Christmas stories 2006
Christmas – like no other occasion – seems to inspire the highest highs and the lowest lows. Here, six of our favourite writers relive the family arguments, defective presents and obscene commercialisation that makes this time of year so damn special.

Christmas mysteries of the Chicken McNuggets as explained by macrobiotic star people and Aunt Harriet’s magic Ouija board, Sufjan Stevens

Two weeks before Christmas, my parents read a pamphlet on the industrialisation of food and told us from then on we would eat macrobiotic. The next day, my father showed us the menu for Christmas dinner: kale, Chinese lettuce, Shiitake mushrooms, seaweed crackers and a tofu roast. I was eight years old, my brother was nine, and my sisters were 10 and 11. All we wanted was a Charleston Chew and a bag of Twizzlers. But these were now off-limits. My parents read somewhere that food colouring in breakfast cereals promoted hyperactivity in children; my mother served oatmeal and salty bran flakes with flaxseed. If we begged for sweetener, she gave us sliced bananas. My parents joined the natural food co-op and signed up for colon cleansings. We were no longer allowed soda pop, potato chips, fast food, or chewing gum. My mother told us that corn syrup caused cancer. “It’s in everything!” she said, reading from a can of spaghetti sauce. Soon after that, she stopped shaving her legs. She stopped wearing undergarments, bras, or anything acrylic. Our Christmas stockings had to be knit from sheep’s wool from Switzerland. My mother was convinced that tinsel was radioactive. My father bought hemp baseball caps and organic cotton dental floss for stocking stuffers. We decorated the tree with organic popcorn and orange peels. My father burned incense and read selections from Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse.

At night, I prayed to God: Please send me a candy bar! Please send me Laffy Taffy. I wrote a desperate letter to Santa Claus. “Dear Santa: My parents have become hippies. I don’t want ginger gum and miso soup packets for Christmas. I don’t want bee’s wax hair treatment or a silica face mask from the hot springs of Iceland. I don’t want a home enema kit or a toothbrush made from recycled newspapers. I just want some Chicken McNuggets.”

I got my wish. After Christmas dinner, my mother had an allergic reaction to the tofu roast. She had hot flashes, her skin broke out in hives, and her throat swelled up. My father flipped through the book of homeopathic remedies and told her to suck on a stick of liquorice root. It didn’t do a thing. He told her to bite the rind of a grapefruit. It didn’t do a thing. He finally took her to the hospital, where they pumped her stomach, and made her sleep next to a man with dementia. The next morning, when she came home, bleary-eyed and white as a ghost, my mother broke down and begged for a milkshake from McDonald’s. My father shrugged. We climbed in the car and got Big Macs and Chicken McNuggets from the drive-thru.

The following year, my parents read too many Anne Rice novels and brought home bags of garlic cloves for stocking stuffers. They put up mirrors in every room, just to be safe. My father watched a TV special on Celtic myths and superstitions and decided to laminate four-leaf clovers and give them away as Christmas lanyards. He encouraged us to wear them around our necks, like ID tags, to usher in good fortune. Each one had our name and a famous quote from a James Joyce novel. Mine said: “Hi! My name is Sufjan. History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” When my mother accidentally broke the mirror in the coat closet, she made us each wear a lucky rabbit’s foot on our belt loops. But on New Year’s Day, my oldest sister broke her arm sledding down the hillside gardens and my father was laid off from his job at the state park. A few weeks later, our dog was run over by a snowplough, and my mother said enough is enough. She asked that we give back the rabbit’s foot key chain and the lucky wheat penny and the yin yang talisman bracelets and the four-leaf clovers. She burned them in the wood stove. My father took out a life insurance policy and started buying lottery tickets and my mother used the garlic cloves in her egg frittata.

A few years later, everyone was talking about the Christmas lunar eclipse. My parents considered this rare celestial phenomenon an important sign. They had begun to prescribe to the notion that they were “Star People”, space aliens from another planet temporarily inhabiting human bodies. There were millions of Star People on earth waiting for the Universal Power Source to end all the nonsense of war and suffering once and for all. There was a paperback book frequenting our kitchen countertops (Are You a Star People? Am I a Star People? by Curtis Leopard) with illustrations of crystal shapes, interplanetary objects, illuminated faces with concentric eyes and first-person accounts of past life experiences on other planets. There was a description of one man, a short-order cook named Garth from Cleveland, who recalled having once been a Martian king with a harem. Santa Claus, the book claimed, was a Star Person with intimacy-displacement issues. He went around giving gifts because he wasn’t shown enough affection by his space mother.

My own mother was certain that, in another life, on another planet, she had been a witch. She pointed out residuals: her proclivity for sweeping the floor with a medieval-like broom she had bought at an antique shop; she also claimed to possess the powers of telekinesis. We had yet to see her move anything, not even our disbelief. My mother’s evidence was an inventory of rhetorical questions. “Have you ever felt out of touch?” she read from the book cover. “Have you ever felt restless and homesick for no apparent reason?” She pointed out other symptoms: acne, headaches, an interest in learning foreign languages. This made me worry. I had just started high school and my face was breaking out, little ruddy patches around the flat face of my chin, where I was starting to grow stubble. I was also taking first year German. My mother gave me a look over her reading glasses. “You seem to fit the bill,” she said. “Do you ever get migraines?” For Christmas that year, I got a copy of Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles and a telescope from Sears, but it was too overcast to see anything through it, not even the lunar eclipse.

Then there was the Christmas when Aunt Harriet got divorced and moved in with us for a few weeks. My parents put her up in the living room, in a cot next to the Christmas tree. “Don’t bother Aunt Harriet,” my mother warned us. “She is going through menopause.” I was only seven years old; I thought menopause was something like a very long vacation you take when you have been working too hard. “That’s about right,” my mother said. “But maybe keep that to yourself.”

Aunt Harriet smoked unfiltered cigarettes and read Vogue magazines cover to cover. At night, after a few drinks, she would call us to the living room and pull out the Ouija board, which she used for spiritual guidance. We all circled around her, me and my brother and sisters, touching our fingertips to the heart-shaped pointer as if we were praying in church. Aunt Harriet asked the spirits if there was life on other planets, was there any meaning in life, was there hope for Ethiopians starving in the desert, who would be the next president of the United States of America? After each inquiry, the pointer would seamlessly slip and slide, spelling out ominous answers, and I felt my hands turn hot. “Go ahead and ask something,” Aunt Harriet nudged me. I racked my brain, rummaging through a catalogue of the world’s mysteries, unanswered questions, the secrets of the universe. I decided on something less grand: “What will Santa Claus get me for Christmas?” My sisters snorted and snickered, rolling their eyes, poking my gut with their pointer finger. “Santa Claus doesn’t even exist!” they hollered, and right then all the powers of the Ouija board had left us.

On Christmas morning, our mother told us the news: Aunt Harriet had packed up her suitcase and taken a bus to Canada, where she wanted to teach yoga classes to disabled children. “She is having a midlife crisis,” my mother said, passing out gifts from under the tree. “God help her!” Aunt Harriet had left a few things next to her empty cot – a shoe box of New Age crystals, a carton of cigarettes and the Ouija board, bent and frayed at the corners like a dog’s toy. After presents, after Christmas dinner, and after our parents had gone to their rooms to read the newspaper, me and my brother and sisters tiptoed down to the living room and pulled out Aunt Harriet’s things. My brother emptied the cigarettes on the carpet and built a Civil War fortress out of them. My sisters made earrings out of the crystals using sewing thread and fishhooks. When no one was looking, I took the Ouija board to my room and propped it up on the pillows on my bed, concentrating on the mysteries of the universe.

“Will Aunt Harriet be OK?” I asked, resting my fingertips on the pointer. “Will she ever remarry? Will she find peace and happiness? Is there any meaning in life?” Slowly, the pointer trembled awake, inching over the alphabet like a slow-motion hockey puck. “Yes, yes, yes,” the board assured me after each question. “Everything will be just fine!”

Sufjan Stevens’ new five-CD collection ‘Songs for Christmas’ (Rough Trade) is out now