If ever there was a year to observe a blue Christmas, this is that year. So nothing political today ... just the blues and holiday stories from the pages of THE SUN.

If we make it through December
Everythings gonna be all right I know
It's the coldest time of winter
And I shiver when I see the fallin snow

If we make it through December
I got plans of bein in a warmer town come summer time
Maybe even California
If we make it through December we'll be fine

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9TByT3QlWc]

I got laid off down at the factory
And there timings not the greatest in the world
Heaven knows I been workin' hard
I wanted Christmas to be right for daddy's girl
Now I don't mean to hate December
It's meant to be the happy time of year
And why my little girl don't understand
Why daddy can't afford no Christmas here

If we make it through December
Everythings gonna be alright I know
It's the coldest time of winter
And I shivver when I see the fallin' snow

If we make it through December
I got plans of bein' in a warmer town come summer time
Maybe even California
If we make it through December we'll be fine

PLAYING TRACKS BY
Charles Brown, Elvis Presley, John Lee Hooker, Lightnin'Hopkins, Eartha Kitt and more

AFTER MY HUSBAND left me — on his birthday, two weeks before Christmas — I went back to a 12-step program and quit drinking. For thirteen years I hadn’t gone a single day without alcohol.

The holidays are not an easy time to get sober. My remaining family was 1,300 miles away, and most of my friends were big drinkers. Alarm bells went off in my head at 5 PM every day, reminding me to drink. But I didn’t. I went to meetings and made one sober friend.

On Christmas morning I fed my five dogs and sat down to call my sister. Suddenly an earsplitting crash rocked the house. A six-by-ten-foot mirror had fallen in the bathroom. Shards filled the sink, tub, and toilet, covered the countertops, and buried the tile floor, reflecting my shocked, miserable face.

If ever there was a good excuse to drink, this was it. Instead I called that sober friend. She let me cry and complain before pumping me full of 12-step platitudes, which worked surprisingly well. Then she offered to come over after Christmas dinner with her family and help me clean up the mess. She had known me for only thirteen days.

I said I would wait for her, but at 3 PM, the time I would normally start craving that daily cocktail, I rolled two big trash cans in from the garage and started filling them with glass. Three hours later I swept up the last pile of shards and dust. My only Christmas gift was this: five o’clock had come and gone without a single thought of drinking.

Bonnie
Grapevine, Texas

PLAYING TRACKS BY
Butterbeans and Susie, Tampa Red, Louis Prima, Victoria Spivey, Bo Carter and more.

My wife of forty-two years, loved holidays. She sent greeting cards, made special meals, and bought colorful decorations. For Memorial Day, Fourth of July, and Labor Day she marched to John Philip Sousa and cheered the finale of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. Though her immediate family was Catholic, some branches were Jewish, as were most of our closest friends, so Hanukkah and Purim traditions were part of the annual retinue.

The Christmas before Lorraine’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis, when I brought home the tree, she pulled at one of the branches, asking, “What is this thing for?” For the first time ever, I decorated the tree alone.

Soon after, her dementia became more pronounced. A policeman pulled her over for going through a red light, and when he asked to see her license, she said, “What’s a license?” On a clear night that spring she stared at the full moon and asked, “Who put that there?” A week before July Fourth we went to the airport to pick up her ninety-five-year-old mother. “Nice to meet you,” Lorraine said to her.

The most traumatic day of my life was when I consigned her into a memory-care facility. She fought and screamed, “Take me home!”

By her last Christmas Lorraine had no idea who I was. But when Santa walked into her room, she beamed, rose from her bed, found her Christmas sweater, and brushed her hair. I have a few photos from those final years of her life. The one of her and Santa stays close.

Dean
Oakwood, Ohio

PLAYING TRACKS BY Butterbeans & Susie, Rev. Edward W. Clayborn, Larry Darnell, Jimmy Butler, Lou Spreignier & His Orchestra and more

On Christmas Eve, 1977, I came out to my parents.

Jim and I had met during fall orientation at a theological seminary near Chicago and had been sleeping together ever since. He was twenty-four, and I was thirty-one. Within months we had come to believe that we had the potential for a long-lasting partnership. We could have kept it under wraps, finished our degrees, gotten ordained, and embarked upon a life of clandestine assignations, but we probably would have paid for it psychologically and spiritually. Jim and I agreed that if we were going to stay together, we had to come out to the Church — and our parents.

Though my parents had always assured me that their love was unconditional, for years I’d assumed I would keep my sexuality to myself, find a compatible woman to marry and start a family with, and take my secret to my grave. Now Jim was to spend New Year’s Eve with my parents and me. I’d be bedding down with my lover a couple of rooms away from them.

On Christmas Eve my mother was prepping dinner while my father and I sat sipping cocktails. Sometime during the second round of drinks, I used a lull in the conversation to deliver the speech I’d planned.

“Over the years,” I told them, “we’ve given each other many wonderful gifts. This year I want to give you the gift of truth. Jim and I are much more than just friends. We’ve been lovers since September, and we hope to spend the rest of our lives together.”

There was a pause while they collected their thoughts. Then my father offered his hand across the table, and we shook.

“You’re the same son you were five minutes ago,” he said. “We just know you better now.”

I could tell it wasn’t emotionally easy for them, but they never faltered in their support and affection for me and Jim. They made us feel we had something as worthy of preserving as their own marriage, which lasted more than fifty years.

Jim and I are retired now. Lots of decisions have been made along the way, but forty-three years later I look back on coming out that Christmas Eve as one of the best.

Terry
San Francisco, California

PLAYING TRACKS BY
B.B. King, Charles Brown, Randy Greer & Ignasi Terraza Trio, Emilie-Claire Barlow, Ray Charles and more.

The First Time I brought a boyfriend home for Christmas, I was twenty-six years old and had been living on my own for several years. My boyfriend was a kind, generous man, and I was proud to show him off to my family.

The visit started well: He laughed at family stories and helped in the kitchen. My mother even took me aside to whisper her approval. Then, on Christmas Day, after we took a long walk around the neighborhood, my father stormed into the house. He’d been drinking and was in a surly mood, and he directed his ire at my boyfriend, deriding him for being divorced, calling him a loser and a failure. I was horrified. We grabbed our things and drove across town to my sister’s house.

The next morning, embarrassed by what he’d done, my father called to apologize. My boyfriend accepted, but we still headed home as soon as we could. A year later we were married, and my father did his best to repair the rift. That Christmas Day thirty-four years ago was the last time he ever had a drink. He stayed sober until he died last year at the age of ninety.

Lynn
Olympia, Washington

PLAYING TRACKS BY
Nico, Muddy Waters, Kate Bush, Vince Guaraldi Trio, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds and more.

There isn't a Christmas from my childhood that I don’t remember the cops being called. If it wasn’t my oldest brother and my father fighting in the front yard, it was my sister screaming at our mother to keep our other brother, who had molested me, away from her young son. Any joy became muted behind sobs and sirens.

When I lived on my own in my early twenties, I tried to control holidays by inviting only the family members I thought would behave. I’d host them in my apartment for a feast I’d prepared, hoping that a dose of normalcy could cure generations of dysfunction. At some point Mom would excuse herself to phone the brother who’d molested me. This always stirred up the same guilt and anger I’d felt since I was four years old, when I’d told on him and shattered my mom’s world.

A few years later, after he’d died and my mom had gotten lost in her own grief, I stopped hosting or attending any holiday gatherings. I wanted to celebrate alone. I’d buy my favorite foods, get stoned in the morning, paint all day, and take an afternoon walk in the woods. I discovered strength, joy, and gratitude on these days.

Last year I married a man who belongs to a loving, supportive family; they plan holiday gatherings nearly a year in advance and insist on video chats for any celebration where they can’t all get together. In theory I love how close they are, but it’s taking me some time to adjust to spending holidays with a family again.

B.M.
Great Falls, Montana

PLAYING TRACKS BY
Jimmy Liggins, Charles Brown, Pilgrim Travelers and Detroit Junior.

Since my husband came home from prison more than eight years ago, every simple occasion has felt like a holiday. We take any excuse to celebrate, honoring no particular faith other than joy and closeness. We decorate and feast to celebrate the returning sun at midwinter; the coming of spring; the longest day of the year; and the fall harvest. We even knock on our neighbors’ doors for treats on Halloween.

But most of our holidays are made up and harder to explain. Like the “Gathering of the Greens” to honor the earth, or the broth ceremony at each new moon.

On the night of the year’s first fog, we take plates of food and thermoses of tea outside to lie on blankets and look at the stars. As the temperature drops and the sky gets darker, we are at once chilly and content.

Erika
Portland, Oregon

PLAYING TRACKS BY
BB king, The Four Tops, Roomful Of Blues, Saffire - The Uppity Blues Women, Mighty Blue Kings and more.

I GREW UP CULTURALLY Jewish and religiously atheist, so we had neither Christmas tree nor menorah at my house. I always loved the idea of a fragrant tree with twinkling lights, though. In the winter of 1991, stranded in Lake Placid, New York, without the money to go to graduate school, I decided this was my chance.

No need to buy a tree in the Adirondacks. I simply drove around back roads for a few days until I found the perfect balsam near the edge of a thick wood. I came back that night to cut it with a handsaw and brought it home.

>I don’t remember how I stood it up — I’m pretty sure I didn’t know about tree stands — but I did have lights to put on it. Ornaments were harder to come by without much money. At a craft fair I found two little tin stars patterned with tiny holes, for five dollars. They didn’t provide much coverage to the tree, though, so I had to be creative.

Dot-matrix printers were common in the early nineties; the paper had perforated edges that could be torn off once the printing was done. As an aspiring writer, I had reams of this paper, so I made paper chains out of those edges, long enough to wrap the entire tree. For the top I cut a lopsided Jewish star out of cardboard and covered it in aluminum foil.

It was a lonely winter, as I worked several minimum-wage jobs to cover my rent and student loans, but there were moments of joy: ice-skating on a lake at midnight; skiing on a nearby golf course in the early morning; and sitting by the Christmas tree at night, gazing at the warm lights.

Twenty-five years later I’m still in the Adirondacks, on land covered with balsams. Every year my daughter (now seventeen) asks for a “real” tree, but I insist on cutting down a gangly one from our woods.

We have boxes overflowing with ornaments, many handmade by my daughter, and I still have the little tin stars. One was chewed on by my cat, Levi, who lived with me for nineteen years. The Jewish star still goes on top every year, though it’s gotten a few new coats of foil. The paper chains no longer get used, but I can’t bring myself to throw them away. Every year I open their box and remember that first Christmas in the place that became my home.

Shir
Vermontville, New York