Day 24: My Mom is Dead

Jojo sits alone, crying.

All around her, the party continues on. Festive music plays quietly underneath the merry buzz of people chatting and having fun. After all these years, they don’t even bother pretending that she’s not there.

“Is she alright?” someone asks in a concerned whisper.

“Who? Oh. Yeah, that’s just how she is at this time of year.” The reply is as flippant in tone as in word. “Her Mom’s dead. It’s why she hates Christmas.” Only the last word, Christmas, is delivered in a whisper.

The conversation fades as the interlocutors meander toward the food and drinks table. Most of the party is gathered in that area, a holiday herd grazing on tidy servings of charcuterie and buffalo chicken dip. The hot air was stuffy from the fireplace and all of the Seven & 7 burps and homemade eggnog farts.

So much time, so much money, so much waste. “But…it’s tradition!”

Whose tradition? To whom does all of this bluster and bullshit belong? Jojo’s mind wonders as her eyes wander over the tree, decorated to within an inch of its tiny life, its artificial arms nearly breaking under the load of cheap ornaments meant to look ‘old timey’ and ‘vintage’.

Nowhere can she see the tatty old Mr. and Mrs. Claus that her parents had made when she was a little girl.

In her vivid memories, she can still hear them complaining about their fingers being raw, sore, and blistered from placing beads and sequins on tiny pins, dipping them in glue, and forcing them into the hard, molded plastic bodies of the figures to add the decorative elements that made them sparkle among the draped tinsel icicles on the fresh pines in her memory. Every ornament, every decoration, even her stocking had been lovingly hand-made by her parents. Beaded, sequined, and embroidered over weeks and weeks in the few hours they could find between her bedtime and their own.

Jojo was only four when her parents left the cult, and that first Christmas among the worldly formed the foundation of how her family would celebrate the holidays: Mom would go over-the-top hosting friends and family, buying presents for Dad to wrap. Jojo would bake sugar cookies decorated with cherry and lime Jello powder, because her parents wouldn’t buy colored sugar. Weeks of making fudge and rum cakes and bourbon balls and pralines.

Fuck, Mom’s pralines were unlike anything else in the world. And Jojo hasn’t had one since before her mom died.

That would have been…Christmas 2018, then, Jojo thinks, doing the math. It was all she gave me that year, pralines and a $5 Starbucks gift card.

In her memories of the past, Jojo can so clearly recall her mother’s slow descent into angry, bitter resentment. From the perspective of a tween, she recalls wandering the mall with her mom, taking careful note of everything that her mother pointed out. Later that evening, she had escorted her Dad from store to store and pointed out all of the things he was to buy.

After that, Mom discovered QVC and HSN and the mall became a thing of the past. No more staying up late with Dad to wrap presents, just a knock at the door whenever the USPS carrier had another package to drop off. Wouldn’t even take it out of the shipping box, just shove each one in a cheap paper bag printed with Santa or a snowman or a cardinal and dump it under the tree.

For two decades, Jojo watched Mom slide from giver to hater due to her father’s indifference. Every year, Jojo took it upon herself to do more and more to try and make her mother’s holiday just as special as her mother made it for her. And every year, she failed.

Because it wasn’t her problem to solve.

As the years went by, Jojo found herself the center of her mother’s resentment. “If you’re not going to do it right, why even bother trying?” This, after Jojo had saved up from her first ever job to buy her mother a silver bracelet.

Silver. Not gold. “It’ll tarnish, and then I’ll have to clean it. So, it’s not so much a gift as it is another mess I have to clean up.”

In the present, more tears blur Jojo’s view of the tree into a jumble of colored lights and gaudy, faux-Victorian décor. Around the base of the overdecorated abomination are dozens of Amazon bags made of some recycled fabric-like substance. Most of them look exactly the same, a wall of roughly textured azure printed with rectangular, black ‘decorations’.

A few of the packages have been lovingly cloaked in beautiful paper, their precise folds and neatly taped flaps speaking to the hours of time invested in their wrapping. Jojo doesn’t bother with bows or gift tags anymore. Just neat folds and a little Sharpie-written name on the corner to tell who it’s for.

Even without those notes, she would know for whom each was intended, just from the size and shape of the box. After all, it’s not the packaging the matters, it’s the love and thought that goes into selecting the perfect gift for each person. The sort of love and thought that is rarely reflected in the gifts they buy for her, each one accompanied by a shipping confirmation email from Amazon, describing in the subject, header, and preview text exactly what was ordered.

Occasionally, someone will ask her what she wants for Christmas. But not often. Jojo considers this a small blessing, because every year it gets harder and harder to keep herself from saying, “I’ll just pretend to be happy with a steaming pile of disappointment. After all, that’s the family tradition.”

Around her, the atmosphere of the party has changed. The herd has migrated from the food…to Mom’s old upright piano. Jojo herself is the only one who knows how to play. Sort of. But she doesn’t. It’s just where they gather, to sing carols, according to…tradition.

Her husband approaches with a tissue, and she takes it. “Come on,” he says softly. “It’s almost over.”

She takes the tissue without looking, dries her eyes, blows her nose. When she does nothing else for several long moments, he reaches down, takes the tissue from her as he slips his hand into her empty one.

Finally, she looks up at him, and nods as a fresh wave of tears well up inside her. Hot, angry, bitter tears of loss, loneliness, and resentment. She can feel them. He can see them. For a long moment, they simply stare at each other.

Another long moment passes before she gives a nod, glues on her ‘Happy Haly’ smile — the halcyon visage that they all count on as a signifier of good tidings and prosperity — and she allows herself to be guided to the edge of the herd.

After all, it’s tradition.