I unwrap my grandmother’s tinkling candle carousel without incident. We’ve used the same bubble wrap for years, and I’m not sure what good the airless plastic does to protect it, but anyway, the metal is tarnishing.
Next, I arrange the poinsettias my mother sent over, enough to cover the whole hearth as she did when I was a child. We actually use the fireplace in our home, and I’m not sure how the Christmas flower holds up when exposed to dry heat and smoke, but this doesn’t bother me either.
It is the manger, the one my aunt presented to me the first Christmas Joe and I were married, breathlessly, as if it were an heirloom—no, as if it were a sacred relic—the manger is what gets me. I let Ivy put baby Jesus in the manger, her chubby kindergarten fingers pinching the swaddled Savior and gingerly laying him into the shredded synthetic hay. She unknowingly calls out my apathy. I do not, cannot, care about Christmas this season. I only purchased Christmas cookies on impulse at the grocery checkout. I’ve only hummed along to “All I Want for Christmas” once, and only because Love Actually was playing in the background at my sister’s.
Ivy narrates her actions. “The mama sits by the cradle—what’s that funny word?”
“Manger.”
“That mama—”
“Mary,” I correct, trying to be gentle. This is the first Christmas Ivy has cared, has understood. And I am confronting my own weakening faith at the same time I must decide our family’s oral traditions.
Once upon a time, a virgin carried a baby riding a donkey across the desert, traversing actual hell to foretell what was yet coming. That Holy Night wasn’t a silent night, but a raucous one—cows and pigs screaming, shitting; laboring Mother screaming, shitting. It was only in those shrieks and pain and filth that a glorious miracle was birthed into the world.
Plastic Jesus is so peaceful on his plastic hay bed. Porcelain Ivy is
