Lights out in Bethlehem and why that matters

I keep thinking about the little town of Bethlehem, the avowed city of Jesus Christ’s birth in Israel’s West Bank, and how they put away their decorations for Christmas, before Christmas.

The majority of Bethlehem’s population is Muslim. As the Israeli-Palestinian war wages on, families are grieving the loss of a staggering number of lives, the largest share of which includes women and children. Accordingly, the local government and churches of Bethlehem conferred and decided to remove the Christmas decore and to scale back any festivities in the town that had been a major tourist destination in the past. 

What does it even mean for one faith tradition to choose to bear witness to another’s? It seems so powerful, and generous, and kind of hard to believe, honestly. I don’t find humans, namely Americans entrenched in a culture of capitalist overconsumption, especially good at holding space for others’ grief even in times of great sorrow.

We are often so hellbent on being human doings than human beings.

I think about Sandy Hook. I think about twenty six families burying children and teachers slain. I think about Christmas and Hannukah presents that would never be opened. I think about parents receiving condolence cards instead of Christmas cards.

And then I think about how school shootings have risen dramatically. How the past two years have seen historically high numbers, practically one per week. It makes me want to hunker down like Bethlehem for awhile.

Following Sandy Hook, Ann Curry had suggested 26 good deeds in response, and a movement of contagious kindness spread. Channeling so much sadness into positive action can feel productive, and even healing. However, sometimes the very act of abiding--that is, to take no action but to merely endure alongside the bereaved and hurting--is the kindest way to show up. 

In C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed, a memoir about the loss of his wife, Lewis writes about the impossible limbo of receiving condolences from others, “I see people, as they approach me, trying to make up their minds whether they’ll ‘say something about it’ or not. I hate if they do, and if they don’t.” Similarly, writer Sarah Wildman shares in a recent essay about the loss of her 14 year-old child, that eventually the text messages “slow and stop.” She notes that “holiday markers are as hard as promised” but it is her daughter’s daily absence that is the “cruelest blow.”

I think how I might write an imaginary holiday letter, sent to the masses of people who are kind enough to remember me and my mailbox at this time of year. Hey Y’all. First Divorced Christmas. Totally broke! Trying to meet my healthcare deductible! How ‘bout that monologue in the Barbie Movie, though?! Kids are fine. Funny. Sometimes moody. Me too, honestly. I’m mostly okay-ish. Sending love from Boston! xoxo

We try ever to say the rightest thing, to impart the most appropriate greeting. Then life knocks you sideways and you realize sometimes you’ve got to put your decorations away. There’s just no masking the sads.

Like the city of Bethlehem, no one is asking us to dull our sparkle. Solidarity is not a store looking to hire more seasonal employees, but rather a union that relies on volunteers. Sometimes the kindest thing we can do is merely to consider others’ pain. To imagine the space left by the empty chair at the dinner table, or the spot on the mantle where they hoped another stocking might hang. To wonder how great their river of sorrow must extend and into which tributaries of their lives it touches.

If the moment feels right to stand in solidarity with someone in pain this holiday, I hope we can do so. The experience may unite us with generations who have felt left out in the cold at the holidays, with no room left at the inn. 

Bunk Bed Assembly

I am assembling a bunk bed in an otherwise empty bedroom and the metaphors abound. I am profoundly aware that I am stacking bed frames and stories upon stories upon stories.

I am here because I chose this hard, this stack of hards. I chose to leave a marriage of 17 years this last year. In this, I am not heroic. I am merely a woman who could not see a future where she could model good parenting and good partnership simultaneously, given the way a life’s fabric can shred and fray. I am here, perhaps, because I lacked imagination of a future where we rebuilt our sinking IKEA bed plank by plank. Or maybe I am here because I leaned in to my imagination, where I believed I might be capable of starting over, of co-parenting and reducing the atmospheric tension, and betting on myself.

This bunk bed will not build itself, which is fine as I enjoy the tedious meditation of Allen wrenching screws and double-checking instruction manual diagrams. My co-worker tells me I should invite a friend over to help me, but I have always enjoyed the solitude of a manual task. The times when I have had to share a job and to communicate to someone else the precise logistical maneuvers I intend to make, (rather than simply winging it) has always exposed my feverish independence. I am a firstborn with a stubborn streak and yet I am utterly at peace as I hex key my way through each bar and beam of this bunked contraption.

My bunkmate of 17 years was remarkably gifted in curiosity. He wanted to know how a thing was made, how the machine was engineered, what made a person tick. He knew how to build a thing before he set about doing the dang thing. He knew what people needed before they knew themselves. I could never project so far; my high beams were always too dim. I muddled through, killing plants and misassembling dressers so that the drawers clunked off the rails every time they opened.

This bunk bed is not a twinset but a full-over-full mattress bunk bed for the children whose limbs and senses of self are growing. Their inward and outward journeys are bewildering and beautiful to me. I am the woman who once lied on their bedroom floors for hours until they were fast asleep, but now I assemble the beds they will prefer I never come near, not even to wash the sheets they deny ever need to be washed. They are close siblings and will not allow the other to be left behind, but they will undoubtedly fight over who will get stuck with top bunk. They will stay up late debating the deeper meanings of Kendrick Lamar lyrics. Bars, man.

I carry long metal spindles and hook them into the strange catch-holes of this bedframe. This bunk bed was bought with Amazon gift cards from thankful student families who could not possibly have known how they are allowing me to build something new for my little family. How they are giving my children, and perhaps their mom, as well, a place to find rest.

I Am Fuller McAllister, Alleged Bed-Wetter

Happy Holidays. This is the annual reminder that I am now a Grown-Ass Man and, not only do I not need reminders at every friendly fete to go easy on the fluids, but I am here to clear my name as an alleged bed-wetter.

Like all caboose babies in a large fold like the McAllisters, I was the butt of every joke. My cousin Buzz? The obvious source of my angst. He was a stuffed sausage full of hormones, with an ill-advised haircut for the first 32 years of his life. (No one keeps a tarantula as a pet who is not deeply insecure.) The only time he wasn’t wielding insults at me was when he was shoving his piehole full of cheese pizza.

My cousin Kevin was not much better, though I know he is still working through the PTSD of being abandoned two Christmases in a row by his parents. He may have first spread the rumor that I wet the bed, but my dude was just Going Through It. His only “friends” were a septuagenarian bachelor and a pigeon lady. His whole life was a cry (::slaps hands on cheeks:: AHHH!) for help.

Indeed, to merely survive as a McAllister was a daily struggle. “But Fuller!” you may be saying, “Look at all that economic security your family had! And all that togetherness!” To which I will remind you that the early 90s were still the wild, wild west of white privilege. So what if I did whiz the mattress once in a blue moon? Do you think perhaps it was because of a slightly insecure attachment to the “adults” who always appeared to be asleep at the wheel? Explain to me how they never faced charges of frequent criminal negligence of minors.

You want to talk about “Les Incompétents”?! Look no further than my own parents, Frank and Leslie: the epitome of learned helplessness. Big Frank was a tightwad who never paid anything forward but tone deafness. And ol’ Les may have forbidden us from drinking cola, except on special occasions, but this was only to enable Big Frank’s addiction to the syrupy goodness he would guzzle in the garage, crushing cans of Coke and Pepsi — with a large rum chaser. No wonder he was always a crank. Who calls children “little jerks” to their faces? Especially at a big family gathering? It is only in the fullness of time that I’ve realized I am the product of a functional alcoholic and a codependent doormat.

photo courtesy 20th Century Studios

For this reason, it feels extra cruel that everyone is still telling me to “Go Easy on the Pepsi” and ribbing me with reminders that the “rubber sheets are already packed.” I am still processing the cluster of my childhood in which I was inexplicably dressed each day like an academic research librarian. This year, I am not your Tiny Tim. I’m steering clear of your spiked egg nog. I will not be disappointed at all if I did, in fact, make my family disappear.