mid-January. Thanksgiving was sort of a trigger for all these emotions in him, and not to take anything he said or did during that time too personally. Understood, I said.

I didn't tell him that I love Christmas. I love shopping for the perfect present -- I listen carefully to my family and friends and choose their gifts with care. I don't go overboard with decorations, but I love putting up a tree. I have boxes of trimmings -- everything from antique ornaments salvaged from my grandmother's house, to exotic souvenirs of my travels, to a bunch of silly things I've seen in store windows and liked. And I bake like a fiend -- every year, several thousand cookies and several hundred truffles and more peanut brittle than you can imagine come out of my kitchen. It starts about Thanksgiving, and goes through mid-December, when I package it all up and give it away to the people who've been a great help to me throughout the year. And most of all, I love Christmas parties. People get dressed up, they decorate their houses, they put on an excellent spread -- what's not to love?

So I figured that Christmas would be about compromise. I reasoned that I could take care of the little things like sending out cards and wrapping presents. I could lay off decorating if it helped his frame of mind. I could bake a few of his favorite treats along with my usual fare. I could even make the rounds of parties by myself to spare him the grief. What I didn't realize, however, was the depth of his despair over the holidays. That by not hating Christmas as much as he did, I was a traitor.

I started getting an inkling of this our first Thanksgiving together. We were newly engaged; I had just started looking for a job in the little town; my parents were nagging me about a wedding date; his kids bounced between indifference and hostility; and he was retreating behind a wall of Xanax and Scotch. Despite all this, I invited my family to the little town for Thanksgiving dinner so they could meet the kids and get to know his family. Since it had to happen I reasoned, why not over a four-day weekend that focuses on food and football? He agreed.

There were some uncomfortable moments -- like when I wasn't sure dinner would be ready on time because I woke up on Thanksgiving morning with a raging hangover from the nerve-calming bottle of Zinfandel I'd had the night before -- but it was mostly a good weekend. My parents, surprisingly, were on their best behavior. His kids were polite and nice and even interested in talking to their prospective grandparents. The turkey was perfect. My alma mater won the big game against its football rival, cinching a top bowl berth.

At the end of the weekend, after assorted kids and parents and siblings left for their homes, and my husband and I were alone in his bachelor pad, I commented that it went remarkably well. He just looked at me, shook his head, and walked out of the room.

"Never put me through anything like that again," he said over his shoulder.

"Why," I asked, "did you agree to it in the first place?"

"Because it was important to you."

And as those words hung there in the air, I got my first taste of what the holidays for the rest of our lives would be like. He totally agreed that our families had to meet -- that wasn't the point -- but I made a tactical error setting it up when I did. Anything out of the ordinary (and what ISN'T out of the ordinary during the holidays?) from about mid-November on adds stress and makes him retreat. Not from the world -- he has a good game face -- but from me and those closest to him.

I later learned that when I went back to the big city after that Thanksgiving weekend when we started blending our families, he found another way to deal with his stress. I kid myself that if I'd waited for spring break to bring everyone together, things would have worked out differently. I'm not sure that's the case, but it's one of the things I regret when I have trouble falling asleep.

The Wife Who Knows