Before I get to my essay that is (somewhat) about shopping, can I suggest another way to spend your hard-earned money? Perhaps you or (someone you love? as a gift?) want to take my winter workshop? They’re coming up sOoN!
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All last weekend was spent glued to my computer with about ten trillion tabs open. The sales started early this year and got progressively more unhinged—when Madewell announced Sunday that everything was 60% off I felt like replying to their email and asking them if everything was OK.
I can see the effectiveness of the tactic, actually—all the thirsty, hand-wringing desperation of the brands made my own shopping seem Puritanical in comparison. I was just a humble mom, saving money, hoping to provide a happy holiday for her family. It just made sense to get everything all at once in a state of intense hyper-fixation, while saving 30%! 30% is practically 50%! So what if my carpal tunnel was flaring up? IT WAS STUPID NOT TO! THERE IS SO MUCH STUFF!
After working my way down my shopping list, I found myself on a site I hadn’t been to before. Even though I was technically done shopping, there were a few odds and ends and extra things I couldn’t justify buying, like almost every single thing on Ingebretsens’s Nordic Marketplace. The tabs piled up again as I clicked through page after page of Swedish paraphernalia, yearning for the type of Christmas it represented.
I’d never been to their website, but I had been to the brick and mortar a few times, as a kid. It’s a charming shop in Minneapolis, where my mother is from and where some of her family still lives. We already have a lot of the things they sell: this exact straw tree-topper that has seen better days; this Christmas tree candle holder that always seems a bit too wobbly to be strictly fire safe. I have my mother’s old tree skirt, similar to this one, but with illustrations of mischievous little trolls on it.
As a kid I wasn’t interested in the Scandinavian stuff, though I could see how important it was to my mom to keep some of the symbols, if not traditions, alive in our house each Christmas. No: I was most interested in seeing if someone would buy me a troll doll. You might be thinking of the common Russ trolls, available at any 90’s era Spencer’s Gifts, but I’m talking about the original ones, Dam trolls, from Denmark. I still feel a little clench in my heart when I see these! I want them! I want to tickle my chin with their hair! I want them to smile at me, unblinking, as I lay sleeping!
It’s not surprising that I’m feeling both (1) interested in dissolving into a hole of consumerism and (2) extra sentimental these days. My mom has been sick, not herself. I wish for that to be different; I wish for so many of those candlelit moments that flicker in my memory to feel less far away.
What is surprising is that mixed up in all of these feelings is the unexpected and overpowering desire to provide my child with the exact same Christmases I had as a child. It’s not so much that I want to buy her those troll dolls, although I did think about it, or that Swedish candleholder, which I will not be setting up for obvious fire safety reasons, or for her to taste the krumkake and lefse my mother always used to make, neither of which I really know how to prepare by myself.
It’s more than that. It’s complicated. It’s the distinct memory of a Christmas when I was maybe five or six, when my mother got me a dress-up set, which I think was actually a large cardboard box, full of 80’s prom dresses and satin pumps from the Salvation Army. My stomach still does flips when I think of the yellow high heels—silken and architectural and just big enough that I could skulk around in them if I was very careful. I’d drag the box down the sidewalk to the neighbor’s house where me and the other kids would play dress up for hours in their front yard, only vaguely supervised by parents who were busy inside, only aware of our existence if somebody screamed.
What is Rosalind getting this year? A dress up box that I ordered from the Container Store. It has a unicorn illustration on it. A witch’s hat and Elsa gloves and a Rapunzel dress, all from Amazon. A set of hideous plastic shoes from Target. Stuff that was on sale. Other stuff, stuff she’s asked for. More stuff than she needs.
We have more money than my parents did when I was little, and I think we are a little more reckless with it. Something I hope will be different about Rosalind’s childhood: I don’t want her to grow up feeling tight and pinched as I often did, or that wanting things is wrong. I don’t want her to breathe in the second-hand worry about money from parents who perhaps didn’t realize they were emitting it. And yet. How would Christmas ever be as magical without all the storytelling my mother did, explaining how she found the particular items she’d hunted down, how special each gift was because she’d discovered it when she did? How would Christmas ever be the same without that bittersweet feeling of wanting just a little bit more?
Back on the Ingebretsen’s website I saw something else I desperately wanted… a birch and pinewood nativity set. How darling it was, with its hand-carved figurines. I thought, then, of my own parents, working to create a new kind of Christmas for me, after both of them had rejected their own respective Christianities. Growing up we had a weird old creche with snapped off eaves and fake hay that dissolved in your hand if you held it for too long. I loved it, like I loved anything Christmas related, whether or not the story of Jesus was integral to my inner world.
I think of my parents, trying to raise me in what must have felt like a brand new world, so different from their own childhoods in the 1960’s. My dad didn’t want me to have so many Irish siblings nobody listened when you screamed; my mother didn’t want the repressed Lutheran tension of her own childhood. So they started anew, in Albany, as best they could.
Now I think of us, all of us, raising our kids in a new world too. So many worries that our own parents didn’t have: cell phones, for example, and guns, and climate change. Rosalind lives in the same city I grew up in, less than a mile from my childhood home. But she has no sidewalk to play dress up on (since our street oddly has none), and she’s growing up in a culture where letting kids play unattended is seen as reckless or neglectful. Even her garden will look different than my own did as a kid—Upstate NY’s plant hardiness zone has changed with the warming of the planet. It’s so much stuff.
Having a child feels like this dual process, outer and inner. As Rosalind grows, I grow too, figuring out what kind of mother I want to be, or maybe just can be. Right now I am a mother who buys store-bought crap for Christmas. Right now I am also a mother who listens when her child asks for something, and tries to honor those wishes.
These days I am so wildly aware of my own little self, alive within me and asking for things too. I know that inner child and my actual, real, outer child are not the same at all, but sometimes it feels like there is another plane on which they are completely connected. I wish they could meet, and Rosalind could somehow know that specific flavor of love my own inner child once felt; I wish Rosalind could know and have known my own family the same way that I did. Maybe it’s as simple as that. Does anyone else feel this way? It’s so much stuff.
I closed my laptop as Jimmy came in the room.
“No peeking at Christmastime!” I said. Jimmy was holding what looked like a large black rag.
“I have something for Rosalind’s dress up box,” he said, holding it out. “I cut this hood of my sweatshirt. I don’t know, maybe she can use it for something.”
“Great,” I said. “She can use it to play executioner.”
So we are still weird, and the presents will still be special. So there is still December, and for now anyway, there is still glittering frost atop the dead brown leaves, and for now they still rustle in the wind the same way they always did.
Thank you for reading Mom Blog. Like this if you LOVE CHRISTMAS or *ME* or just if you liked it in general.
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