The Weight of Holiday Cards

Holiday cards are a sensitive subject for me. A subject that turns dreadful at the arrival of the holiday season. It’s a nagging dread I need to resolve. It may naturally resolve in the coming years, as Time the Thief hoards the minutes of my days until years have accumulated in the Time Vault. Time leaves, but the experience of time exists eternally. Years morph into memories, and as memories often do, they vanish. I’ve learned certain memories in the Vault do not age, they do not vanish. They stay perfectly alive in their present form, regardless of how many years ago Time took them. A simple photograph can recall a memory that was locked away and forgotten years ago. A forgotten photograph when it is reflected upon frees the memory from the Vault. As the memory floods our being, we are transferred to a past present moment. A moment frozen in time. The closest we will ever come to reliving the past. Many moments of my life are locked in the Vault never to be recovered. Other moments I can take out, admire, and refile such as family memories, all thanks to the Holiday Card.

It’s our family’s second holiday season without June. Despite Time sweeping last year’s holiday into the Vault, tidying up scraps of emotion the holidays recklessly left behind, there is the inevitable recurrence of this annual, and at times, unbearable, holiday occasion. I am forced to reconcile with it again. There should be a law that when a child dies the family skips all foreseeable holidays for a minimum of five years. The public would have to acknowledge this law, and the families would be allowed to live peacefully in a holiday-free vacuum.

“What’s wrong?” a friend asked me in the supermarket a few days after Thanksgiving. It’s Thanksgiving week and June is dead. Has everyone forgotten? The emotional hangover of living the juxtaposition of another Thanksgiving without June while still counting my blessings had a firm grip on me. It wasn’t planned. It just happened. I am heartbroken and I am grateful. The two exist separately. Not all is bleak, but the facts are the facts. June is gone. You cannot change cold, hard facts. It takes time to shake the holidays even after they’re gone.

Holiday cards are the initiation phase in the drawn out month of December. They are also part of the consolidation phase as they trickle in well after the New Year. Can I liken the phases of the holidays to June’s treatment? Everything comes in phases and before I climb the mountain I need to know how many miles up and and how many miles down. Most people like to know what mile they are on as they climb. I am no different. Often, I apply a phase to a dreadful situation because it’s applicable to everything in life and because phases end. Putting life’s situations into the box of “it’s a phase” helps me see the end. Seeing the end helps me breath in the middle.

I’ll complete this year’s holiday phase just as I did last years. Until recently, I hadn’t thought of what the meaning was when June’s oncologist said, “Congratulations, you’ve reached the consolidation phase.” I knew it meant we were on the last mile of a one-thousand-mile hike, but I had failed to notice what it actually meant. I assumed it meant the last, or the end phase, why else would he have been congratulating us? Consolidation has several different meanings however, but they all point to strengthening. Bringing everything together. Consolidation is a collection of pieces, which in June’s case were the various treatment options she had completed, that together would make June stronger by placing her in a position further away from the cancer. June wasn’t stronger, however, and the consolidation phase of her treatment wasn’t affirming of anything but her death. The end. The definition of the consolidation phase will always signify the end for me, as it did in the beginning. I don’t care what the dictionary says. We didn’t finish the consolidation phase, but still I apply phases to everything. If nothing else, it’s a useful tool that helps me to survive the present moment. It keeps me a little closer to June and at the most basic of levels, it helps to reach the end of my current affliction: holidays and the cards they bring. I imagine the consolidation phase of holiday cards begins around the New Year. The beginning of the end.

I walk to the mailbox once a day as dread infiltrates my lungs from the thinnest wintery Maine air. The air houses dread and I am an innocent bystander passively breathing it in. It tasteless, and weighs my body down. ‘Tis holiday card season.

The first holiday card of 2023 arrived the day after Thanksgiving. An eager sender, someone I used to be, mailed it just in time. Years ago, I remember the wheels turning leading up to the first week of November. I’d begin perusing photos on my phone of my children which mostly consisted of them sitting in one another’s laps reading books or eat messy snacks on the couch. I’d pick the perfect candid and upload it onto Minted. One year, I used a photo of June and my oldest daughter sitting on the couch just after they had finished yogurt. Thanks to technology, I edited the yogurt off of June’s chin and transformed it into a glowing holiday card. I added photo bloopers to the backside of the card which I noticed is usually left blank (so much space! Nothing to say?) which included a couple of photos of Bella, our black lab-boxer mix, who had inserted her muzzle front and center into the photo. I sent that card in 2021. It was the last holiday card I've ever sent. It’s the last holiday card both June and Bella ever graced.

Now what?

June is gone. A holiday card could never capture the essence of our family. Bella is gone too. 

I’ve belabored creating a card this year. Everytime I broach the subject, I am drained of creativity and left with a blank page. Except, I do have a recurring odd image that comes to mind. It’s the number thirteen. June died on March thirteenth. I recently came to learn the meaning behind the number thirteen. It would be enough to suffice that a holiday card with a giant number thirteen on it and some gothic Angel wings in the background would speak to the way in which my heart was torn from my chest and how it continually aches with each passing holiday. There is questionable blood dripping from the bottom of the one and the three. The card screams more of a Friday the thirteenth essence than of a holiday cheer essence.

I wonder if the receiver might understand the message? Left to interpretation, based on the coloring, font, and eeriness I believe the card would accurately convey the idea. But why thirteen, you might ask.

“What’s your obsession with a holiday card?” My husband wants to know.

I don’t know where to begin, so I don’t bother. A holiday card which my mother referred to as our “Christmas Card” was a yearly staple. It was the time of year we put on our red petty coats with black velvet lapels and posed in front of my mother’s horse. There were matching hats with red bows. Innocent smiles. Maybe the smiles were fake, but I mostly remembering them to be genuine. The kind of smile you give when you’re only asked to smile in front of a camera a handful of times in a year. Something my living children will never understand. Back when people exclaimed, “Oh! Let me get my camera!” and disappeared in the house. Christmas cards at our house were planned and the camera already in-hand. There was no shopping around in past photos you could edit on your phone. Christmas card photos were staged. Outfits laid out the night before. They were a family event. The memories of my childhood holiday cards are locked in the Vault. A snapshot in time. They can be pulled out whenever because they exist in print.

The holiday card marks the passing of time. Growing older, getting bigger. Adding another year to our lives. When I return to the memory of the Christmas card I can recount almost every one, and what my sister and I wore in the photographs. I can recount what we were doing. Did we go sledding that day? We sure did. I wore my aquamarine onesie snow suit with neon pink stripes on the shoulder. Our cheeks were candy apple red and we were standing in snow up to our knees after a storm. The newest addition to my growing body, my big, round, adult teeth, sparkled white. The holiday card marks the passing of time and life’s subtleties that otherwise we might forget.

Now, I cry at the thought of making or receiving a holiday card.

Fuck the holiday card. 

What’s it worth to me anymore?

What’s the holiday card worth to anyone?

I know I sound all bah-humbug-ey, but this is where I am living right now. 

The last holiday card I made, where I edited the yogurt off of June’s chin, I had created just two short weeks after the oncologist delivered the news that June had “No Evidence of Disease” (NED). The premade card I found online had the caption, “There is so much to be grateful for,” which fully encapsulated our year. In the photo I had chosen, our oldest adoringly nuzzled her face into June’s chest. June, with her big white toothy grin, smiled at the camera. Our two girls. My husband and I adored our girls, and collectively, we as June’s family, adored June. This card says that. I am staring at the card now which I have since framed. I can see that I forgot to edit a tiny bit of yogurt off of June’s top lip. This brings me so much happiness.

I sent our last holiday card of 2021 to the oncologists office, which I hoped would communicate to them how grateful we were for everything they had done for our family. Perhaps I was in denial, but it also reflected how great we were in the face of pediatric cancer. June was still very sick from chemotherapy, but the disease was gone. I sent the card to friends. It communicated that we were okay despite being handed life’s worst circumstances. We had so much hope.

The holiday card is layered. Last year, the first year our family celebrated Christmas since the passing of June only eight and a half months after she died, we spent a month in South America. We stayed with my Chilean host family. We celebrated a Chilean Christmas. Chilean Christmas is not much different from a Christmas in the United States. The overt difference is the weather and the palm tree outside your window when you wake up on Christmas morning. There’s no snow. It’s not grey and cold. It’s pure blue sky, dry heat, and a warm breeze. It’s glorious. In Chile, I escaped the holiday. We escaped. We escaped the cold of winter. We escaped facing relatives who were as heartbroken as we were that June had died. We escaped the wrath that Christmas had become after losing June. The moment we stepped foot onto the plane to Chile, now physically a family of four, we left our holiday traditions behind.

When we returned home in late January, I realized there was one holiday tradition we did not escape. There they were. A pile of holiday cards stacked neatly on the counter. Happy people, sending wishes, with healthy kids splayed across glittery green and red foiled paper. In the depths of my grief, I was insulted. The ugliest part of grief, victimhood, reemerged. How dare happy people send me photos of their happy, healthy children, placing their lives on display for me to see! How dare they not know! I ripped open a few cards, gleaning what I most feared which was happy, healthy children indeed. Some happy, healthy children on hot vacations like the one we had just returned from. Parents holding cocktails on a beach while their happy, healthy children made sandcastles and floated in clear blue, warm waters. The waters looked happy. Everyone smiling. Everyone together. Full families represented. No dead children to mourn. Then, it occurred to me that perhaps they’d sent a quick note on the back briefly acknowledging life without June on this first Christmas. I’d flip over the card to the back blank side to see nothing. No note, no sentence, no line, no word. Nothing. No acknowledgement of what we continued to endure. That despite the boastful happy, healthy holiday greeting, there was no sliver of humanity tucked into the envelope. “Fuck this,” I said after opening a couple, throwing the pile in the trash. 

In the absence of a card, I deliberately mark the passage of time, and I am reminded that my life is not whole as it once was. How to explain this to my husband? What is the meaning of all of this? The holiday cards holds the meaning of which I assign, however much of the meaning is inherent. A beautiful memento amid a neglectful childhood. One of the only mementos I carried into my family’s life when I became a mother. A tradition I cherished before June became sick.

How to let go of the holiday card. How to cut the strings of emotion tied to the holiday card. These things I wonder.

The Friday after Thanksgiving when the postwoman delivered the mail my daughter watched her leave it outside our garage door.

“Mommy! A package!” We walked down to retrieve it. There on top, was the first holiday card.

“What’s this mommy?” she asked holding up the envelope.

“It’s our first holiday card, do you want to open it?” I tried to sound excited.

“What’s a HOLIDAY card?” she asked.

In that moment, I realized it had been two years since she last opened one. She was three at that time. She’s now five. I reminded her of how we used to collect and hang them on twine using miniature clothespins behind the Christmas tree.

“We collected so many! You used to love opening them,” I told her.

“Really! I don’t want to open that one,” she said with a frown as she ran into the house with the package. 

I stood in the dimly lit garage staring at the card. “What the hell,” I thought to myself as I tore it open.

I’m certain I won’t be hanging holiday cards in my house this year, but I haven’t thrown it in the trash yet either. It was glittery, green, and red, boasting a Christmas tree. I think of the last card I sent. Of the others I sent before that one. I know I didn’t send a card to be boastful or thoughtless. I sent a card to spread love and positive energy which naturally begins and ends with my children. I understand now that the cards sent to our family after June died, the first Christmas without her, were not meant to be hurtful. I don’t take them personally anymore. I am no longer a victim.

As for the cards coming this year, the first is still sitting on the trashcan in the garage next to a dirty coffee cup. I know if I decide to bring it in the house it could leave a glittery trail behind it which might be nice. The vulnerable part of me is afraid, but the courageous part of me says it’s all going to be okay.

The number thirteen holds many powerful truths. The number thirteen signifies in numerology the end of a cycle and the beginning of something new. Symbolic of life and death. Signifying the end of one era and the beginning of another. It also signifies growth during a period of difficulty. June died on the thirteen. I can see things more clearly now. I’ve uncovered so much meaning since last holiday season. It occurs to me that one day, I might be more than okay.

Maybe I’ll send out that bloody number thirteen this year.

Maybe it will be dripping with glitter glue.

No bloopers. Nothing more to say.

Definitely left up to the reader to interpret.

But seriously, my quandary of holiday card or no holiday card is that I want our holiday memories to be secured in the Vault in print. I’m just not ready yet. The day I am ready is the day I’ll know how to also incorporate June. The day I can represent the oneness of our family despite June being gone. Something I constantly work on every day, regardless of whether it’s holiday season or not. How to intertwine our lives with June’s death.

One day, I’ll have it all figured out. I’ll be able to see through the pain. I have faith that day will come. The day I’ll dip into the Vault and think, “My God, what a beautiful life it was.”