I knew I was going down. No way to stop it. No time for anything graceful. Just minimize the damage. Oh, shit. My phone.

And then I heard myself say it, casually, calmly—”oh shit”—as I landed on my right knee (There’s the tear.) and my left hand, scuffing the palm. The right hand swung out and landed somewhat more lightly, just to steady me and stop me from rolling forward, the corner of my iPhone scratching hard against the ground. (Its just the case. It’s just the case.) And my gym bag pivoted around my body on the strap across my chest and slammed down on the sidewalk behind me. I heard the combination lock, in an outside mesh pocket, rattle against the concrete.

The high school kid in front of me, on is way to school, looked terrified and suddenly wide awake. My headphones were still in my ears, but I heard the panic in his voice: “Oh, god. Are you all right?”

I stood up. His reaction seemed a little dramatic. I only fell. Was I bleeding? Oh, man—is he seeing something I’m not seeing?

I turned back to see what tripped me. Some plastic straps sat there a couple of yards away, probably the remnants of some stacks of the shitty South Philly Review. I must have gotten one foot in a loop as the other stepped on the other end. That’s South Philly: The garbage swirls like a cyclone, as Ani DiFranco once sang. Stupid, selfish, littering neighbors.

I checked my left hand. My palm looked cheese-gratered, but there was no blood. Just raised flakes of skin like scales on a half-scaled fish.

“Are you all right?” he asked again.

The phone was fine, too. Just some scraping on the corner of the case. The NPR News app I was loading right before I fell—I shouldn’t have been looking down at my stupid phone. Uh! So dumb!—kicked in with the WHYY pre-roll support message: “This is Terry Gross. I know you’d like to listen to WHYY online, but before you do…”

I didn’t want to lend any further gravity to the situation by taking my headphones out of my ears, so I just spoke up over Terry.

“Yeah I’m fine,” I said.

I was touched by the kid’s concern. What if I had been hurt. He was the one person in a position to do something about it.

“I’m fine,” I said again. “Thank you.”

Poor kid. He didn’t wake up thinking he’d have to help some old guy off the sidewalk.

I walked off at a normal pace. Nothing to see here. I became aware of other people around me.

I’m not usually the type to get overly embarrassed about accidents like these. I don’t pretend they didn’t happen, but I don’t dwell on it, either. You can turn a light misstep into a little jog to the corner, but a full sidewalk body slam? There’s no hiding it, so why bother? I happens to everyone.

Usually I find some comfort in imaging friends of mine doing something similar. What would so-and-so do? It surprises me who I think of. I suppose it’s because I somehow think of them deep down as the most poised and composed of my friends.

I shouldn’t have been playing with my phone. I shouldn’t have been going to the gym: I woke up feeling ill, congested, sneezy. My head was clouded, clumsy, and I wasn’t 100% awake yet. But those seemed like excuses to me at home. I’m not talking myself out of going to the gym again.

I rounded the corner before I stopped to check anything else. I examined my knee for a good 15 seconds. Miraculously I did not tear anything. Not even a mark.

Now that I’m on my way, I’m not turning back. 

Sooner or later you reach a point where you have to sink so much money into your car to make it sellable that it’s worth just as much or more as a trade-in. And even if that’s not precisely true, it’s worth something to have someone else take it off your hands.

So Jeff and I drove to a suburban car dealer in a 1997 Jeep Wrangler, and we drove home in a 2011 Honda CR-V.

When Jeff bought that Jeep in 2002 he joked, “It makes me look 30% sexier.” And he was right. It was true for anyone. It was a hot little number. Now we’re lulled into a need for reliability and comfort, room for groceries and, one day, room for a kid. Sturdy. Sensible. Soccer mom.

The new car is lovely. But it sure is hard to say good bye to the old friend who saw us through three moves and three cities.

There was one catch, however: Since we hadn’t counted on trading in the Jeep so quickly, and it had so many accessories, we had to keep it for two more days to gather up all the various pieces, including a hard top that was being stored in a warehouse in north Philly.

Here are some pictures from the last day of our acquaintance.

I snapped this photo on my block the morning we traded her in. This is when I started to really feel sentimental. It took some effort to hold back some tears on this one.

We stopped at the warehouse, where the hard top was being stored, before continuing on to the dealer.

I harassed Jeff to take one last photo with his baby.

It started to lightly rain as we were installing the hard top. When we were done, I captured Jeff with the new car in the background. Is it too late to change our minds? (Yes. It definitely is.)

Jeff's last drive. I followed him to the dealer in the Honda. Stopped in traffic, I tried to capture a puff of cigarette smoke pouring out of Jeff's driver-side window, but I was not quick enough. This route reminded me terribly of Queens.

It’s been a few weeks, and I can still hardly believe the old girl isn’t sitting out in front of the house. Some part of it lives on: The Honda is red. Not the bright, bold, sporty red of the Wrangler, but a rather more sober, adult, guarded maroon. Better than the black or a gray model we expected. It was the last one of its year on the lot. A sign.

Still, the Honda at least has the good graces not to pretend to be the Jeep, and we make no comparisons. This newbie has some big treads to fill. I love the new-car smell, a fully functional driver-side door lock, reliable brakes, air conditioning and heat, a quiet engine and transmission, ignition on the first turn of the key, a decent stereo system, no leaks in heavy rain. But I still grope for the stick shift when I approach a stop sign, and I still feel with my left foot for the ghost of the clutch.

Jeff still wants to wave at other Jeep owners as they pass on the road, but that just doesn’t make sense in a Honda.

It’s so easy and almost embarrassing to over-sentimentalize a car, but it does see one through a lot. There is so much in between the first trip to the last.

The day Jeff drove it home from Lake Mille Lacs, Minnesota, about an hour and a half north of the Twin Cities, we had tickets to see Heart perform at Mystic Lake Casino. That day must have been like a dream for him: his first real car—with an option to go topless—and “Crazy on You” in the same day.

We drove out to Trout Lake, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, for Thanksgiving with Jeff’s family one year—my first experience with a deep-fried turkey. Four-wheel drive came in handy on that trip, driving from frozen waterfall to frozen waterfall, as it did through six Minnesota winters.

After Jeff accepted that job in New York City, and our lives changed indelibly again, we drove around Lake Calhoun, site of so many hazy summer afternoons, one last time. I cried quietly but inconsolably as we listened to Bloodletting, Concrete Blonde’s greatest-hits album.  Hey, hey, good bye. Tomorrow Wendy’s going to die… It just happened to be in the CD player that day. But seven years later, I still don’t have the heart to listen to it all the way through.

The Jeep started acting up during Jeff’s drive from Minnesota to New York, and he got stranded just short of the border in Niagara Falls, Ontario. He received a huge phone bill the next month, thanks to international roaming charges.

We drove it far less in later years in favor of the mass transit of these East Coast cities. But I did learn how to drive a stick in Queens—out of necessity. We risked getting a ticket (or worse, a tow) if we didn’t move the car every week (sometimes twice) to avoid getting towed to make way for street sweepers.

We took day trips throughout the summers to Jones Beach, the wind of the filthy highways tangling our salty hair and cooling our sunburns. We often drove through Manhattan with the top down, and I loved to throw my head back and watch the skyscrapers whip past us. And at how many rugby matches did that Jeep make an appearance?

After Jeff accepted a career move to Philadelphia, I helped him packing as much as we could into that Jeep after he moved from temporary accommodations into our first apartment in the city. The back seat came out, but there wasn’t as much room back there as you might have imagined.

My driving lesson was complete when we moved from West Philly to our first house in South Philly. Jeff got called in to work, and I had to carry on with the transfer.

I paid for a new transmission later that week.

I still maintain it could have happened to anyone; it was just its time to go.

The first rule of Christmas morning was to wait until everyone was awake before digging in. Whoever was up first, usually me, and in later years, the younger ones, would be forced to sit back from the tree, bright with promise and the buzz of electricity, regarding it like a ravenous, wild thing, chained, silent and steady, waiting for the first chance to strike.

And we did look wild, clothes twisted and unformed, hair standing up in all directions like ruffled fur, eyes still pink and swollen and crusted from sleep, smelling faintly of sweat and bad breath. When the priority is a tree laden with brightly wrapped boxes, there is no time for a glance in the mirror before greeting one’s family.

Mom made coffee in the kitchen and had her morning cigarette. Every time she tried to speak for more than a few seconds at a time, she lost herself in a loud and painful-sounding fit of coughs. (My dad was reading something. We tried to keep the TV off until after the Christmas orgy.)

Grandma was in the same spot on the couch where she had slept over the night before, her legs drawn up beneath her in what I called “Indian style” at the time. She was surrounded in blue smoke, tapping ashes from her cigarette into a large ashtray in her lap and making remarks about all the presents under the tree that we didn’t deserve.

She was probably right. It was usually an embarrassment of riches. We were very lucky.

“Would you look at that. What is all that stuff? Where’s it all come from?” she said, the lights of the christmas tree reflected in her eyeglasses. “You kids don’t deserve all this, do you?”

I knew she was teasing us—unless I misunderstood. Anyway, she paid for much of it. But should I say so, or should I wait until someone told me I was a good boy? I nodded quietly. Um. Yeah. I deserve it. I think.

“You do?” she said with a sly smile. “Oh, ok.”

“It’s a little different from when you were a kid, isn’t it?” she said to my dad. It was as if from a script. I think we all followed the same routines every year, told the same stories, shared the same memories. “No,” she decided. “You kids did ok, too, didn’t you? Yeah, your father and I always did pretty good by you kids.”

I always liked to drag out some leftovers from dinner the night before and poke around or slice myself a hunk of egg nog cake and a bowl of fruit cocktail—a prime time for breakfast with the other kids still in bed, I could always mine as many cherries as I wanted from the murky, fruity depths.

Eventually the family would coalesce around the tree and wait for Mom and Dad to start passing around packages.

Is it time yet? Is it time yet?

It’s time.

My dad understood his special role on Earth to be torturing us with scotch tape. He thought it was the greatest thing as we struggled mightily with the paper and the boxes, cutting out fingers on the cardboard.

“How d’you like that wrapping job?” he said. “How d’you like that taping job?”

Secretly (and not so secretly) we all hated it. But it was his thing. Let the old man have that much, right?

“You kids open it all up so damn fast. It just goes by so fast,” he said. “So sue me if I try to make it last a little longer.”

Over the years, I began to feel more and more guilty about the wasted paper and packing materials. I made it my custom to open everything as slowly and carefully as I could to keep the paper from ripping and pull it off in one solid sheet. It was a subtle and almost unintentional response to my dad’s plea for slowness.  But he took it for mockery, so eventually I’d start tearing through it like everyone else. And we never saved the paper anyway, so my delays were not helpful.

My dad always loved Christmas. I think spoiling us kids beyond his means made him feel prosperous.

Tearing into Christmas, we all descended into a sort of a idiotic cheer. It bordered on manic. Every reveal was amazing, every toy exactly what we wanted, every item of clothing just want we needed—or at least I wanted it to be. I knew as a young kid that part of the fun depended on the gift recipient really, really liking what you gave them. It was better to give than to receive—as long as they showed a little bloody gratitude, eh? And I had no reason to disappoint my parents.

I think I picked it up from my mom. She has a compelling enthusiasm. When she really turns it on—widens her eyes, lifts her eyebrows, raises her voice—you are the most important person in the room, and whatever is happening to you is just … amazing. An ugly sweater gets a perceptual makeover: “Well look at that. Ooh, that’ll be nice and warm, won’t it? Let me feel that. Oh, yeah. That’s nice.” A boring-looking book becomes an adventure: “Now weren’t you just saying you wanted something to do in the car. You can read this on the way up north this summer. Oh, that’ll be ideal.”

Never mind that reading in the car gave me a headache and an upset stomach. I was rendered helpless and joyful by her charm.

And if any one of us kids seemed unhappy or insolent or ungrateful, it put Dad in such a sour mood—which in turn put me in a sour mood. I hated people to be unhappy on the holidays.

After the kids opened their presents, we gave mom, dad and grandma their gifts. The toys and trying on of new clothes would wait until Dad had his new power tools and cologne and mom had her new fuzzy slippers, jewelry and kitchen appliances.

And then the frenzy faded. We were spent, surrounded by the carnage of consumerism: fragments of boxes, ribbons and bows, bits of clear plastic packaging, cardboard, wrapping paper, styrofoam peanuts, tissue paper, tags and gift receipts. It sure does go by quickly.

And then it hits you like a sack of oranges in the gut: Christmas is over. A whole year of waiting, and this is it.

One contents oneself with thoughts of a happy few months playing new games, trying new toys, wearing now clothes to school. And there’s always next year.

While Mom and Dad surveyed the wreckage, one of us got a garbage bag.

“Be careful!” we were always warned. “Don’t lose any pieces mixed up with the paper.” There were always so many pieces.

Christmas was our day for visiting family, after presents. But until then, and while we each in turn got ready to leave the house, I busied myself with assembly and applying decals and reading through new instructions. I had always so much to show off to my cousins and aunts and uncles. What would I bring with me to play with in the car?

Mom and Dad had some presents under the tree early, the ones from them and Grandma and Uncle Dennis and Aunt Kay, but they were off limits until Christmas. The ones from Santa, of course, came later. I didn’t have to worry about those, but these were there to taunt me.

Most of them were clothes. Who cared, right? But some of them, the smaller ones, probably—the strangely shaped ones, right?—those were toys.

If I was good enough (if I begged and pestered my parents enough, nicely, gently), they would let me open one present—just one—before we left for midnight mass on Christmas Eve. I don’t think they for one second expected me to not beg. I don’t think I ever convinced them of anything. I think they always had one intended for Christmas Eve. But it was one of those child-and-parent games we played.

Usually it was a toy of some sort. Something small. A taste. A Transformer or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, maybe, or a CD or a movie on VHS. If they let me open a Nintendo game, it was even worse torture: knowing what it was and not being able to play it until the next day.

My uncle and aunt and grandma stayed at home while we went to church. They weren’t churchy. I was inclined to think it weird in those days, but for a few years, we weren’t churchy either. Like most of the midnight mass attendees, we were Easter and Christmas Catholics. The regular Sunday routine was the only Catholic mystery in our lives. Church got harder once the twins were born. As they got older, we started going more frequently.

The church was always full. Parking was scarce. The adjacent chapel was opened to make room for more people. If we got there late, we had to sit in folding chairs, which seemed cheap and uncomfortable and embarrassing compared with the upholstered pews in front of us. (Though didn’t we deserve the punishment for being late? If Jesus died on a cross, I figured we could deal with folding chairs.)

I always loved midnight mass. They pulled out all the stops for special occasions. Usually there was a lone organist playing on Sundays, but at Christmas, there was a pianist, as well, sometimes a guitarist, and a full-size chorus. Music was always the best part of church. The songs at Christmas were the same, plus a few Christmas hymns, but everything sounded so much more beautiful, fuller, richer—classy—in three-part harmonies and diatonic chords.

I sometimes was able to smuggle my early gift out of the house. Keeping it in a pocket or wrapped up in my coat was encouraging somehow. It was naughty to have it. And sometimes I could sneak a peek. But keeping it hidden and secret felt delicious. It was a talisman, powerful, titillating. If I kept it from distracting me too much, I felt almost virtuous.

When I was older, Mom and Dad let me help Santa stock the tree from their stash in their bedroom. Set out the cookies, the milk and a carrot. And mom always procured the thank-you note from Santa, in Santa’s special handwriting—indisputable proof (at one time) that he was real.

Then it was off to bed. I always worried I wouldn’t be able to sleep, that I would sleep in the next day and wake up in the afternoon and miss Christmas morning. But mom and dad never let me sleep in.

Grandma's cake looked a little something like this.

Whereas turkey was the center of Thanksgiving a month prior, Christmas Eve dinner revolved around a turkey and a ham! Those were from Dad. It was a food orgy—like Thanksgiving plus Easter … plus a birthday party.

My uncle Dennis always brought a cold tuna-noodle salad that the food of the gods as far as I was concerned.

Aunt Kay always brought dinner rolls and home-made chocolate candies. Starch, salt, sweet and fat, the chocolate-covered pretzels were irresistible.

Grandma spent a day stewing probably the best baked beans in the world—with bacon and molasses and brown sugar … and bacon. It may one day just save the world.

Mom made her potato salad, unequalled on seven continents, with the sliced hard-boiled eggs on top and drifts of sprinkled paprika.

Christmas was also the occasion for mixing up a huge two-gallon jar of fruit cocktail. Most of it was from canned fruits that we cut up into smaller pieces. We dumped in peaches, pears, pineapple, white cherries, red cherries. Sometimes white grapes. And we peeled and cut up oranges and droppen them in ,too. The best part was washing my hands and plunging my arm into the jar past my elbow to squish all the fruit around and mix it all up. It tasted best served with Grandma’s egg nog cake. And Cool-Whip.

There were vegetables, of course, and various other side dishes. Boring. These were not even forgettable co-stars, they were more like extras. Microwave for five minutes. Butter. Salt. Good. Now let’s get to the good stuff.

There was so much food, there was no room at the table for people, but wasn’t it better to sit in the family room on the floor playing board games or watching movies, anyway?

We should have owned stock in 3M.

Dad always waited until Christmas Eve or, maybe if he was especially good, the day before, to wrap presents. He’d box everything up in the bedroom and drag it out to the kitchen table to wrap it up. Every box had a label in his own shorthand: the name of one of us and some code to help him remember what it was.

He had a fondness for putting boxes inside of other boxes to disguise the gifts, so we never knew what he had. And if it was the sort of box that could not be disguised, we’d hear from down the hall as he bounded toward the kitchen, “You kids’d better keep your eyes closed, dammit, or this it going right back to the store!”

Sometimes I’d be permitted to help him. He was very particular, so sometimes he didn’t want help. Usually I had something of my own to wrap, and as he had all the paper and supplies, it made sense to join him.

My dad always claimed he could match the pattern at the edge of the paper to the pattern on the side he was taping it to. That way the pattern wasn’t interrupted st the joint. It was a nice thought, but I never quite believed him. It just wasn’t possible unless the packages were the perfect circumference. Right? But he insisted. And I didn’t want to go through the trouble of proving anything. I know he took immense pride in his wrapping.

What he was really saying was that it mattered to him—a lot—that we all appreciate what he was doing. He wanted us to understand the work and care and effort, but also to marvel at the ease with which carried it all off. And I had no reason to discredit him.

He made a policy of using as much tape as possible. Every top was taped to every bottom in at least one place on all four sides. Every flap of wrapping paper was taped down. A typical gift would require 16 pieces of tape to box and wrap.

I approached things differently. First, I never taped the lids on because it was annoying as hell to sit there struggling with the box, ripping the cardboard like some kind of savage, or a wild raccoon, sucking on a paper cut—or worse, cutting yourself under the fingernail—looking in all directions to see where that damn butter knife (or nail file or screwdriver or ring of keys) went.

With a little judiciousness, and the right shape, I could box and wrap a gift in as few as three pieces of tape. 3M stockholders were not among my biggest fans, I’m sure.

But my dad especially loved to torture us with scotch tape.

“You kids open it all up so damn fast, it just goes by so fast,” he said. “I like to watch you open it. So sue me if I try to make it last a little longer.”

To get on his good side, I tried to open everything so slowly and carefully that the paper would come off in one solid, undamaged piece. I was the Houdini of wrapping paper. And when my dad’s patience was well and truly tried, I’d kick it up a notch and tear through the next one.

This is disgusting to me now, but it would have delighted me as a kid.

It wasn’t December if my family and I were not driving around looking at other people’s Christmas lights.

We started in our own neighborhood, admiring the wild and colorful houses, and the simple monochromatic houses in white, gold, red, blue. In my little kid’s logic, I always assumed the blue houses must be Jewish. Or something. Just a feeling. I wanted to say so, but it seemed rude. I never knew any Jews growing up—at least none that I knew of.

My mom and I especially loved the ones that looked like gingerbread houses with sidewalks lined, every angle of the roof highlighted, doorways and windows lit. Our house should be like that. I studied them carefully as we slowly passed, making mental notes between audible gasps every time a new extreme came into view.

I really appreciated the people who did their trees. Those were the ones who really cared. Random placements among the branches were popular one year. Then our neighbors began to include the trunks, too. A few years later, a tightly wrapped cluster of lights on the trunk with a contrasting color densely filling up the branches was en vogue.

Some people tightly wrapped the largest branches, too. I admired the hard work and patience it must have taken to work among the tangles of smaller branches, which were left bare—even if it did leave their trees looking like enormous, ghoulish claws reaching up from the ground.

Sometimes people did just the trunks, which I thought was weird and lazy. Gradually I began to hate the mongrels who seemed to just throw a string of lights at a tree without a thought, without a care in the world for Christmas. They didn’t understand. Why did they even bother?

My parents had a voyeuristic thing with other people’s houses generally. One of our favorite summer pastimes was driving around new and developing subdivisions to see the new houses. So big. So beige. We dreamed of those houses, everything new and clean and tight, the scent of cut pine timbers and fresh paint and new carpet. Mmm… Benzene…

I have a little of that impulse still, looking in other people’s windows to see how they’ve decorated their living rooms, what they’re using for window treatments, whether they have exposed brick, what colors they’re using, where they’ve mounted their flat-screens, closed or open staircases, thinking of possibilities. And impossibilities.

And in the wintertime, those same South Philly neighbors go bonkers with their front-window Christmas displays. It’s like a competition with Macy’s to have the biggest Pooh Bear-with-Santa-hat, the widest-smiling craft fair snowman, the brightest-glowing baby Jesus and the most solemn Virgin Mary.

It takes me back to those nights my parents drove me and my brothers and sister around to explore unknown neighborhoods, in towns we rarely saw and would never recognize by daylight, my mom on the hunt for new light shows, my dad the coach master whipping and spurring the van ever onward.

Hines Drive, a parkway that snaked through Detroit’s western suburbs, was always a safe bet. We could see up into the back yards of the tony hilltop houses surrounding us, many of which were decked out in GE’s finest. Plus, one stretch of the drive was always done over in a wash of professional, both sides of the parkway giving drivers enough to ogle that traffic slowed to a crawl.

In contrast, my dad every year kept his plans for our own shrubs, hedges and roof relatively basic. He lined the eaves with those old, large, glass outdoor lights on the house. I preferred the simple, bold colors and the heat of those monsters to the small indoor/outdoor lights he used on the shrubbery.

I always dreamt of something a little more extravagant—at the time I would have called it “artistic”—but we never went through with my schemes. As it was, we were already running several extension cords all around the yard and through every doorway and a few windows. My dad went through yards of black electrical tape, wrapping up the joints between strings. I could not fathom how other families did more. (My dad could not imagine how they paid for it.)

For a while we had some of those simple, free-standing, animated things—just a framework to hold an outline of lights to suggest a Santa Claus waving his arm or a reindeer stooping for a nibble at the snow. But they always break down, don’t they?

When we were done, every year, I’d stand on the corner the first night we turned them on and look at our house from the neighbors’ perspective and decide, in the end, I was satisfied. We had done a fine job after all.

I came home to find Jeff pulling ornaments off the tree. He was putting them in the wrong boxes, but I didn’t say anything. It may seem like it does’t matter, but I have a system. They should go back in the boxes they came from. Different colors should be distributed evenly to ensure equally even distribution next year when we hang them on the next tree. But at least they’re all put away. We can deal with it next year.

The tree had been well past it for about a week. Parked in front of the radiator, it was browning on one side and completely dried out on the other side. The lightest touch would send a cascade of needles down onto the carpet and the unwrapped gifts below. It was time to say good bye.

We finished boxing everything and packing it all away—a little less than we started with: two ornaments shattered on the floor and two whole strings of lights were burned out.

I dragged the tree outside, needles raining down all around me, in my hair, down my shirt, down my pants. I dropped it on the sidewalk in front of the house and turned around to see a green and brown trail leading back inside. It looks so much smaller outside of the house. Defeated. Diminished.

Vacuuming up the pine needles is one of my favorite parts. Now until we empty the canister, every time we run the vacuum, the house will smell like pine.

The installation of a Christmas tree is a major disruption. Furniture is displaced. The TV moves clear across the room. The cat’s basket moves to the dining room, of all places. It’s a totally bizarre, almost obscene, thing to drag a living (dying?) tree into one’s house, stand it up in the corner and throw Christmas at it—but it’s a matter of obligation, isn’t it? I can’t imagine ever not doing it.

Then it becomes the new normal, the new familiar, and you don’t ever want it to go away. Standing in the corner by the front window, the tree is solemn and proud. Sometimes the only lights on in the house are the 400 tiny lamps on that tree. Sometimes the quiet, warm glow is the only light you need. You don’t need to see far—just enough light to remember the good times, and maybe to catch a glimpse of good times yet to come.

And then when it’s time for the tree to go, it feels as if it’s torn from the house. It leaves a wound. The furniture is set right, but at first it seems all wrong.

When Christmas ends, it always ends abruptly and completely. The needle lifts from the record and the music stops. The lights and decorations are out of place and time, and the songs don’t make sense anymore. The drug stores still have leftover candy, marked way down. But apart from that, Christmas is all but rolled up and tucked away.

Someone recently compared it to sex. All that preparation, all that fuss and bother, leading up to one moment, and then it’s suddenly over. And you’re wondering: Well, what now? Is that it? And you’re left with a mess to clean up. (And before long, you can’t wait to do it again.)

Santa's givin' you some sugar this year!

There was nothing in particular that linked my mom’s cookies with Christmas, except that we never made them at any other time of the year. You can have eggnog in the summer, but why? Grandma could make her baked beans for Easter, but why? No, these things were for Christmas only.

I always looked forward to those rare and special nights when my mom dragged out her big electric mixer and the glass and metal bowls and wooden spoons. Soon the kitchen countertop would be covered with bags of flour and sugars, syrups, shortening, butter (it was always margarine, but we called it “butter”), eggs, nuts, sprinkles, chocolate, vials of food colorings and flavorings, shredded coconut, candied cherries.

The first time I can remember staying up into the wee hours was during a marathon cookie-baking session. It felt important somehow: taking that long to do something, staying up so long past bedtime. I was standing on tip-toe, rubbing at a cloudy window to get a short, quick peek into adulthood. The world did not stop turning at 9 p.m.

At first there was not much I could do besides crack an occasional egg or mix something or carefully—very carefully—tap out just a couple drops of food coloring. Just a couple things here and there until I got bored and ran off.

As I got older, there were more tasks for me. My favorite was grinding nuts. Mom sat across the table and cracked the shells and dug out the walnuts and pecans and Brazil nuts and hazelnuts, and I dropped them into the grinder (and, when Mom wasn’t looking, into my mouth) and turned the little crank to chop them up into the little glass jar. It was a lot of work, but I think buying the nuts unshelled was much cheaper than buying them prepared.

Still later, I helped my mom involve my younger brothers and sister. They could help cut out star- and tree- and gingerbread man-shaped sugar cookies and drop spoonfuls of preserves into the thumbprint cookies and press Hershey’s kisses into the peanut butter cookies.

We made coconut-cherry bars, Russian tea cakes, frosted nuts, cream cheese cookies that folded up like little fruity burritos. We once tried peppermint-flavored cookies, twisting together two snakes of red and white dough. Chocolate-chip cookies never seemed so dull and unimaginative as when my mom was baking.

There was no reason not to make every variety from her oil-streaked and stained cookbooks and various handwritten notes from friends and relatives. We didn’t do much baking the rest of year, so come Christmastime, it needed to be a grand production. It was as essential as a Christmas tree, as lights on the eaves of the roof, as carols and Midnight Mass and the Nativity. The possibilities were limitless. The counter space was not.

And then, hours and hours later, we would have to pack them all up between layers of waxed paper in the round cookie tins that we seemed to collect more and more of each year. My favorites were the grown-up-looking ones with Victorian fireside and sleigh ride scenes printed around the sides.

For a short time, we used a cookie shooter. It appealed to the little boy in me to have a machine shaped like a gun that shot out little blobs of shaped cookie dough. But it broke or a piece went missing or something, and we stopped using it after a few years.

What stuck, and what still sticks, are the time-consuming hand-made recipes. There’s something satisfying about the labor. The two main differences now are that my mom and I are 600 miles apart, and that I, lazy as I am, buy shelled walnuts and pecans.

It took a black Santa to introduce me to White Guilt.

My parents were savvy enough to tell me that the man in the red suit and the white beard at the mall was not really Santa but one of his helpers. I mean, you can’t expect him to be everywhere, right?

It was just a proxy. A Santa of convenience.

So, I was fine with the charade, playing along with the stand-in pretender to make my parents happy—and hoping desperately that somehow my Christmas list (compiled mainly from the Sears Wishlist catalog, complete with page numbers and item numbers,  and my subscription to Nintendo Power magazine) would find its way to the real Santa’s fulfillment department.

I never much liked sitting in Santa’s lap, but I also don’t remember ever crying like some kids did. It was just strange to sit in a stranger’s lap. To smell his breath. To pose for a stranger taking my picture. (Little did I realize at the time how similar this would be to experiences later in life at the DMV.)

Let the record show, I was never fooled by the dark eyebrows of some of those impostors. They were much younger men pretending to be old men. And they probably weren’t properly jolly, either.

Also, Santa looked different every year. And he looked different from mall to mall. I could tell. I mean, who did they think they were kidding? I was no rube. Of course he was a “helper.”

One visit to the mall with my family to see Santa stands out in particular. I was too old, so I tagged along as an accomplice for the benefit of my younger brother and sister. A proxy parent. In truth, I was happy to keep the little ones believing in magic. It was fun … to lie. (But it was only a white lie, right?)

I’ll never quite understand what my parents were thinking that year. We went to a mall we never went to before, but I had to assume there was some kind of plan. We stood in line like normal. The only odd thing was I wasn’t used to seeing quite so many black people around me, where I was from. But I knew we were just in a different city, and a different mix of people lived there. I was sure it didn’t matter.

Before too long, we standing in front of a man who looked remarkably like Santa Claus. Except he was black.

I was astonished. It had never occurred to me in all my—what?—10 or 11 years that such a thing could happen. A black Santa?

It made me angry. What were they doing?

Then I remembered: Back in the line we had come to a fork, and we were made to choose right or left. Was there a white Santa in the other direction? Was it too late to change our minds? I was desperate. Who could we talk to about this? I began to panic.

I looked up at my parents, hoping for an explanation. Hoping that they were as uncomfortable as I was. They were expressionless.

I looked at the other families. Were they mad that we were here, intruding? Were we busting in on their Santa territory? Again, no one seemed to be having any sort of reaction to any of this.

I guess it made sense, in a way. There were probably some very good reasons for little black boys and girls to want to see a black Santa. So … fine, I thought. Let the little black boys and girls have a black Santa. But what about my poor brother and sister? We needed a white Santa. This was just … weird. Santa was white last year. How do we explain this?

I mean, yes, of course Saint Nicholas was from Turkey. Somehow the Europeans got him and made him into some sort of mythical snowy-bearded reindeer herder. Along the way, he took up residence at the North Pole. Then you throw in a furry red cape and a cadre of elves … and it all begins to break down a little bit.

If there were things to explain about Santa, the least of our worries should be his skin tone.

And there it was: My first experience with White Guilt.

Why is my brain spinning out over this? I thought. It shouldn’t matter, right? Why should white folks have a hold on Santa Claus? I’m. Such. A racist!

Bobby and Lauren sat on his lap and told him their hopes and dreams. And nobody seemed to be bothered. Santa was happy. Bobby and Lauren were happy. Mom and dad were exhausted. I began to calm down.

I was too embarrassed to ask my brother and sister what they thought about it. I was desperate to avoid any “is he real?” conversations. Best to let Mom and Dad deal with that one. So I still don’t know how they made sense of it—or if it even mattered to them.