Jenn is a storyteller.

Holidays with Asians

(performed at Listen To Your Mother: Holiday Edition November 2024)

I can tell you the exact moment I knew my relationship to the holidays was about to change forever.

I was moving into my first apartment with my then-boyfriend, now-husband, Sanay. We were retrieving some of the things he’d put in storage while we were both in grad school. I’d only known him for a little over a year at that point, but suspected that his pastel-colored Polo shirts and college fraternity days belied what was really underneath. And here we were, standing amidst stacked banker boxes, next to the chrome-and-black-leather furniture of a former bachelor, when I spotted a huge Tupperware, thigh-high and several feet long, with a green base and a red lid.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Oh,” he said, as he swung his gaze toward me and the plastic box I was pointing at. “That’s my Christmas bin.”

“Your what?”

“My Christmas bin. It has all of my holiday decorations.”

It turned out that my future husband really, really loved Christmas.

So that year, the day after Thanksgiving, Sanay declared it time to decorate. Out came Christmas Bin, and we spent the afternoon un-bagging snowmen made of coconut shells, wrapping tinsel around the staircase banisters; and carefully removing ornaments from their bubble wrap cocoons, including a heavy ceramic piece that depicted four Chicago Bear football players in a touchdown celebration, mounting each other’s backs.

We are the children of Asian immigrants - Sanay’s parents from India, mine from China and Hong Kong. When we try to remember how we spent holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving, they were so inconsistently celebrated in our homes that the memories flash only briefly, like watching from the inside of a house as car headlights pass in the night, illuminating everything for a moment and then leaving it all in darkness.

I can remember a few things: we had an artificial tree that touched the ceiling but only went up some years, when my parents had the energy. I remember gifts: one year my parents clearly tried to gift-wrap a yellow banana seat bicycle for me, but gave up, so that the handlebars had crumpled wrapping paper taped to it, but the rest of the bike was leaning against the laminate dining table, concealed under an old bedsheet.

As I got older, I didn’t mind that our home was spare on decorations because holiday magic was everywhere in New York City: at the Union Square market where the smell of candied apples and burnt coffee overpowered the sewage and cigarette smoke for a blissful month; on Fifth Avenue, where you could see the Tiffany and Cartier buildings wrapped in giant blue and red ribbon like a big gift for the whole city; and even in the bodegas where the owner would dangle tinsel from the case that held the lottery tickets and tobacco.

Most of the time we spent Christmas with my extended family, because everyone had the day of Christmas off from work. My mother’s mother, Poh Poh, would spend the whole day cooking for her four children, their four spouses and her eight grandchildren: glassy rice noodles with dried seafood, boiled whole chicken, stir-fry with bamboo cut in cross-sections like round pieces of Swiss cheese, and a huge soup pot of steaming white rice whose bottom she’d burn so she could crack huge hunks of it with her metal spatula and hand them to us whole to snack on like potato chips.

One constant every year: my mother’s religious attendance at the day-after Christmas sales, when all the stores would steeply mark down their merchandise. She would bundle me and my siblings in puffy coats and Freaky Freezie gloves and drag us to Macy’s to replace her old toaster. Then she’d march us over to the Hallmark store, where she’d gently caress and treat herself to one of the delicate porcelain Precious Moments figurines: you know, those pale-skinned toddlers in Victorian dress? Brandishing fabric scissors and clutching blankies or holding their pointer finger to their lips to shhhh you?

“They’re collectibles, honey,” she’d say, in her adopted Brooklyn-Queens accent. “They’ll be worth money someday.”

It seemed my mother craved a little Christmas magic too.

All of this to say that my husband and I, now as parents, find delivering holiday magic to be a very tricky proposition, full of landmines.

Our kids believe in Santa, so we must play along. We make the list and address envelopes to the North Pole; we lined up once to visit Santa and Mrs. Claus in the little visitor’s center on Pearl Street. We dutifully pour the milk and put out cookies and carrots.

But inevitably, we get things wrong, or we do things differently than other families, or worse: differently than ourselves from year to year! We simply forget what we said or did the prior year because we don’t have childhood traditions to draw upon, or family rules that everyone knows and abides by every holiday season.

To wit: one year, we told the kids that Santa filled the stockings. The next year when asked again about the stockings, my husband and I gave two different? answers (because there are two different answers - your mom, and Santa - and only one goddamned truth). In other years our kids ask us,

“How does Santa fit into that tiny hole in our fireplace? Isn’t he…a bigger man?”

“Why does Santa only bring us one gift but he brings the neighbors like, way more?”

“Why does Santa have to deliver all the presents in one night? Why doesn’t he like, spread it over a week or something?”

Often, I want to give up. They’re seven and nine now - can’t I just tell them that holiday magic is really just…their mom? (And holiday cheer is their dad, who contributes…Christmas Bin.) There are so many things I want to tell my kids about a mother’s love, how it will drive her to do things she never thought she’d do: experience vague terror in the closets of her house where she’s forgotten she’s hidden the special gold Santa wrapping paper and accidentally almost reveals it to her children; spend an increasingly obscene amount of money to purchase a live tree so it can die and leave pine needles in the house for weeks; stay up past her bedtime to take convincing bites of an already-stale sugar cookie and an unpeeled, room temperature carrot.

But who is the magic really for? Why do all of this, why keep up the tooth fairy ruse, why tell them I believe in dragons? It’s the delight that this brings my children - that look on their faces when they run out of their rooms with the dollar bill from under their pillow, or the wideness of their eyes when they spot under the tree that special gold wrapping paper of Santa’s. This magic, I know, is for me. I can create something that brings pure, perfect delight; that is all mine.

-

This year for Christmas, we are visiting the kids’ grandparents’ ancestral home in India. Christmas morning will be spent at a breakfast buffet at a handsome historic hotel, a combination of Western food and Indian curries and rice to cater to any visiting palate. There have already been rumblings in my family: “Does Santa visit hotels?” “How will we bring all the presents home?” “Wait, do they even have Santa in India?”

I’ve been trying to figure out how to keep the magic alive - the logistics are elaborate. Buy gifts. Wrap gifts. Ask neighbor to use precious storage space to store her family’s gifts and my family’s gifts. Ask neighbor to be Santa. Ask neighbor to “visit” our house Christmas morning to send us photo to confirm Santa’s delivery. Is this bonkers, I ask myself?

Or. Maybe this year is the year that we simply let go of the obligation to make holiday magic. Maybe we default to what my husband and I knew as Asian kids to be true: that the holidays would mean decorations and cheer in the city around us, but that at the end of the day, the real magic, the lasting memories, will be made spending time together as a family over a huge pot of steaming, hopefully burnt, rice.