Of course there were images of snow in Hindi movies, like the song in “Junglee” where superstar Shammi Kapoor slid down a snow-covered slope screaming Yahoo. But mostly snow was a cultural symbol from the West. I thought of America as a cold place, a white landscape. Visual images from Hollywood blended together to confirm my idea of America as a vast winter wonderland. Whether it was Russia in “Dr. Zhivago,” or suburban Connecticut in “The Ice Storm,” or Spitsbergen in various adaptations of “The Snow Queen,” it was the West and the West was white. It seems odd now to think that Hollywood is located in sunny southern California where it never snows. And yet, the movies it makes so often re-create life in New England with its Victorian homes, Ivy League schools, and cold, white winters. Or maybe those were the images that stuck because they provided an escape from tropical heat and vegetation.

In the comic books we read growing up, “Archie” and “Calvin and Hobbes,” the lasting images were once again of Christmas and snow. Calvin has snowball fights with Hobbes or crashes down slopes on his sled. Calvin always comes home to hot chocolate and marshmallows. Archie and Veronica cuddle by the fire. The world of comic books with their chimneys and fireplaces, set against the backdrop of carols sung by old-timers like Jim Reeves and Pat Boone, seemed much cozier than our own homes. The thought of chestnuts roasting by an open fire was as magical and exotic to me as elephants and tigers roaming the streets with maharajahs might have been to a suburban middle-class kid growing up in America.

In the fall of 2002, without really ever planning to, I landed in America. I was a jaded 20-something grad student, and I tried to embrace my new surroundings without the preconceived notions of my childhood. No stereotypes, I told myself with grim determination. Indians do not all have arranged marriages or adhere to the caste system. I rolled my eyes at unbelievers.

First, I moved to Florida, then two years later to Texas. And five years after that, I moved to Georgia. Nine years in the South. Nine years when I barely remembered what I had known all along. That in America it was supposed to snow.

But it didn’t. There were palm trees and glimpses of the Gulf of Mexico. There were tropical hurricanes that reminded me of the monsoon. Summers brought blistering heat and winters were mild. Things bordered on the unfamiliar but never went far enough. Physically I remained within my comfort zone. In many ways, it was like I’d never really left India.

There was one exception. On Christmas Eve in 2004, I was watching the news on TV, alone in my small studio apartment. It was a quiet, lonely winter. I had arrived in Houston a few months ago, didn’t have a car, which made it impossible to navigate that chaotic city, and had only a handful of acquaintances, who were gone for the break. The news turned to the weather and I stared at the map on the TV without any real interest. The sound was turned to mute. Suddenly, though, something looked odd. I peered closer. There were clouds on the map over the city, but instead of the usual drops of rain falling from them, there were little white flakes. In Houston.

I ran to the door and flung it open. There it was. Snowflakes fell softly to the ground. The sky was lit up, white, hazy. The air had gotten colder. I walked to the top of my stairs. Down in the yard, my landlady, Nancy, was walking around with a camera, taking photographs. Of the few flakes of snow that kept falling. Of the car with a thin sheet of white on the top. Of the white dust that covered the stairs, the roof of her house, the ledges of the windows, the branches of trees.

I ran my hand along the wooden banisters. The slushy, white powder turned to water under my touch. Nancy and I laughed at each other. I was an Indian. I’d been in the States just two years. She had lived in Texas all her life. We were the same.

That was Houston’s first snowfall in 25 years. The next day this would make news. The next day, all traces of the snow would disappear with the first rays of the sun. But that night, I stood in the freezing cold in my pajamas and sweat shirt, and gathered up a small ball of snow. I placed it carefully in my freezer. A souvenir. My first Christmas in Texas. It was a good omen. That night, I snuggled in my bed, feeling cozy and content. Snow wasn’t as exciting as thunderstorms. It was quiet, calm. It soothed. It healed.

I still remember how the snowball felt in my hand. The shape, like a ball of dough ready to be rolled into a roti. The texture, like hardened powder being held together by moisture. The wet, cold, white ball in the palm of my hand. Perhaps I put it in there, beside the ice trays and behind the tub of ice cream, because it was Christmas Eve, and I was alone. Or perhaps because I thought I’d never see snow again. Whatever it was, it was like innocence. Like my childhood spent in India. Like something lost. It was a little bit of America, a little bit of miracle.

Since then, every once in a while, when I least expected it, I’d catch a glimpse of snow, of fleeting flurries or the remnants of a blizzard on a visit up north. But they disappeared as soon as they’d come, like a dream. They never lived up to my childhood visions.

This summer, I moved to Grand Rapids, Mich., for a job. Since I decided to move back in February, colleagues, students and strangers have been teasing me about the winters here. Every first conversation with a new person in Grand Rapids has either begun or ended with a discussion of the winter. I have both sought and received advice on clothes, boots, tires, walking, driving, shoveling. The demands of my first tenure-track job itself didn’t seem half as scary as the prospect of facing my first real winter. The anticipation has built up for months.

A few days ago it finally snowed here for the first time. I woke up to find the grass white. Snowflakes were lodged in the fir tree outside my window. When I walked outside the air was crisp and smelled sharp, like peppermint. The ground was crunchy under my feet, like gravel. Every sensory impression seemed heightened, as if the world itself had frozen to a standstill.

But this time I did not make a snowball to save in my freezer. This time I stood by my third-floor office window and pictured my car going up the bridge on my way to work, the one with the warning sign about ice at its foot. I pictured myself walking across campus from class to class in my heavy boots. I pictured myself doing groceries and buying gas with the snow and wind whirling around me.

This time I braced myself for Lake Effect snow and accumulation. The lake will dump about 100 inches of snow this winter according to the forecast. This time I prepared to arm myself with traction and insulation. Thermal gloves, waterproof hat, ear-warmers, snow boots, down coat, sand bags.

I, a city girl, now live in a smallish town in the Midwest, a town most of my Indian friends have never heard of. Here, I have seen deer walking around in people’s backyards, and flocks of geese resting in parks. Here I see vast stretches of cornfields and orchards on either side of the road when I drive. It’s a world of simplicities I’ve never inhabited before and don’t quite know what to make of.

And this time when it snowed, outside my window, the parking lot was white, the streets were white, the sky was white, the air too seemed silent, freezing and white.

The one-dimensional visual images of my childhood have come to life. I’m a professor, I suppose, not a grad student anymore. And I’m not dreaming; this time I’m really in America. I watch these realities as they fall gently to the ground and accumulate.

Her name’s Roberta. Born Roberta Maybay. She was Bobbi as a child, even Bobbie Jo for a time in preschool–her dad’s idea. She tried Ro, then Rob, then Bob. Bertie. Calls herself Robbie now. Robbie Bourassa. She’s a temp for Kelly Services. She spent the last week as a ticket agent for Air Tran at the Fort Lauderdale Airport, checking photo IDs, issuing boarding passes, wheeling old gentlemen through security and to the gate. You meet confident people at airports. They have the poise of destination. Next week, who knows, maybe back to Broward General recruiting blood donors over the phone. About the boringest thing she can think of.

She swings by the Seminole Reservation, picks up three cartons of filter-tip generics at Tribal Smokes. She writes “cereal” on her hand with her Air Tran ballpoint. She stops at Publix for milk, bread, cereal, and beer. (White, white, Jurassic Park Crunch, Lite.) She pulls into the driveway behind Marty’s pickup, puts the car in park, leaves it idling. She lights a cigarette, looks at her house, at the hard-water stain on the stucco wall, at the shabby pair of spiral Christmas trees by the walk and the cheerless icicle lights on the eaves, listens to Marvin Gaye. She puts her head back, shuts her eyes, and she’s nineteen again, nineteen and blissfully high on Midori sours and wacky weed, and she’s dancing like a dervish at that gay bar on Las Olas. She can’t remember what it was called. It was called The Male Box.

Eventually she will have to go in and face it all. Face the two whiney kids, the Kool-Aid stain on the carpet, face Marty, lying on his bony ass with a can of beer in front of the TV, and the cat shit on the kitchen floor, and the dust everywhere, and the sorry mica furniture that looked so classy on the showroom floor, and the dishes from last night piled in the sink. Face the knowledge that it will always be like this. At least for as long as it counts. Robbie punches the cigarette into the ashtray. The three of them in the house. None of them waiting for her. And Marvin Gaye is dead.

“Marty the Bug Man.” That’s what it says on the side of his truck. “Good for What’s Bugging You.” Robbie married the exterminator twelve years ago. Her first marriage, his second. It will be her last. When she was dating Marty, Robbie would meet him on Fridays at Ocean’s 11. Four-for-one Happy Hour. He’d complain about his wife, Jamie, the ER nurse. He’d nuzzle Robbie’s neck, play her favorite songs on the jukebox. They’d dance, and later they’d wind up at her place, this place. She hears the dog barking out back like a lunatic. Probably hasn’t been fed. The inflatable snowman is now a puddle of plastic on the brown lawn. Robbie wonders how her once favorite holiday could have become an annual disappointment.

Every day she suffers the family’s exquisite indifference. Marty, a gristled lump of indolence, lost in his funhouse of electronic amusements, engages Robbie only when he’s in need of sexual or culinary catering. And the kids simply refuse to clean up. Ever. No matter that she grounds them, slaps them, screams till she’s blue in the face. The bugs will come, she tells them. Like they care. Some mothers get brainiacs, or their kids are good at one thing or another, or they’re drop-dead gorgeous or vivacious, or they can charm the knickers off a nun or something. Anything. Robbie loves Tiffany and Nicole, of course, but she doesn’t, she has to admit, admire them. Her bumper sticker might read My Dull and Sullen Child Is an Unremarkable Student at Mary Bethune Elementary. This thought makes Robbie laugh. She puts on her Christmas-mix CD and listens to Elvis having a blue, blue, blue, blue Christmas.

And then she recalls their first Christmas as a family. Nicole was just three months old and mostly oblivious, but so adorable in her Dear Santa, I Can Explain onesie. Marty spent the better part of the day parked on the Barcalounger, watching sports, and drinking his way through a six-pack of Christmas ale. And then it was time to visit the families, Robbie and Nicole off to see her mom, and Marty, if he stayed awake, off to his ex mother-in-law’s to see his sons Kyle and Dale.

Mom’s boyfriend, Ariel Kim, a secular Korean Jew who taught Russian and Chinese at FIU and who could not pronounce Robbie’s name, did not observe the holiday. When Robbie smiled and called him a Scrooge, Dr. Kim said, “I cewebwate wife, Woeberta!” And she held up Nicole and said, “That’s what the baby’s about, Ariel!” When she offered Nicole to Dr. Kim to hold, he folded his arms. When she gave her mother her Christmas present—a gold pendent with Nicole’s opal birthstone, her mother thanked her with a kiss and set the unopened gift on the coffee table. “I’ll open it later.”

“You’re not at all curious?”

“I know it’ll be perfect.”

The three of them played Dr. Kim’s polyglot version of Scrabble while Robbie dandled the sleeping baby in her arms. Robbie couldn’t stop staring at Nicole and could not believe how exhilarated she felt, how blessed. They had food delivered from Five Chinese Brothers: General Tso’s chicken, Buddhist Delight, and Happy Family. Dr. Kim won the game when he turned the English word flat into the German word flatterhaft and earned a triple word score.

It’s dark in the house. Robbie has to stand at the door and let her eyes adjust. All the verticals are closed. It’s like a dungeon. Robbie opens the blinds in the living room. She plugs in the Christmas tree lights and the color wheel. In the kitchen she shoves the cat off the counter. The girls are in their room with the door shut and locked. Robbie knocks. “Are you girls doing your homework?”

“It’s vacation,” Tiffany yells.

Robbie tells her to do it anyway. She doesn’t know why.

“Later!”

“Now!”

She checks messages on the answering machine. Her mother’s bunion’s inflamed. She needs a ride to Walgreens in the morning. She knows its Christmas, but Walgreens never closes, and anyway she needs to pick up a last-minute gift for Marty. “I was thinking maybe one of those Big Mouth Billy Bass, you know, the singing fish.” The optometrist reminds Nicole of Monday’s appointment. Mr. Jeffrey Knapp from AMEX would like Marty to give him a call at his earliest possible convenience. Robbie wonders how an empty life can seem so full. She tells herself to knock off the self-pity. Is her life really empty? Is it? Well, if empty means without content, then maybe yes. If it means idle, then no. Her life’s not empty then.

Robbie figures she has time to bathe before they go out. She goes to the bedroom.  Marty’s on the bed in his underwear. He’s watching TV, and he’s pointing a handgun at Robbie. He says, “Bang!”

“You asshole!” she says.

“I can’t hear you. You’re dead.”

“Marty, what have I told you about guns in the house?”

“It’s a pistol, stupid.”

“Get it out!”

“I need protection.”

Robbie slams the bathroom door and looks at herself in the mirror. Do other people live like this? She opens the door, tells Marty, “You’re picking up the sitter! It’s your goddamn Christmas party!” She closes the door. Marty’s work clothes are piled on the floor, smelling of cypermethrin. She checks the trouser pockets for cash, kicks the clothes to the corner.

In the bathtub she rests and looks ahead to tonight’s party at Turbo Weedon’s. Robbie and her girlfriends will sit around the living room, smoking doobies, talking about the movie stars they’d like to screw. And the husbands will sit on the deck and talk about the Dolphins or whoever the hell they are. The husbands are all mutilated in one way or another. They’ve all lost digits to meat cleavers, extruding machines, motorcycle spokes. And they all own dogs–pit bulls, Rottweilers, shepherds–and the dogs all have names like the husbands: Chipper, Duke, Buddy, Dave, Zonker, like that.

Finally, she’s relaxing, for the first time in a week. She lets the hot water run slowly, falls into a fitful sleep, or something close to sleep. She’s driving a Wonder Woman lunch box along an unfamiliar and uncrowded road. She doesn’t know where the road leads; she’s just driving toward the light. There’s a sign ahead, but she can’t read it, so she leans her head out the window. When her head hits the tile wall, she’s back in the bathtub. She smiles. What was that all about? She hears the phone ring. Marty turns up the volume on the TV and ignores the call. She hears Barney Miller tell Fish to take Wojo and investigate a robbery in New Delhi is what it sounds like. Agnew’s Deli, maybe? There was a time in her life when she had places to go. These days her life’s confined to the house, the inconsequential jobs, the husband, the kids, the few friends, all nice enough, these friends, but tiring and complacent. Robbie feels like she’s been driving in the breakdown lane.

There’s a bright moment in the car on the way to the party. They’re listening to Billy Joel on Classic Gold singing about how Catholic girls start much too late. Robbie, being a Catholic girl, says Billy’s got it all wrong. She says to Marty, “Do you know the mating call of a Catholic girl?” He doesn’t. She says, “I’m so drunk.” Marty laughs. Robbie says, “What’s the mating call of a not-so-beautiful Catholic girl?” Marty shrugs. “I said, ‘I’m so drunk!’” Marty is tickled and touches her knee. He raises a lascivious eyebrow, and Robbie thinks maybe tonight he’ll hold her. She tries to picture their embrace, but cannot. Sex with Marty has become infrequent, mechanical, coarse, and brief. It still feels good for the shuddering, but it doesn’t carry her out of her world as it once did.

Turbo’s wife Ronnie’s wearing jingle-bell earrings and an elf’s cap, and she tells everyone she told Santa she wants a tummy tuck for Christmas so she can feel craveable again. The Christmas tree is leaning six inches to the left, but no one mentions it. On the stereo, the Drifters are dreaming of a white Christmas. Annette Rafferty tells Robbie and the others that the Barnes & Noble on University has become like a singles bar. You browse a section, you send a message. If you’re looking for a doctor, you might be over in Diet and Health. Looking for a mystic, New Age. Whatever you do, stay out of Addiction and Self-Help! Robbie says maybe they should start a book club. And they laugh. Justine Triplett says she’d like to take a stroll down the Bodybuilding aisle.

Robbie heads to the kitchen for another beer. Orlando Gonzalez is in there, leaning against the counter, sipping vodka right out of the bottle. He’s wearing a sprig of mistletoe on his belt buckle. He tells her she’s looking fine.

“Do you tell your wife that?”

“If I told her I thought you looked fine, she’d strangle me.”

“You know what I mean, Lando.”

He holds up the bottle. “High-test?”

“No thanks. Why aren’t you out there with the boys?”

“You’re more interesting, chica.”

“That’s not saying a whole lot, is it?” Robbie knows that the only time men take you seriously is when you’re flirting with them. And she wonders if that’s what she’s doing. She takes the beer from the fridge, pops the top, smiles, and sips.

“You and me, Roberta, we should have lunch some afternoon.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You don’t know what you’re missing.”

“I don’t need the calories.”

“We could work them off.”

She smiles. She wants conversation, not talk.

“Suit yourself.” Orlando heads off to the deck. Robbie checks herself in the window’s reflection. She’s got her mother’s upholstered hips. You have to be thin to wear anything worthwhile.

Later, after Robbie’s driven the sitter home, after she’s checked on the girls, kissed their foreheads, after she showers and puts on her nightgown, and after she’s wrapped the gifts and set them under the tree, she makes herself a blue ruin—Sapphire and Schweppes—and curls up on the couch with the cat. She hears Marty come in from playing with the dog, and then she hears the drone of the television from the bedroom.

She remembers Christmases when the girls would set out cookies and milk for Santa, when they would swear they’d heard the reindeer clomping on the roof in the middle of the night. She remembers how easily they smiled when they were young, back before they’d taken to rolling their caustic eyes at everything she said. When she thinks about tomorrow, she feels a surfacing dread and the caution, which is its gift. This Christmas, she fears, will be much like the previous. The three of them will present her with another charmless and expedient gift, and she’ll thank them for their thoughtfulness. Just what I wanted, she’ll say, a FryDaddy. The girls will tear open their gifts, will not even bother to lift the clothes out of the boxes, and will mumble perfunctory thank-yous. Marty will say he likes the broken-in wallet he already has. You can exchange it, she’ll tell him. He’ll gush over the Ed Hardy T-shirt she and the girls bought him, but he’ll stuff it in his drawer later and never wear it. And then the three of them will wander off to their caves and leave her to clean up the mess and to cook dinner. At Walgreens, she’ll tell her mother she couldn’t handle listening to an animatronic fish singing “Take Me to the River” every time you set off its motion sensor. She’ll suggest buying Marty a razor and some aftershave.

Robbie sips her drink. Delish! She lights up a cigarette, strokes the purring cat, and remembers, as a child, getting all dressed up and going with her mom to Burdines to see Santa Claus and then sitting on his lap and reciting her wish list. When she was seven or eight, Santa brought her a pink and purple Princess Big Wheel, and her dad let her ride it around and around the dining room table. And every Christmas afternoon they’d drive to Aunt Missy’s condo in Pompano for a turkey dinner. Aunt Missy who collected porcelain dolls and commemorative spoons and who always gave Robbie a chapter book for a present: “The Happy Hollisters,” “Those Miller Girls,” “Miss Pickerell and the Geiger Counter.”

These bittersweet memories, like industrious angels, work to revive Robbie’s flagging spirits, and the blue ruin lifts the fog of trepidation. She can see now that the current domestic situation is unacceptable. If things don’t change around here, she’ll just explode. She will not tolerate this listless disdain in the house any longer, the incivility and spite, the disrespect and estrangement. This is no way to live. She’ll sit them down, talk with them in the morning. She’ll tell Marty it’s time he started behaving like a loving husband and father, and if he can’t do both, then maybe it’s sayonara time. No, it’s not a threat, Marty; it’s a promise. But it will sound like a threat, won’t it? So she’ll need to phrase it more diplomatically. Sayonara time? Must be the gin talking.

This is what Robbie does whenever she decides, finally, to confront her troubles. She imagines the inevitable and obligatory scene of judicious confrontation and rehearses her lines over and over, revising them as she goes. And once she’s started down this road, there’s no turning back. She’s so driven, she can’t think of anything else, can’t sleep for the anticipation. Maybe she’ll tell him I want us to be what we used to be. I want the joy back in our lives. No, joy won’t work. Marty thinks joy is for children and holy rollers. Fun! I want the fun back in our lives.

She’ll tell the girls how much she loves them. She’ll sit at the edge of Tiffany’s bed, and she’ll talk to them about their chores in a way that they’ll understand. A family is a team, she’ll say. We work together and we all win. And we need to start doing things with each other, going to the beach. Like that. Could you please put down the phone when I’m talking to you. Thank you. She’ll hold their hands and ask them what she could do to make their lives more pleasant and meaningful.

So in order to get things off on the right foot in the morning, she’ll cook them all a hearty breakfast. Before they open their gifts, before they revert to their desultory habits, they’ll sit together, say a prayer of thanks, eat, and talk. If it goes right, if Marty praises his over-easy eggs, if the girls ask for seconds on the pancakes, then maybe the whole day will continue to be festive and cordial, and maybe that momentum will carry on into the next day, and so on, because the way we live our days is the way we live our lives. Isn’t that right?

She carries her drink to the kitchen. She sets the table with the good dishes and the cloth napkins. She puts out the Mrs. Butterworth’s and the Country Crock. She mixes up the frozen OJ and puts it in the fridge. She scoops the ground coffee into the filter basket and fills the reservoir with water. All she’ll have to do in the morning is push a button. She knows she can pull off this Christmas miracle. What was born in Bethlehem was hope. She finishes the last of her drink, puts the glass in the sink. She scratches the cat on his silky head, cuts the kitchen light, and shuffles off to the bedroom.

Marty, who hasn’t said a word since they left Turbo’s, grabs her by the neck and shoves her against the wall, so hard the crucifix falls to the floor. She can’t breathe. And he screams. “You wanted Lando’s cock in your mouth, didn’t you? You fucking whore!”

And then he pushes the gun into her face. “Here’s Lando’s cock. Why don’t you suck on this?” He shoves the barrel into her mouth and cracks her tooth. She’s bleeding, but she turns her head. “You like that Cuban cock, Robbie? What do you think, I’m fucking blind?”

“The neighbors, Marty. The windows are open. Jesus Christ, you’ll wake the girls.”

He puts the gun to her crotch. “I ought to pull this trigger.”

Robbie weeps, chokes on her tears. He shoves her on the bed and says he’ll give her something to cry about.

When it’s over, Robbie lies with her back to Marty, who has his earphones on and is giggling at the TV. She wishes he would leave her. But who would have him? He’s made himself so unappealing. And if it’s always going to be like this, how will she ever survive? Well, she could stop noticing every little thing and get on with it. If you don’t see the grime in the bathroom sink, don’t see the busted futon in the den, don’t consider the long, dull tomorrow, you can get by, and it won’t even seem so bad. Just stop looking so closely, Robbie, she tells herself.  Jesus, she thinks, it’s not like you’re a movie star or a rocket scientist or anything. Not like you’re going to change the world. She worries the chipped tooth with her tongue. This will cost her a day’s work and a month’s wages to fix.

When she hears Marty snoring, she slips out of bed and sees Carson Sleeper next door, sitting at his kitchen window, twenty feet away, watching her. She turns off the lamp and vanishes from his sight. Carson doesn’t know Robbie, Mrs. Bourassa, very well, but he does know that her disagreeable husband has abused her physically and emotionally over the years and seems to have done so again on this holiest of nights. When Carson got back from midnight Mass, he heard the husband’s cursing and later heard the sobbing wife.

One night several months ago, Carson found Robbie crying on her front steps, and he went to her. The exterminator had locked her out of their house while he sat inside watching TV and drinking beer. Carson’s knocking on the window and door was ignored. He took Robbie inside his house, lent her his terry cloth robe, brewed some coffee, fortified it with brandy, and set a box of tissues on the kitchen table. He offered to call the police. Robbie begged him not to. Ever. Never ever call the police. Promise.

Carson apologized for the day-old banana bread. It’s all he had. She asked him about his limp. “Shrapnel,” he said and waved a dismissive hand. No one really wants to hear your war stories.

Robbie looked around the kitchen. “So tidy,” she said.

“It’s just me and the fish,” he said, “and they pick up after themselves.”

She laughed. The aquarium sat on an iron stand beneath a framed print of Monet’s field of poppies. “What kind of fish are they?”

“Flame angels.”

“Gorgeous.”

She spooned sugar into her coffee and admired Carson’s flamingo salt and pepper shakers. She thanked him for his kindness.

He said, “Tell me it’s none of my business if you want to, but why don’t you leave your husband?”

She said she was leaving the SOB, she was always leaving, she just hadn’t escaped yet. “There’s a lot of gravity in that house.”

He said,  “It can’t be easy leaving your life behind.”

“I need somewhere to go. Somewhere, not just anywhere.”

Carson hears the Bourassas’ chained-up mongrel start barking. He shuts his window, draws the curtain, and goes back to his cognac and his book, B. H. Fairchild’s “The Art of the Lathe,” a Christmas gift from his friend at work, Inez. He reads about “the death of the heart . . . a kind of terrible beauty.”

Next door, Robbie leans against her daughters’ closed and locked bedroom door. She knocks with one knuckle. She doesn’t want to wake them. She wants one of them to already be awake, to sense her mother’s distress, and to rush to the door and rescue her. In the kitchen, she rinses her mouth with tepid water. She sits at the table and holds a can of frozen lemonade to her bruised and swollen lip. The place settings mock her vanity. This was all her fault, they say. She allowed herself to act like a child at Christmas, foolishly praying for a miracle. She cries, but the tears only anger her. Tomorrow she’ll tell them all she’s sick as a dog, and she’ll stay in bed all day. She watches a leathery cockroach skitter across the table and climb the tub of margarine. The cockroach waves his long antennae like he’s conducting a choir. If you have no place to go, you must be where you’re supposed to be. Right? She’ll be okay. She’ll get through this. Not hope, but resilience is called for. She knows there’s nothing so shabby you can’t get used to it.

Excerpted from “BLUE CHRISTMAS:  Holiday Stories for the Rest of Us:  An Anthology” (B&B Press), edited by John Dufresne

Anyway, my grandparents, uncles and father have long since died. I have abandoned any semblance of Christianity — no trees, no Easter eggs for me — and have instead become interested in the religious tradition of my mother’s family. I still have a cousin from my father’s side who lives about 40 minutes from me. Every year, she invites me and my husband and kids over to her place for Christmas Eve. She is one of those highly repressed, chronically nice yet inwardly seething people who always tries to do the right thing and resents the hell out of the world for not appreciating her, but she’s too polite to go on direct attack. I feel she wants to go through the motions of maintaining the myth of family connection, as if that group were less horrible than they really were. She’s a very nice, good person who has been generous with my kids, and is reliable. She’s done a lot of stuff for me over the years, but I never felt like it was for free, thus I don’t feel safe with her emotionally. It doesn’t feel like an emotionally honest relationship. There is a subtext, but I don’t know what it is.

None of us can afford to spend a lot of money on gifts. She can’t, and I can’t. Nobody can. But I am afraid that we will be invited, and my kids will want to go, and I will feel obligated to go over there, even though I am probably not wanted anyway, and we will all give in to the pressure to shop in order to go through the ritual of giving gifts nobody wants or needs.

What is the deal with the competitive gift-giving thing, anyway? In my family of origin, it was supposed to prove that people cared because they couldn’t express caring in any other way but through money or gifts. They couldn’t say anything nice, they couldn’t be affectionate or warm — they were all bundles of grudges, resentment, suspicion, insecurity and bitterness.

Miss Manners would be appalled, so I’m not asking her, I’m asking you: How can I get out of this event? Is there any nice way to say to my cousin, to acknowledge, that none of us can afford to go through this charade? And then just not do it? Because what I wish is that anything anyone would spend on me they would simply take for themselves and buy something they really want and enjoy rather than give me something I don’t need or want and resent me for it. Do you get that receiving anything from anyone in my extended family carries the burden of resentments and unmet needs and accusations? It’s a drag. Why do we keep doing it?

You may wonder why I don’t invite my cousin to my house, which could be an option if my place were not such a dump — broken plumbing, holes in the wall, non-working electricity, a neighborhood eyesore, broken oven, rotting doors, chunks of house falling off, etc. Far from the Better Homes & Gardens image our grandmother lived by. No dining room, no place to sit. I hate the Holiday Season and wish I didn’t have to do this stuff anymore. Frankly, it would not surprise me if she really doesn’t want to do it, either — but how to address the issue? Or just make other plans?

Dreading It

Dear Dreading It,

Here we go again.

I was at Salon’s panel discussion last night about the meaning of the Occupy movement and, more broadly, this moment in our social and political history.

Every now and then what we all know and have been repressing becomes visible. Someone does something and it catches on and things change. It is hard to know when such a moment is at hand.

But certainly now is such a moment. The moment is at hand to make courageous changes both public and private.

It is especially hard to make changes in family practices when there is no larger context for them. One risks being labeled an eccentric or a troublemaker. But when a large social context appears — such as when the feminist movement happened, or during the era of civil rights protests — then individuals in families have an opening. It is as though taboos are lifted and people may speak. That is when we may make changes — particularly when everyone has known the change needed to be made but no one had the courage or the opportunity to speak up.

Your critique of how your family celebrates Christmas is nicely linked to the larger critique of our general economic arrangements. If we can speak of the unfairness of our current system, and its waste and destructiveness, we can also speak of the unfairness of our individual practices, and how wasteful they are. We can do this with a clear conscience. We can do it in context.

It is a time to make changes, some large, some small. These changes may be “political” in certain ways. But what is great about the current moment is that when “political” movements take hold they always touch individual lives in important ways.

One interesting thing about the panel discussion last night was that those of us who have lived through previous social and political movements were able to acknowledge what we learned from those past attempts to change our society. One thing we learned was that a nonhierarchical, consensus-based approach leads to a more durable — if messier — group process.

It was refreshing to consider afterward the wonderful benefits of just leveling with people, of just telling the truth and being heard.

So I hope that in some way this holiday season you can tell the truth to those who matter to you, and that you can be heard, and that you can be yourself and be loved for who you are. My guess is that you are indeed loved for who you are. My guess is that this relative of yours who has invited you over has a real appreciation for you. But, like you, she must struggle to find an “appropriate” way to put her appreciation into practice.

There are many dangers in trying to “fix your family”! But there are ways to simply be present in it, and there are ways to appreciate the flawed but sincere ways that people come together this time of year and try to share what is in their hearts. That is what many people are trying to do, however imperfectly they are doing it.

One idea that comes to mind is for you to give each person an envelope with a personal letter in it; make it a card, as a nod to holiday convention, but put a longer letter in it, too, telling that person the truth about your experience, and inviting that person to confide in you, if he or she wishes, about his or her real experience of the world and of your family.

This could be done quietly.

You might have to give these cards at the end, as you are leaving. Or you might write them in such a way that you are comfortable with each person reading what is in it. If you write what you truly believe and are comfortable with each person reading it — that is, if you refrain from slander and venting — then it might indeed be an empowering act by which you cease this compulsive and harmful thing everyone has been doing for years while acknowledging the universal drive to connect with others at this time of year and celebrate our humanity, such as it is.

Benedict has repeatedly denounced a campaign against Christians in Iraq blamed on al-Qaida militants, including an October attack on a Baghdad Catholic church that claimed 68 lives, two of them priests.

The Vatican is very worried that a steady exodus of minority Christians from Iraq will permanently reduce their numbers and discourage the wider community of Christians in the Middle East.

Benedict cited what he called two negative extremes at work in the world: secularism, “pushing religion to the margins to confine it to the private sphere,” and “fundamentalism, which instead would like to impose (religion) with force on all.”

The Vatican celebrates New Year’s as World Peace Day, and Benedict urged world leaders to make a “concrete and constant commitment” to help bring peace.

On Saturday, a bomb exploded in front of a Coptic Christian church in the Egyptian city of Alexandria, killing at least 21 people in an attack that raised suspicions of an al-Qaida role.

Benedict recalled his speech last month in which “I stressed that religious freedom is the essential element of a state of law — you cannot deny it without, at the same time, undermining all rights and fundamental freedoms.”

After leaving the basilica, the pope removed his gold-colored robes, donned an ermine-trimmed crimson cape to guard against the chill, and greeted from his apartment window pilgrims and tourists in a packed St. Peter’s Square.

The new year, he said, is an opportunity to reflect “on the great challenges that our epoch poses to humanity,” calling the threats to religious freedom urgent.

“Wherever religious freedom is effectively recognized, the dignity of the human person is respected to its root, and through a sincere search for truth and good, moral consciences are shored up and institutions and civil coexistence are reinforced,” the pope said. “That’s why religious freedom is the privileged way to build peace.”

Benedict also announced that in October he will make a pilgrimage to Assisi and invited non-Catholic Christians as well as world religious leaders to join him in the Umbrian hill town of St. Francis.

He said he wanted to mark the 25th anniversary of a similar pilgrimage made by Pope John Paul II and highlight his conviction that “the great religions of the world can constitute an important factor of unity and peace for the human family.”

While each Dwyer wrote their own personal section, that darn computer did not show mercy to anyone. It was certainly true Missy had an exciting, fulfilling summer but not for the reasons given in the newsletter. Missy did not mean to say, “This year I didn’t spend as much time at the tennis club due to being so busty.” Missy is very busy, not busty. And she meant to say, “What I did over my summer vacation,” not “What I had done over my summer vacation.” Under the photo where it said, “A Dwyer gets a new nose, and tits!” the caption should have read, “A Dwyer gets a new dog, a shih tzu!” These years are awkward enough for her without Auto Correct lending a hand. There are far too many mistakes to itemize each, needless to say, rumors of what work Missy has had done are just that—rumors. Regrettably, the rumors of her break-up with Jason over New Year’s are not. Consider this an official relationship update and one that is amended in the revised newsletter enclosed. Our Missy is so traumatized by this unexpected news, and our Christmas newsletter, that she has been staying with her BFF, Sherry, and is not speaking to me but we will provide an update as that status changes. A copy of these amendments and apology have been forwarded to Sherry’s home.

Dan asked me to address the fact that the 2010 Dwyer Christmas newsletter stated he became a fish. This was also a typo — he is still a biotech regional manager in between jobs. He used his free time last year volunteering for a clothes drive and running in a 5K for breast cancer, not “dodging jury duty and running a five & dime bodega.” It is a blessing that someone among the Dwyer clan anonymously pointed out these mistakes as it prompted us to review Dan’s resume, which we found laced with discrepancies. Listing his term at Whit, Sampson & Alliance as time he spent as “a white supremacist in Alabama” may explain his prolonged job search. No wonder Dan has been “looking for work for many months,” not as what we reported, “cooking on a wok for many mouths.” We changed Dan’s resume to state his objective was “to find a position which allowed him to take charge,” instead of “a position which allowed him to take catnaps.” A lesser man would have considered entering a witness protection program. We all love Dan very much and he has our full support.

Well, obviously such a problematic newsletter is a testament to how busy the Dwyer hosehold was in 2010 — no time for proofreading here! (I also put out the office mailer and coordinate after-hour events at my job, a reason I got a raise from my boss. I say this not to brag how busy I’ve been or to defend my newsletter skills but because in the Dwyer Christmas newsletter I inadvertently and erroneously boosted, “I also put out in the office mail room and coordinate affairs at my job, a reason I got a rise from my boss.”)

Finally, father has had an arduous year not an urinalysis ear. Please replace all instances of the word cheeseburgers with the word Asperger’s in the second to last paragraph of the newsletter. Thank for your time and patience.

Always,

The Dryers