Note: I wrote and posted this last year. I felt like sharing it again. I added the Dickens quote because it reminds me so much of my father and his feelings about Christmas.
"But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round -- apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that -- as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!'"
- From A Christmas Carol
- Charles Dickens
Weekends at Grandma’s house were always fun, even more so during Advent. She catered a few Christmas dinners for charities, and made tons of cookies, pies, and cakes to sell at holiday sales (for charity organizations, our family’s church, and our schools) and to give as gifts. Her little kitchen was a blur of activity in December. I loved it.
My “chores” on those weekends (tasks I loved then, and still enjoy now) were wrapping gifts, and decorating cookies. I was never very good at making bows (nowadays I just buy those ready-made bows with an adhesive strip on the back), but I loved to decorate the cookies, especially the gingerbread people.
One December weekend, the year before my dad passed away, my mother’s cousin Steve, an artist (mostly, he painted) was staying at my grandmother’s house (His home was in Greenwich Village, but my grandmother was his favourite aunt, so he visited often).
While my grandmother baked gingerbread cookies, Cousin Steve and I sat in the parlour. I posed for him on the big comfy chair in the corner. While he sketched me, we talked about the people and things he had painted recently. I asked him how come he could draw people and make them look like people, and I drew people that looked mostly like snowmen. He tipped his head a bit to the side and smiled at me.
“Let me think about it for a minute, please,” he said. He did not stop sketching.
My grandmother called out that the cookies were out of the oven. She said we could decorate them in an hour, when they were cooler. She walked into the parlour and sat down on the footstool near the stairs.
“What you drawing?” She asked Steve.
“My sweetheart.” He winked at me. I smiled and he teased me for not keeping my pose.
My grandmother stood and looked over Steve’s shoulder. Then, she looked up at me. She patted my cousin’s shoulder. “It really looks like her,” she said.
“I wanna see,” I said.
He shook his head slowly and grinned. “You have to wait until I’m done,” he teased.
“Fine,” I said, and switched my pose to that of The Thinking Man. He and my grandmother laughed.
“Tch, I’m almost done anyway,” Steve said. A minute later (it seemed like forever, but it was probably just a minute), he said, “Okay. It’s done.”
I jumped from the chair to the sofa. Sitting next to him, I looked over at his sketch.
I frowned.
“I thought you were drawing me,” I said.
“That is you,” he said gently. “You don’t see it? Look again.”
I looked again. I looked longer this time. The girl in the picture was beautiful. She was curled up on the big comfy chair in the corner, writing in her journal. She wore a frilly-looking dress (I wore jeans and my favourite Christmas sweater that day). Her long hair was loose, falling over one shoulder (my long hair was pulled into a ponytail).
My grandmother said, “Look at the eyes.”
The eyes bothered me. They were really pretty, but there was something kind of sad about them that I did not like.
I said, “She’s beautiful, though. I’m…”
“You’re beautiful, sweetheart,” Steve said. “That’s you.”
I didn’t get it, but it was sweet. I smiled at my mom’s cousin.
When my grandmother returned to her kitchen, he put the picture in my lap. “You asked me about how I draw people, right?”
I nodded, my fingers tracing the lines of his drawing.
He told me that there was more to making a portrait of someone than just drawing or painting what he or she looked like. The trick, Steve said, was to capture someone’s spirit, the subject’s personality.
“I draw people. I draw what they look like. But I try to kind of get their… insides into the picture, too.”
I didn’t get it, but it sounded nice. I smiled at Steve.
When my grandmother suggested that I make a special gingerbread man for my father as part of his Christmas present, I decided to put Cousin Steve’s idea into play. I told Grandma and Steve what I wanted to do, and they offered to help.
I ripped off a large piece of parchment paper and placed a cooled gingerbread man on top of it. My grandmother pulled out all of her decorations for me to use, and placed them on the kitchen table.
I stared at the blank gingerbread man for a while, wondering how I could make it look like my dad. What was his spirit? What did his personality look like?
The first thing I did was to dip a thin brush into bright green frosting and give him two small blobby eyes.
I glued a tiny upturned piece of red licorice below the eyes. Okay. He’s smiling now.
I frowned. It was okay, but not exactly what I wanted. The eyes were the right colour, and my father did smile more around Christmas than any other time of the year…
My grandmother looked at the face. “Well, that looks like him, so far.”
“No, it doesn’t,” I said in a daze, “But I’ll think of something.”
Steve said, “Wanna know a trick?”
I smiled at him. His head was tilted again. “Yes, please,” I said.
“Think about him and close your eyes. The first thing you see is…”
I did so as Steve spoke. I smiled. “The first thing I see is the shop.”
“There you have it.”
Grandma, Cousin Steve and I sat in the kitchen for hours. My grandmother and I sat at the table; Steve sat in a kitchen chair pulled far from the table. He was closer to the sink, drawing.
I hammered a black gumdrop flat. My grandmother cut out safety goggles from it. She very carefully glued it so that the green blob-eyes were not disturbed. I painted blue jeans on him. My grandmother mixed up a sort of caramel-coloured frosting for his work boots, and used scraps for black licorice for the laces.
For me, the most difficult part was painting on a flannel shirt. Using darkish blue, black and white frostings, and three different-sized brushes, I worked very slowly and gave the gingerbread man one of my dad’s favourite shirts.
Grandma took the mallet to another black gumdrop. She cut tiny almost-circular shapes out of it. With a pin, she added buttonholes. I glued the gumdrop buttons on carefully, scared I would smudge the plaid shirt.
I smiled down at the cookie. “Wow. It really looks like Daddy, now, doesn’t it?”
My grandmother said, “Yes… but you have to give him hair!”
I shook my head and laughed. My father had a full head of thick, almost-black hair, but he had taken to shaving his head lately. I liked the way he looked bald.
I said, “No, Gram. No hair. He likes being like Kojak!”
Steve chuckled behind his sketchpad.
My grandmother laughed, flattened another gumdrop, a red one, and cut it into a little lollipop. Giggling, I glued it into his hand. “Who loves ya, baby?” I joked.
Steve put his sketchpad down on the counter, stood up and came to the table. He inspected the cookie carefully. He kissed the top of my head and said, “You did a beautiful job, Vanessa.”
I smiled up at him. “Did I capture his spirit?”
He knelt beside me, his eyes level with mine. He tilted his head, winked and said, “You got him, sweetheart.”
When I gave my father the gingerbread man on Christmas morning, his reaction made me happier than any of the presents I had opened.
“Wow,” he said. “It’s me!” Big Smile.
“Yup… When you’re in the shop. See? You even have your glasses on!”
He kissed the side of my forehead. “It’s great!”
“You like it?” I asked.
“I love it.” He kissed my cheek. “But… Uh… Why the lollipop?”
I smiled. “Kojak.”
My father laughed. “Kojak,” he echoed, shaking his head with a smile.
My mother and brothers loved the cookie. Everyone commented on the work that must have gone into the plaid flannel shirt. He made a point of showing it to everyone who came to visit.
The next day, the cookie was given a protective coating and a place of honour in his workshop downstairs. A bunch of my dad’s friends hung out with him in the shop that day, drinking beer and talking about things they wanted to fix or build. I sat on the stairs, listening. My heart sang when they discussed the gingerbread man up on the shelf, and how much it looked like my father.
When we went to my grandmother’s house on New Year’s Eve, her Christmas present from Cousin Steve was hanging on the wall by the big comfy chair in the corner of the parlour: A framed painting of a beautiful little angel-girl in a frilly dress with almost see-thru wings and golden halo, her waist-length, red-brown hair loose and hanging over one shoulder, a smile on her face – and in her eyes – as she decorated a gingerbread man at my grandmother’s kitchen table.
My father studied the painting for a few minutes. He looked over at me and held his hand out. I took it and let him pull me closer to him.
“Steve’s good, isn’t he? Looks just like you.”
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