In the picture my mother vacantly looks off-screen and into the far distance smoking a cigarette with a too-long ash. She’s dressed in a dowdy housecoat and her hair is slightly askew. She’s wearing the fluffy slippers I bought her a few years back. Her eyes are vacant in the way that only a schizophrenic’s can be. She’s clearly visiting a winter wonderland of her own.

My sister sits in the middle, eyes focused directly into the camera. She doesn’t look blank so much as insecure and scared. Later that day, she’ll leave her young daughter in my care, saying she will return in a few hours. She won’t return for several weeks. It’s the third time she’s done it that year.

Sandy, my two-year old niece, sits at the far end. Her mouth is smeared with my mother’s homemade chocolate and she’s as wild-eyed as only young children can be on Christmas. Her eyes show happiness and uncomplicated joy. She’s still mostly pristine. The constant abandonment, the tugging between parents and grandparents, and the general neglect of her estranged mother and father haven’t yet turned her into the frazzled, broken, middle aged woman she’s become – a woman I haven’t seen nor spoken with since my own 20-year old daughter was the same age as Sandy is in the photo.

Ghosts of Christmas Past
I take the picture holding the camera up as a shield to separate me from them. I try to stay upbeat as I’ve been for all the other years of my young, yet very old life. I’m smiling hopefully like I did on Sandy’s first Christmas – the Christmas my former brother-in-law lost control of his car and smashed through the outer wall of their apartment.  The couch where my sister sat feeding the baby came to rest against the far wall of their living room.

I smiled weakly like I did last Christmas. That was the year the police came to break up a fight between my sister and her husband on our front lawn. I remember thanking the cop for coming out on a holiday as I held my infant niece close and the cops struggled to handcuff the two of them.

I planned to smile next Christmas as well, but didn’t feel very hopeful. That would be the one when my father and I tricked my mother out of our house and drove her to her third mental hospital. I rode in the back seat holding down the door lock so she couldn’t escape during the hour-long ride.

Shortly after checking her in – and despite the 250 lb. orderly lending a strong hand – I was in the darkened office of the Hospital Chief of Staff for Mom’s formal commitment hearing.

I told a sympathetic judge that, yes, my mother really wasn’t my mother anymore. She was a deranged stranger with a terrible torrent of malevolent fiends in her head. They didn’t like her and terrorized her night and day. I knew this because she often screamed at the television, shrieking for her tomentors to leave her alone or locked herself into her room for days at a time to escape them. At 12, I already knew the litany of schizophrenic symptoms and was able to discuss them like a clinical psychologist, even if I was only a newspaper boy.

There were many other Christmases, most equally bad. The first relatively trouble-free one came in 1977. I was in the Air Force and half a world away. That Christmas I flew from Germany to an RAF base just outside of London with a plane-load of Christmas hams. In less that 24 hours, a detachment of British troops would be eating them, also away from their families, in their tents in Kenya.

I spent the next seven holidays in various places around the world, before getting married and eventually having our beautiful daughter. I’m 54 now and can’t remember a truly enjoyable holiday. It’s a knack I’ve never quite mastered. I’ve been back “home” only once for the holiday.

Ghosts of Christmas Present
My Christmas luck holds still. My first stepmother died between Thanksgiving and Christmas 1989 and this past Thanksgiving I spent with my father for the first time in years. He was in the hospital recovering from a stroke and I sat at his bedside for almost two weeks. Delirious for much of the time, he often cried out for help, hallucinating that he was in some sort of torture camp or remembering the sudden death of my mother after she’d finally been “cured”. He was restrained to keep him from hurting himself. Thankfully, he was home before Christmas with no apparent permanent damage other than to deepen the depression he’s been in since his health began to fail.

Clearly, I’m not on good terms with the Holidays, or most other special events either. They carry along too much baggage and despite lots of expensive therapy and the help of more medications than I’d like to take, I can manage holidays now – if only just barely.

For me, the time between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day is filled with a choking feeling in my throat and a vacancy sign hung on my brain. Each time I decline a party invitation, or skip the pot luck at work, or am accused of curmudgeonly Bah Humbuggery by the eternally chipper, I have to hold my tongue. I know everyone expects joy, but I want to scream. I know people can’t be blamed for the ill it causes me. For the most part, many don’t know about it and when they do, they usually graciously leave me alone.

But now the holidays are over. I can take down the tree, strip off the lights and tinsel, and go back to my day-to-day life. I’ll be OK except for the small uptick around my birthday – another holiday that’s also a burden for me.

But for those of you who understand and give me the room I need around the holidays I’m thankful. For the rest of you, I harbor no hard feelings. I’m sure most of you wouldn’t go where I don’t want to go if you only knew. I’m glad most of you (though I’m aware holidays are a particularly hard time for many people) enjoyed your holidays. For the rest of you I sympathize. But now that it’s over for another year, I can say this:

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year…really, I mean it.