Gothmas

Growing up in poverty tends to dull the shine on Christmas. Santa doesn’t usually visit your home, or even your block. And if he did manage to swing by, he’d bring things like school supplies, batteries, maybe a winter coat if you were lucky.

Predictably, I grew a distaste for the season. I taught myself early to condemn the materialism and the riot of forced cheer. I sneered at the shimmering joy and glowered at window displays. My candy-cane scented soap box was both high and very judgy.

What I didn’t know then was that my Grinchiness was actually grief over what Christmas was in my home. There was no story of the Christ child, no advent candles, no warmth or community. Just an emptiness I didn’t understand and a quiet shame for even feeling disappointed, because so many people had so much less.

So I ignored it. I volunteered to work on Christmas. I took myself to the movies. One year I donated blood on Christmas morning. I did anything I could to distract myself, and it worked for years, right up until I had children of my own.

Eventually the Christmas Eve when everything went sideways arrived. Amid all the chaos I realized I had completely forgotten to make cookies for Santa. In an attempt to mop up my children’s tears at their impending shift to the naughty list, I improvised. We didn’t have cookies, but we did have leftovers. So I popped them up on the counter with a loaf of bread, a criminal amount of horseradish, and told them to make Santa a Roast Beast sandwich. I was refereeing a skirmish about triangle slices versus rectangles (triangles, obviously) when the next disaster struck. We were out of milk. In an internal panic I rummaged through the fridge and grabbed the only thing I could find. A long forgotten bottle of Guinness. Perfect.

Up on the mantle this weird offering went, along with a few sticks of gum from my purse for the reindeer, because at that point why not.

Santa thoroughly enjoyed his savory midnight snack, so much so that he left a crumb covered note about how much he was looking forward to it again the next year.

Over time, Christmas has turned into Gothmas in my home. I proudly display a black Christmas tree, stuffed with skull and bat garlands, glittery locust ornaments (always room for an Old Testament plague), and a tiny Nakatomi Plaza with an even tinier Alan Rickman falling from it. The stockings are badly sewn from an old black tablecloth and shaped more like tubes because sewing a curve is apparently beyond me. The advent candles are black and crawling with glitter-covered spiders. Our gingerbread houses are built for the express purpose of smashing them to bits after Christmas dinner, hoping Santa left one last burst of candy-filled chaos.

Gothmas has become so much more than an aesthetic in my home. It’s the reminder I return to every year that we don’t have to keep doing things the way they’ve always been done. Almost anything can be approached differently, softened, rebuilt, or remade into something that finally fits. And the key to changing anything, or everything, is disarmingly small.

We start where we are. We use what we have. And somehow, piece by piece, the whole thing slowly becomes something worth keeping.