“At this time of the rolling year, I suffer most.”
~Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
My daughter is crying. “He’s fat and red!” Jess says. We’re tooling down the road in my sports car, four-on-the-floor. “Who is, sweetie?” I ask. “Him!” she sobs. “He’ll come into our house late at night. You’ll have to fight him!”
Jess is four years old. She often watches as I teach adult self-defense classes. She’s not afraid of a home invasion as much as the thought that I might end up in jail: “Santa can’t come in!”
I pull over and switch off our holiday music. “Jess, baby, Santa isn’t real,” I say, amazed that I’m spilling the beans. She stops, tears glistening in our car’s dome light. “He’s just on TV and stories. We all go along because it’s nice.” And just like that, she grins. “Okay, Dad! Let’s go!”
Another single-parent tragedy averted. For 1992, at least.
The next Christmas season, Jess is five and fully prepared to believe in Santa again. Fears of an overweight intruder dressed in imposing garb are replaced by, well, sugar-plums dancing in her head. Jess’s mother berates me for telling her the truth too soon. My friends are disgusted.
Except one.
Bob is around my age. He and his wife have no children. Instead they work as Santa and his elf for a local department store. Bob is far from slender, but has a pleasing bass voice and a red suit that is the envy of our local community theater.
“So she was scared last year, it happens,” he says over lunch. “You did the right thing. I’ve told a few crying kids the truth, too.” Then Bob has an idea. We plot over steaming mugs of hot cocoa.
That weekend, Jess and I drive to Bob’s house. He’s in full Kris Kringle regalia when we arrive. “I’m not really Santa,” he tells my wide-eyed five-year-old. “Just a helper.” He points to an antenna towering over his roof. “Kids tell me what they want, see, or hand me letters, and I hang them waaay up there for the reindeer to get.”
Almost on cue, an elf opens the front door: “Who wants chocolate chips?” We sweep inside and sit in their living room near a small alcove. Bob’s a ham radio enthusiast (the real grown-up reason for that antenna). Half-way through milk and cookies, his receiver buzzes.
“Santa One to Santa 382, come in.”
These memories could make holidays without my daughter miserable. But the opposite is true.
Bob answers: “382 here. I read you.” Soon Santa One is telling us Prancer just arrived with the latest letters that Bob and his wife had left out for collection. “Mrs. Claus is going through them now,” he explains. Jess is in awe. Then she nearly cries—in a good way this year—when Santa 382 asks if she wants to talk with the real Santa. Bob had arranged the entire show with a friend in Ohio.
But Jess’s Christmas isn’t over yet.
On Christmas Eve, a deputy sheriff rolls up as Jess arrives home from school with her mother. “Pardon me, ma’am,” he intones from his squad car. “I have some news for the little one.” He explains that they’re tracking Santa at the station; his sleigh is over Asia and will be in South Carolina later tonight. “Just in time for little girls to get their presents,” he chuckles, and pulls away.
Jess spends Christmas with her mother and grandmother that year. Around midnight, with Mom’s permission, I sneak over, spread feed corn on the back porch, and clump mud in the shape of hooves—final proof that restores Santa to one little girl’s childhood.
Jess was twenty-six when she died in 2015. As an adult, she told me that she understood why I revealed the truth when she was four; and why I went to so much trouble the next year. “I knew it was make-believe,” she said. “But I believed in Dad.”
These memories could make holidays without my daughter miserable. But the opposite is true. I dust off each as I would a treasured gift. Remembrance makes Christmas all the more precious.
For that I thank God and A Christmas Carol.
Travel with me now, as Scrooge followed a helpful spirit into the past, to another holiday season. It is 1:06 p.m. on November 29, 1988. After forty-two grueling hours of labor, Jess’s mother is making a final push, surrounded by hospital staff. The doctor waves me over. Dressed, gloved, and masked, I hold out shaking hands and bring my daughter into this world.
Her mother is too exhausted to support baby Jess, so after the medical checks, I hold our little girl in my arms. I hadn’t realized until this moment that gratitude and praise can be the same thing. “Thank you, Lord, look at her,” I whisper. “Look at her, oh dear God, dear God.”
We own exactly one VHS tape: A Christmas Carol (1984) starring George C. Scott. Jess’s mother and I watch it over and over, usually alone, as we swap late night duty with our infant girl. To this day, her mother tells me she’ll never watch that show again. Not me.
Since Jess died, I view A Christmas Carol each year. It is a small tradition that makes the holiday season easier to bear. In this way, memory is a good thing. But it can also be very, very bad.
We may choose realistic, helpful remembrance that enriches our holidays. In this, memory is our ally.
Memory is at times a capricious, capering, unwelcome guest. Augustine may have been onto something when he lamented: “Great is the power of memory, a fearful thing, O my God, a deep and boundless manifoldness.” It is all too easy to focus on our many failures. I have a litany of paternal flaws that I can recall in a heartbeat, but this is less than fruitless, it is harmful.
Brooding over mistakes we cannot change offers no solutions and no hope. Rather, the relationship with our dead can shift to loving in separation, as philosopher Thomas Attig puts it. We may choose realistic, helpful remembrance that enriches our holidays. In this, memory is our ally.
Bereaved parents are able to reconstruct the smallest details of their children’s lives with uncanny clarity, according to Ruth Malkinson and Liora Bar-Tur with Tel Aviv University. This phenomenon arises for the rest of their lives. Two other researchers, University of New South Wales psychologists Fiona Maccallum and Richard Bryant, suggest that personal remembrance provides a unifying framework in grief that helps us to understand ourselves and our attachments while fostering positive coping responses.
“I am inclined to believe that God’s chief purpose in giving us memory is to enable us to go back in time,” says author and theologian Frederick Buechner. “So that if we didn’t play those roles right the first time round, we can still have another go at it now.” This is not a matter of self-deceit, he adds, but a chance to remove memory’s power over us, and to make peace with grief.
Buechner was ten years old when his father ended his own life in 1936. For decades, when asked how his father died, Buechner avoided what he considered the shameful truth, murmuring instead something about heart trouble. This in turn led to repressed emotions, anxiety, and guilt. Only in middle age, he confesses, was the death real enough for him to finally weep. He learned at last that when Jesus said, “Do this in remembrance of me,” he was not suggesting a trip down misery lane. Rather, Buechner writes, memory allows us “to summon the dead past back into the living present.”
We sustain our healthy emotional and spiritual bonds through memory and ritual.
When I watch A Christmas Carol, past and present combine in a moment both immediate and timeless. This may be the closest we come in our time-enslaved world to understanding eternity. “Such wonderful knowledge is beyond me, far too high for me to reach,” writes bereaved father King David. “Where can I go to escape your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?” Researchers call this expected aspect of mourning unified time. There is no connection between the number of years that pass after a death, explains Robert Weiss (University of Massachusetts) and the intensity of our memories, the acuteness of our grief, or the depth of our love.
This may be one reason sorrow extracts such a heavy toll. Is it worth it? Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel thinks so: “Suffering contains the secret of creation and its dimension of eternity. At the end of suffering, of mystery, God awaits us.” The struggle to continue a relationship with our dead in their physical absence is a vital part of grief, according to Barbara Thompson (Sage Colleges) and Robert Neimeyer (University of Memphis). We sustain our healthy emotional and spiritual bonds through memory and ritual.
A Christmas Carol is just such a ritual for me. Watching the film provides a time and place to revisit that first holiday season with Jess. It gives meaning to a love that is intertwined for eternity, to borrow a phrase from Friedrich Rückert, who lost his two youngest children over their Christmas holiday in 1833-34:
What departs does not pass
away: it remains in essence,
if not in the senses; intertwined
for eternity
Scrooge’s memories in A Christmas Carol blend past and present into one possible future. But redemption is not beyond reach. In an act of penance and compassion, Jacob Marley appears to warn his old partner before all is lost. Suddenly we realize that relationships only seem to end with death. To Scrooge’s great surprise, and ours, love remains in memory and hope, a fact Charles Dickens knew from painful experience.
On March 31, 1851, Dickens’s father John passed away at age sixty-five. “I remained there until he died—O so quietly,” he mourns. “I hardly know what to do.” He wraps his mother in his arms as they weep together. Two weeks later, on April 14, the popular author is speaking at a dinner when his nine-month-old daughter Dora suffers a severe convulsion and dies almost immediately. Remorse and sorrow dominate his life throughout that summer and on into the holiday season.
“You shall hold your cherished places in our Christmas hearts, and by our Christmas fires; and in the season of immortal hope, and on the birthday of immortal mercy, we will shut out Nothing!” Dickens writes that December. “Be those remembrances admitted with tender encouragement! They are of the time and all its comforting and peaceful reassurances; and of the history that re-united even upon earth the living and the dead.”
I too shut out nothing. Memories are painful, but I would not trade a single one, the good and the bad. I too am reunited with my dead through remembrance, tears, and prayer. As I cue up A Christmas Carol again, I fancy my daughter is with me, flopped on the sofa, free of tears, except the good kind. I trust in the promise of Christmas. We will be together again. Santa may not be real, but Jess is.
“I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.
I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons they teach.”
~Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
