Do I Deserve This Gift?
"I'll spend Christmas 2024 with my son, our first Christmas together in six years. ”
How many of you have been estranged from someone during the holidays? Or forbidden from them? It’s a larger club than you think. Some people have miraculously survived it and even managed to reconnect with someone they love who’s willing to love them back. Ben Gaffaney returns to The Small Bow and shares his version of this story:
“At AA, I shared that my DWI didn't kill anyone, and I was thankful for that. I joked that my lack of presence was my gift that year, which got some polite laughter. After the meeting, I got my signed attendance card and I didn't stay to socialize, but I wished I had. Community is hard for me on my own now, but especially then. I don't remember anything about Christmas after that.”
But Christmas 2024 is shaping up to be memorable — it’ll be the first one he spends with his son in six years. He’s excited, grateful, and overwhelmingly happy but nervous about how he is supposed to “fill a whole day with joy.” These are the normal holiday anxieties most parents share. This type of normal is progress. — AJD
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The Ghosts of Christmas Never
by Ben Gaffaney
I'd never heard of matching holiday pajamas as a tradition before my wife brought it to our marriage, so in 2018, we all dressed in long johns with candy cane stripes. I'm bearded, with black plastic glasses and short, dense hair, the only one in the frame smiling for the camera. I made the classic mistake of not checking the background before the selfie, so the top of the Christmas tree is growing out of my head. I'm holding J, who has his wrist at his mouth, like he's a shy adult stifling a laugh. My wife is in profile, smiling either just before or after kissing him on the head.
Behind us is the liquor cabinet, with a bourbon barrel head hanging above. It's from Woodford Reserve, the distillery nearest to my wife's hometown, signed by the master distiller as a housewarming gift from her parents.
Sometimes you find a beloved picture from your past, and you remember that you were masking some sadness, anger or hangover, that you were putting on a smile for the camera, just getting by. You see that you were smiling, but your eyes have no crinkle, you're really just showing your teeth. This isn't one of those pictures. This is a happy family.
My son and I both have birthdays between Christmas and New Year's, so it was a busy week, with me turning 45 and him turning one. I don't remember any of the gifts our one Christmas together, but my wife gave me a holiday card that read, "I know I haven't been easy to live with this year," and called me the "big gushy heart of our family. She added "clearly, I'm the muscle," since she had returned to her powerlifting gym in recent months.
Later that week, J went ham on a strawberry smash cake we bought from the place where we got married. We had it specially made, and I have a photo of J looking positively wasted on sugar. Shortly after that, the restaurant started offering smash cakes on its bakery menu, which made my wife angry for some reason.
A first Christmas and a first Birthday are huge events, and I bet I have dozens of photos on a hard drive somewhere. I'm sure I could track down J's first attempts at opening gifts, or playing tug-of-war with one of the dogs over his stocking. Probably some pictures in hats. If we posted any of this on social media, it's been deleted by now.
On Christmas Day 2019, I rode the bus to AA, staying completely still as a woman in pajamas and a stocking cap shouted at the bus driver for "touching her stuff," a pillowcase full of something. The woman was delusional, perhaps schizophrenic, telling the driver to go to a downtown bank, then calling the driver a whore and a racist, then screaming about how she was banned from talking to children, that men weren't allowed to speak to her, and that she just needed to get to the bank at Eighth and Lavaca.
During a break in her shouting, I was hit by a massive wave of déjà vu, which I usually ascribe to anxiety or sleeplessness, but I wondered if it was the intrusion of one of the parallel universes my Sober House roommate was always going on about. I get déjà vu at least a few times per day, every day, and always have, but no therapist or psychiatrist has found it alarming. I've never had a seizure, just a constant sense that I've been here before and I still don't belong.
I kept still as the woman in pajamas ranted. I made a conscious choice to avoid catching her eye. Finally, the woman shrieked at the driver to open the door and left with her pillowcase to walk toward the University of Texas campus. The bus driver announced we'd stay until help arrived.
I checked the time on my phone and saw that I was still running early for the holiday AA meeting. I felt guilty that I had checked the time because delaying the bus was the right thing to do. My wallpaper was set to the photo of my family in matching pajamas.
At AA, I shared that my DWI didn't kill anyone, and I was thankful for that. I joked that my lack of presence was my gift that year, which got some polite laughter. After the meeting, I got my signed attendance card and I didn't stay to socialize, but wished I had. Community is hard for me on my own now, but especially then. I don't remember anything about Christmas after that.
I'll spend Christmas 2024 with my son, our first Christmas together in six years. It will be the first Christmas where I play Santa, where J goes to bed without presents and wakes up with them. He's not particularly obsessed with Santa, and he's at the age where he's more excited about receiving gifts than the gifts themselves. I'm not a great gift-giver, always buying things at the wrong time, getting him a telescope when he was four that he might like when he's seven. Getting him Paw Patrol pajamas after he'd left Paw Patrol behind.
Christmas 2024 is probably the last time I'll play Santa, too. In 2026, he'll be a few days short of nine, and Santa will be over by then.
***
I lied constantly while I was drinking. During the end of my marriage, my ex uncovered some very odd lies, some quotidian, some mythmaking. I claimed I'd tried cocaine when I hadn't. I claimed I'd spent a few months homeless. The other lies were more typical of alcoholism, like claiming to work crazy hours when I was just sitting in my car drinking.
So when I got sober, I was particularly moved by the AA tenet of rigorous honesty, and I view it as its own sobriety. I'm sober from alcohol and sober from lying, which means I do my best to avoid lying to J, even when it would be expedient to, say, unplug the router and claim the Internet's down rather than fight over screentime or tell him the overpriced mini golf place is closed.
Santa's an exception for now. To me, Santa's less of a lie and more of a ghost.
J asks about ghosts all the time. He's afraid of them and probably wishes I'd tell him they don't exist, but I don't. Instead, I tell him: I believe in ghosts; they take a lot of forms, they come and go, and sometimes they arrive and arrive again. Sometimes they leave and leave again. I tell him I love ghosts, that I think they have a lot to offer.
I haven't told him that my mom believes in ghosts, but in family lore, she was riding the car in 1981 when she suddenly began to weep and she didn't know why. She looked at her husband and said, "There's someone I'll never see again." Her dad died that day.
So that's probably where I get it. I see ghosts all the time. Nearly every poem I write is about ghosts, Santa's a ghost, the people I've wronged come and go in my home, the déjà vu, the grandparents I barely knew, the life we didn't get together as a family of three, all ghosts.
J is at that pedantic age where he has a crystal-clear memory of every deferred promise, and he's settled on rigid definitions for the words he knows. ("Dad, come here!" "One second." "One." "I mean one moment." "You said one second!" etc.) That's beginning to thaw as he reads more complex books, so now we talk about what "ghost" means. Is it just a strong memory? If a memory imprints itself on your brain, is it a ghost? Are there ghosts of people who are still alive? He keeps asking questions, asking about multiverses and the like. It's a lot to process for someone who just got written up in art class because he and his friends were having a butt-slapping contest.
Still, I provide him an example: I know he was the one who used a ball-point pen to write "[Smileyface] [Heart] Dad/Ben" on the arm of the most expensive thing I own, a $1400 Herman Miller office chair. But when he's not here, it's the work of a ghost, especially since it's in the jagged scrawl he got from me. And since it's the work of a ghost, I'm not going to wash it off. I can't.
***
J recently got a diary, one with a little lock on it. I told him that I would never, ever read his diary because I want him to have that safety to express himself, particularly when he's older, with scarier thoughts to work through.
But: he wrote his Christmas list to Santa in there. He left his diary unlocked while he left our coffee shop table to chase birds, and I let it be, figuring he'd have to write a letter to Santa for me to mail at some point. I asked if he was too old to chase birds and he explained that he was making sure they stayed healthy and got their exercise. I wondered what his life was like with his mom.
The Christmases from my childhood aren't particularly happy or sad. Every Christmas Eve, we'd go to my aunt's house, eat chili, and open her gifts, always a roll of quarters (she was a bank teller) and a little cardboard book of Life Savers flavors. At home we'd open the rest of our gifts in the evening, in the Scandinavian tradition, then get our "Santa present" on Christmas morning. Then my weird cousins would come over and that family of six would pile onto the loveseat and not talk to anyone else. My aunt would drink too much, and that weird family has produced at least three alcoholics.
My dad never played Santa, and I never cried for the cameras on a mall Santa's lap. My brothers and I would throw a football around.
I don't know what Christmas will look like in 2024. Will J be excited the night before? Will he have trouble sleeping, sneak into my bed, ask if every creak in the house is Santa? Will he remember it as warm or cold, that one Christmas he spent with his dad? Will he feel it when I die?
I'm nervous about filling a whole day with joy, knowing that his long-term memory is fully formed. I imagine him describing Christmas 2024 to a friend someday, how bored he was once the presents were opened, or how he didn't have much memory of it besides the tactile chill of dad's poorly insulated house or a faint smell of wet dirt beneath his foundation. But the real pressure is more personal than that. I lost a lot of time with J due to my DWI. I agreed to over five years of very gradual increases in custody to avoid litigating my divorce. My ex-wife is still afraid of the alcoholic I was, directing me to take a 10-panel urine test today, a week before Christmas 2024. I've overcome hurdle after hurdle, both personal and legal.
Having Christmas with my son is the greatest joy I can imagine. His presence is my gift this year, and I'm not totally sure I deserve it.
What he asks from Santa remains a mystery.
*****
Ben Gaffaney lives and writes in Texas. More of his work can be found at “Hopping Off the Bus to Abilene.”
MORE FROM BEN GAFFANEY:
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DO YOU PLAN TO WRITE YOUR RECOVERY STORY IN 2025?
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If you’re in recovery, you have a story—how you got here and what’s happened since.
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The Winter 2025 session kicks off Jan. 21 and runs for 11 weeks.
Ready to tell your story? Learn more and sign up at anamariecox.com/thirdstory.
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* Special holiday meeting
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This is The Small Bow newsletter. It is mainly written and edited by A.J. Daulerio. And Edith Zimmerman always illustrates it. We send it out every Tuesday and Friday.
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A POEM ON THE WAY OUT:
Flame Name
by Ron Padgett
*********
I saw my name in boldface type
lying on the ground among the orange and yellow leaves
I had placed there to simulate autumn,
but someone else had placed my name there
and set fire to its edges.
The effect was lovely.
This was not, by the way,
a dream. It was also not
something that really happened.
I made it up, so I could
set my name on fire
for a moment.
— “Ronpadgett.com”
ALL ILLUSTRATIONS BY EDITH ZIMMERMAN
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