I just downloaded A Very Special Christmas because it reminds me of baking cookies with my mother as a little kid. For a caustic, chain-smoking recovering alcoholic who considered her unwillingness to cook a form of feminism, Mom could get pretty domestic around the holidays. Halloween too — for a few years she'd even sew a costume for me and a matching one for my Cabbage Patch Kid.


When I was growing up I spent every Christmas eve at my great aunt Eileen's house in Philadelphia, helping her decorate her giant tree. She had those great giant multicolored bulb lights that they only make in LED now because they were probably enviro-murder, and I had a favorite ornament that I have in my apartment now because I asked for it after she died. It's a beaded velvet faux-Victorian monstrosity of a thing, so heavy it strained even the thickest branches up top. Deep purple in color and covered in pearl pushpins, it's basically Prince in Christmas ornament form, and in my few years on earth I had never seen anything more glamorous in my life.


I'm not sure when I found out that my Mom had made it for Aunt Eileen --from a kit--when she was in her twenties. This added a whole new layer of meaning to My Purple Precious. I'd heard enough from Mom speaking at AA meetings, half listening as I colored in the back of the church multipurpose room, to know that her life before she got married and had me was very different (how strange was it when you first realized your parents had an entire life before you came along?). She'd had a convertible, and an Airedale named Martini that rode shotgun, and her "rock bottom" was when her head nursing teacher at Bellevue found her wandering in traffic blackout drunk. It all sounded as dangerous and as unpredictable as her moods still were. Maybe that's why it blew my tiny mind picturing it: My mother driving to a craft store and buying the materials for the ornament, and then sitting down to push the pearl pins in one at a time. I imagined her furrowed brow, her cursing as she glued on the gold curlicue trim. I have a hard time reconciling the hurricane person with the calm, crafts-inclined person. Both lived in there obviously, just like earlier versions lived inside the woman that raised me.

I don't have a Christmas tree this year but the ornament is hung up in my window. It hangs in tribute as I bake today, listening to our old favorites.

Eurythmics - Winter Wonderland