Unfiltered Smoke

by Jody Coughlin

Christmas was never an easy time for me as a kid. I missed a Dad I never knew; I constantly fought against the devilish bile of jealousy and doubt as I compared the amount of gifts I received in comparison to my sisters; I dreaded going back to school after the holiday break. Worse still, my mother was always stressed to the absolute maximum at this time of year and every now and then she would do something quite whacky to make Christmas all the more horrifically memorable.

Case in point: one year she took an axe to the stump of our Christmas tree to make it fit in the tree stand, which would have been perfectly normal except that she hacked away at it in the middle of the living room. I distinctly remember vacuuming wood chips from the carpet. I remember watching mom slice away at that tree with utter abandon…

This event and others like it, which are a little too painful to publicly recall are the things that would eventually denote the exact opposite meaning of the most wonderful time of year for me. What is the exact opposite of wonderful you ask? Awful. It’s awful.

It has taken me a full decade of having my own home to get my head around what I want Christmas to mean for me and my family. My husband has always had a great holiday spirit and has, over the years, looked upon me with a vague sense of concern mingled with something probably close to annoyance at my eccentricities around the holidays. With good reason. I remember one December day, years ago, I was sweeping the fir needles from the kitchen floor and in the middle of the task I went into a blind rage over nothing at all other than the fact that it was just Christmas time and I was having a reaction to it. A very negative reaction to it.

These days, things are much saner and calmer and I find I even look forward to the holidays. This year I actually took the time to really think about what I sincerely wanted for a gift which, I realize, is not the true meaning of Christmas and all that stuff, but I wanted to partake of the tradition anyway. In other words, I just wanted present. I did. It’s true.

I decided, ultimately, on a sewing machine. I conjured visions of myself designing scarves (my personal favorite accessory) and making quilts and other such things during the longs days of winter. Such a romantic notion. Such a stupid, stupid, stupid romantic notion… I mean, as if?

Well, Christmas day came, I unwrapped (you guessed it) a sewing machine. I took it out of the box, perused the instruction manual and then I put it back in the box, taped it up and returned it a few days later. One look at that manual and all the details therein and it was all over for me. My grand illusion of becoming a seamstress extraordinaire was indeed an illusion. I instantly remembered why. The only class I ever failed in school was sewing class. I had forgotten that fact somewhere along the line. It all came crashing down around me when I saw the word bobbin in big bold letters.

Yuck. Ew. Gross.

So, what initially seemed like an enormous bout of amnesia on my behalf, actually turned into an opportunity to rethink my ideal gift. To really get it right this time. At this point I decided what would really suit me, what would totally rock my world was not a sewing machine but a bag of insulation. That’s right. A bag of insultion. It would be my one big purchase. My main gift. The jackpot. I, at the time, was in the middle of renovating my tool shed into a painting studio and therefore a bag of insulation seemed as valuable to me as diamond earrings might be to normal girls. Naturally.

Wait. Stop right there… Hold on ladies. Don’t get jealous. Don’t glare at your significant others and demand to know why you didn’t get a bag of insulation for Christmas. There is always next year. Christmas is over. Let it go.

Okay, back to the story. Onward, my husband went into the building supply store, he threw the money down on the counter (I assume) and ordered the insulation. Once it was bought and paid for we were directed outside to the warehouse only to find out that they were completely out. Flat broke about it. At this point, in essence, I went home with a thirty-two dollar piece of paper (receipt). Yee-haw. Deck the halls with utter annoyance.

About a week later, after much deliberation about the state of my studio which is perfectly functional in the summer, but not-so-much in the winter, I decided it was time to bring my easel inside. I realized the smart thing to do would be to shut the studio down for the winter and regroup next spring. Forget the insulation. Forget the renos. Forget it all until Spring. I set my easel up in the kitchen and again, returned my big purchase (essentially, my receipt) which I never actually got in the first place. No big deal, but still, I wanted something to call my own by way of a Christmas gift. Call me crazy. They often do.

So the hamster wheel in my brain started spinning. I dug deep. I thought long and hard about it and I concluded what I really wanted for Christmas, in the end, was a few new canvases to paint on. This was my absolute final decision on the matter.

I knew my mom (also a painter) had a surplus of canvases, of all shapes and sizes, kicking around her house. So I phoned her up, offered her some money to take of couple of them off her hands, et voila! In the end, it seems, regardless of what I thought I wanted for Christmas what I actually got was something to paint on. Weird. Very weird. Weird because I liked it.

It also seems, deep down, I must have wanted those canvases because, in the end, all I really wanted to do during the holidays was paint a portrait of Viggo Mortensen, alluding to his character as he (it?) appeared in Lord of the Rings (you know, a kind of freeze frame and snap a picture and print it and paint it kind of thing) because I had the big idea to do so a while ago as a form of commentary of popular culture and the intriguing artist types who seem as out-there as I feel most of the time and yet make me so…well, you know… So. Something. Or something like that.

If I had just thought about it a little harder, I would have come to these conclusions earlier. It’s all so vaguely obvious to me now.

There is a moral and it is this: In the end, I have discovered, it is much more pleasurable to give than to receive, especially for us indecisive types. Lesson learned.

Thusly concludes my personal saga of Christmas 2009. The end.