The Ghosts of Christmas Past – 2024
The Yuletide Spirits
Originally written in 2021, The Ghosts of Christmas Past is a tapestry woven from painful and joyful memories that all decided to surround me that December. I’m reprinting it this year, with some additions at the end. The Holidays are tough in the best of circumstances, whatever you choose to celebrate. We do secular Christmas, so I’m going to talk about Christmas for the rest of this. Feel free to substitute your own festival if you like.
There is so much internal and external pressure to do everything just right, to make everything special (more special, even, than the last time you worked so hard to make it special, which was more special than the time before that). The expectations we put on ourselves, always greater than the ones we imagine others are putting on us, that we can never meet. The whole BUT IT’S CHRISTMAS of the season. It’s a lot. It’s been a hard year for all of us. I mean, it’s been rough in Castle Wheaton, what with my seizure and Anne’s back surgery. But it’s not just the Anne and me us. It’s the all of us … us. Everyone is going through something this year, and whatever that happens to be, it’s magnified by gestures broadly at everyfucking thing.
I have so much love and respect and appreciation for everyone who is doing everything they can to manifest some of that Magic of the Season those obnoxious car commercials suggest ought to be delivered in the form of matching SUVs. But you know, in a genuinely meaningful way that isn’t tied to spending 140,000 dollars. Seriously, just making that damn Elf on the Shelf move around for 24 fucking nights? In a row? After everything else you have to do just to keep your house from falling apart and your family fed and everything else the rest of your family just expects will magically happen? Respect. Someday, your children will be 49 and writing about That One Christmas During the Third Pandemic Year that you worked your ass off to make special for them. I see you, and I love you.
This year, more than any year in recent memory, the Ghosts of Christmas Past are everywhere I look. They showed up one at a time, and then all at once, starting maybe a week ago. Most of the memories they brought with them are painful. Some of them are joyful. They all weave together into the tapestry of my life, and as much as I’d like to pull the painful threads out, you know what happens when you pluck at threads in your tapestry. I don’t know why I need to write these things down. I just know that I’ve been reliving them nonstop for several days, and writing them down at least gets them out of my head.
Most of this is in chronological order, but the first Ghost of Christmas Past to show up was from 1983, so that’s where I’m going to start.
Wil Wheaton’s Reflections
- It is Christmas Day, 1983. I’m wearing my red footie pajamas. I’m almost too big for them. The big toe on my left foot is starting to poke out. I love these pajamas, but it’s going to be easy to say goodbye to them when I open my Return of the Jedi pajama set, yellow with a speeder bike on the front, and a green collar, like a Polo shirt collar. On children’s licensed pajamas. My brother will have an identical collar on his Raiders of the Lost Ark pajama set. I guess this is the year we graduate from footie pajamas to fancy pajamas.
My brother and sister and I are in the hallway, behind the closed door, waiting to be gently shuffled, eyes closed, into the living room, where we will wait again, while dad gets set up with the camera. Christmas music begins to play in the living room. My summering excitement breaks into a rolling boil. Mom tells us to close our eyes. She opens the door and leads me, then my brother, then my sister, into place. My brother squeezes my hand and I squeeze his back. We are vibrating. It is Christmas morning and whatever Santa has brought us is right there, just a few feet away. It is Schrodinger’s Present, existing and not existing until we observe it.
“Okay, are you ready?” Dad asks. I can hear that he’s across the living room from us, on the other side of the fireplace. We all scream that we are! Oh, the excitement and the anticipation! An entire year of wish books, subtle and not subtle hints, visits to Santa at the mall, letters to Santa, follow-up letters to Santa, quiet prayers to Santa … all of it, accelerated and compressed and refined for weeks — an eternity in kid time — crystallized to form this moment.
Mom and Dad count down from ten. When they get to five, Dad forgets what number they were on. They’ll have to start over. “FIVE!” we scream in unison, eyes still tightly shut. It’s all part of the bargain. Part of the unspoken Rules of Christmas. The suspension of disbelief that allowed for Santa Claus to exist and fill our living room with the gifts we still had not seen. Mom and dad laugh. It’s a good natured laugh. A happy laugh. It’s not the cruel, mocking laugh I’m used to from him.
“Are you sure?” Mom asks. “YES!” It’s all part of the dance. The beautiful dance of Christmas Morning, and we happily, joyfully, play our roles. My little brother’s hand is now sweaty with excitement. Or maybe it’s my hand. Maybe it’s both of us. Dad takes a loud, deep breath. I imagine he and mom make eye contact, nod their heads, and pick up the count together. “Five! Four! Three! Two! One!” I open my eyes, and before I can register anything, I make the shocked, happy, excited face I’ve been practicing for the picture. I know it’s what mom and dad will want, and I want to make them happy, so I perform. It only lasts a second, but it’s enough for the picture.
As the blue afterimage of the flash fades away, I see a bike. A dirt bike! Silver and blue, with pads on the frame and everything! It’s the biggest thing in the room, but it’s not for me. My brother’s stocking hangs from the handlebars. Past it, to my right, a Cabbage Patch Kid, and what I can only remember as “girl stuff”. I was eleven, so. Yanno. I looked all the way back to the left, holding my breath because I had never wanted anything as much as I wanted it, and it just had to be there, it just had to be. And it was. Leaning against the tree, with my stocking in front of it, the thing I’d been obsessing about for what felt like my entire life: US 1 Fire Alert Electric Trucking. A slot car thing from Tyco. You drove trucks around the track, filled them up with construction materials like pipes and gravel, and then dropped them off. You didn’t exactly build anything with them, so when the bloom fell off that rose, out came the star of the show; the fire truck, with real flashing red lights and a bell that rang the whole time. I look pretty excited in the picture, but that picture does not come close to capturing the mainline hit of joy and excitement I felt when I saw that big box in my living room. I was so overwhelmed, tears sprung out of my eyes and I fell to my knees. ‘Thank you, Santa!” I holler, knowing that my voice doesn’t have to make it to the North Pole for him to hear me. My brother and sister celebrate their gifts: his first “big boy” bike, and the coveted Cabbage Patch Kid for her. I don’t notice them any more than they notice me. We have all gotten exactly what we wanted for Christmas. I don’t know it at the time, and I won’t admit it to myself for over forty years, but it will be the only Christmas I remember feeling like my dad loved me.
- It is Christmas Eve 1981. The whole family is in dad’s Dodge Ram Van, heading toward the 134 on the 405. We’re by the Budweiser brewery in Van Nuys. The smell of brewing beer fills the passenger compartment. We are driving from Aunt Val’s house in Northridge to my father’s aunt and uncle’s house in Toluca Lake. They are nice to me, but they aren’t kind like Aunt Val is. I won’t know how to vocalize this difference until I am an adult, and I don’t hold it against them. But the difference between the houses couldn’t be more stark. Aunt Val’s house is middle class. It’s warm. It’s welcoming. I feel safe and at home there. By contrast, my great aunt and uncle’s house is upper class. We aren’t allowed to touch anything. We can’t sit down. There are whole rooms we can’t go into. Mom is super stressed before we go there. She fusses with our hair endlessly. She admonishes us to be on our best behavior. We don’t go there to be around loving family, like we do when we go to Aunt Val’s. When we go to their house, we have to pass a test. I doubt very much that’s their intention, but it’s how mom makes me feel.
I’m not thrilled about leaving the warmth and love of my Aunt Val’s house for a mid-term. But tomorrow is Christmas, and I just have to be on my best behavior, keep my mouth shut, and be essentially invisible for maybe an hour at the most. I can do this. I do it every year. Why would this year be any different. We are listening to KRTH 101 on the radio. They are playing 24 hours of Christmas music, without commercials. I can’t recall who sponsored it, which is strange because I feel like they told us between each song. I want to say it was Cal Worthington, but it probably wasn’t.
My brother is sitting to my right. Our sister is to his right. We typically end up in this configuration, which matches our birth order, whenever we go anywhere. It’s relatively early in the evening, probably around 6 or so. But it’s winter and it’s already dark, so it feels later than it is, which is a cruel trick to play on kids on the one night a year they can’t wait for bedtime to hurry up and get there. The DJ reminds us that they’re playing 24 hours of commercial-free Christmas music thanks to the generosity of … I still want to say Cal Worthington. I mean, I can just say it was Cal Worthington, right? Who’s going to check my work? Let’s just go with that. Cal Worthington. So he thanks Cal Worthington, then he says something about keeping an eye out for Rudolph’s bright red nose, before he drops the needle on Run Rudolph Run.
I lean my head against the window and look up into the dark sky. I like how cool the glass feels against my cheek. I like that I can kind of hear the tires on the road. My mind drifts. I’m nine, and I’m starting to have my doubts about the whole Santa thing. I really want to believe, but parts of the story don’t add up. And my older cousin insists that not only does Santa not bring you presents, he doesn’t even exist. It’s all your parents. My older cousin is kind of a dick, is the thing, and he’s making an extraordinary claim that flies in the face of an entire lifetime of firsthand experience. Surely, if this were true, I would have heard it from a more credible source than my idiot cousin. Still, at the very least, I have some questions, and I am pondering them.
There’s too much light pollution in Los Angeles to see many stars, but helicopters, commercial and private planes criss-cross the sky above us. I’m thinking about the whole Santa Question when I see this lone red spot of light in the sky. My rational brain knows that it’s just a light on an airplane, but it’s the only light I can see, I just heard the guy on the radio tell us to look for Rudolph, and the enormous part of me that wants so desperately to believe that this magical thing is real blurts out, “Dad! I just saw Rudolph’s nose!”
“Really?” He says. There’s something familiar in his tone that tells me I’m stupid. My heart sinks. “Well, I think so,” I say. “Maybe it’s your imagination getting caught up in the Christmas spirit,” my mother offers, helpfully. “Maybe,” I reply. Of course it isn’t Rudolph. First of all, it’s way too early. Everyone knows that Santa doesn’t fly around while you’re awake. This was such a stupid thing to say. Dad’s right. I’m stupid.
“I can use my imagination, too,” my dad says. He points to the stream of oncoming headlights on the other side of the freeway, flowing down the north side of the Sepulveda Pass. There are hundreds, maybe a thousand, cars coming toward us. They create an unbroken streak of bright lights. “That’s a giant snake.” I look at my brother. He doesn’t get it, either. Then I catch my dad’s eyes in the rearview mirror. There is no kindness in them. “What?” I ask. “If you can use your imagination, so can I,” he says. “That’s a giant snake.” It’s so mean, the way he says it. It’s dismissive. It’s condescending. He says it like he can not believe how stupid I am. I don’t know what contempt is, but remembering this moment now (and though I try not to, I’ve remembered it every Christmas for forty years), that’s what it was. I look at my brother again. He’s like five, and even he feels it. The whole family feels it.
We are all silent as Run Rudolph Run finishes. “Did any of you kids see Rudolph?” The DJ asks. I close my eyes and hold my breath. Dad’s going to say something really mean. I know it. But nobody says anything. In fact, nobody says anything for the fifteen or so minutes it takes us to get to my great aunt and uncle’s neighborhood.
As an adult remembering this, there is something really sad about a family sitting in uncomfortable silence in the van together, while the Christmas music we’d typically sing along with played on the radio. As a kid who was experiencing it, it sucked, but I was also relieved that this appeared to be a one-shot from my dad. He wasn’t going to make it a whole thing until I cried, like he usually did. A Christmas miracle. We exit the freeway in Toluca Lake and after two quick turns, we are in the middle of extravagant wealth. The houses are HUGE. Their yard displays are EPIC.
While we drive slowly through the neighborhood, my mother breaks the uncomfortable silence to excitedly point out the wooden cutouts of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, wearing Santa hats, in someone’s yard. My brother and sister pick up her excitement and run with it. Soon, they are also pointing at yard displays. I remember my brother saying “That one’s my favorite,” several times. I know now, as an adult myself, that she wasn’t equipped to deal with the shitty thing my father did to me. I suspect that he was just as shitty to her. I mean, he’s just a shitty person. I know now, as an adult, that his parents and most of his family treated her the way he treated me. She wasn’t good enough for them, and she spent our entire childhoods trying to prove them wrong. I know now that as we got closer to his family, they both must have felt so much stress and anxiety, and I have a lot of empathy and compassion for the people they were then. It doesn’t excuse how shitty he was to me, or that she just sat there and let it happen, but I’m willing to stipulate that maybe they weren’t their best selves in that moment.
But all of that reflection and this pain is in my future. In my present, I can’t deny that my great aunt and uncle’s neighborhood is amazing. I don’t feel great in their house, but I love their neighborhood. It’s like where the Main Street Electrical parade goes to live when Disneyland closes. Every house, which looks like it could easily hold two or three of my houses, is covered with constellations of colored lights. Some yards have been transformed into animated scenes of Santa’s workshop. One house has a working roller coaster in the front yard, stuffed animals riding around it in an endless loop. There are nativities everywhere. JOY and NOEL and PEACE ON EARTH are spelled out in lights on rooftops. Every single house is a Griswold house. It is amazing.
We park the van. Mom reminds us again to be on our best behavior. All three of us climb out and wait next to the van while mom fusses with our hair, our collars, my sister’s dress. Mom reminds us not to touch anything, to stay out of the many forbidden rooms, to be polite and to only speak when spoken to. It’s a lot, but we’ve done it several times a year, at every major holiday, for my whole life. I know the drill. My great aunt answers the door. She greets us with loud enthusiasm. It probably isn’t, but it feels fake. I’m terrified of my dad’s family, and I never feel comfortable or relaxed or safe around them. She’s always nice to me, or at least to the version of me my mother has ensured I present whenever