Rethinking Christmas at 70
Today I’m thinking about the future while putting away Christmas decorations collected by women in my family for more than a century. It’s the last time. It’s bittersweet, but has to be done. I need to stop trying to create a holiday extravaganza for children, in my mother’s style. There are no more children. I’ve been trying for years to turn Christmas into a special occasion for everyone, an experience that builds memories and bonds families. Today I see that’s a big fail and I’m burning down that old desire.
The days leading up to Christmas were fun-filled, even magical. But then went downhill fast. I rolled into a place I wasn’t expecting — the realization that things need to change. It’s not a casual notion; it hit like a hot anvil, an irrefutably crushing imperative.
The way I’ve done Christmas for decades is a lot of work, takes creative energy and money, and it’s not working. Nothing good happens anymore. In recent years the effort turns into mocking abuse and disappointment. That isn’t healthy for me or anyone else.
This is the third year my older adult son has come to my house for Christmas and treated all of us disrespectfully, a behavior sometimes euphemistically called “copping an attitude.” In this case the raging, fueled by alcohol, is beyond that excuse. Being around my adult sons during family gatherings now requires an acrobatic eggshell walk — an emotional cirque du soleil for the holiday.
It’s not just Christmas. It wasn’t any better on July 4th. I’m not interested in exploring the reasons why, or clinging to New Age psychobabble about escaping toxic situations, setting appropriate boundaries, ending co-dependence, or buying into theories about wounded children nursing their crippled psyches into middle age. I don’t care. I’m just done. I’ve heard Budapest is lovely in December.
I have a lot to think about as we prepare to enter a new decade. I turned 70 in November. I imagined that milestone would be cause for celebration and fantasized my family would have a big party to honor me, everyone would come together and my day would be filled with hugs and kisses, candlelight and beautiful food while surrounded by loved ones. I don’t remember anything special happening on my birthday.
I did attend a 70th-year celebration with high school friends in Golden Gate Park at the end of summer, a picnic where everyone was 70 and we grooved to Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead and Jimi and Janis. Very cool Summer of Love anniversary party for San Francisco’s George Washington High School Class of 1967.
In November people on Facebook posted kind greetings for my birthday. I got a few phone calls. But here’s reality: My father died at age 36. My mother died at 59. My younger brother was gone at 63, my husband at 62. I have no idea what one does at 70.
I was in Redding at a forestry conference on my actual birthday, walking around in the woods, observing a controlled burn to clear brush and make the surrounding community safer, enjoying lunch in a rest area beside a beautiful creek. The fall colors were spectacular.
I’m still here and have much I want to do. The list is too long to go into now and my priorities change daily. But I’m thinking hard about it, considering the average life expectancy of American women in 2017 was 78.6 years and the average is quickly declining. Just Google it to confirm this truth. And, during the past decade I’ve had skin and breast cancer, acute gastritis on the verge of a stomach ulcer, a broken right arm and a heart attack.
To survive the coming decade, I’m going to need to make significant changes to take better care of myself. My dear mother didn’t live long enough to figure out what a meaningful old age was about, nor did my wonderful grandmother, who went blind and demented a few years after retiring at age 72. She died in a rest home at 92, lost in her own world for 20 years. It was heartbreaking to see her like that. I don’t have too many good models for how one creates a fulfilling life in old age, but I’m going to try and figure it out.
In the meantime, I have no idea what the next decade will bring or whether I will survive it. I know for sure I won’t survive if I don’t make changes and take better care of myself. My bottom line for 2020 is a simple focus on diet and exercise, the rest is fuel for contemplation that can be jettisoned in the event of a hard landing.
I wish you a happy and prosperous New Year/New Decade. I pray you’ll know where you’re going when you get there. Fingers crossed, flaps up!
Kate Campbell is a Sacramento-based fiction writer, poet and environmental reporter.