Christmas Day 2016 was celebrated in a manner common to many Colorado families, at the old Victorian house on Loma Street. The house had been appropriately decorated for the season; the Christmas tree had been dressed with heirloom ornaments, reflecting many years of previous celebrations. Family members gathered; thoughtful gifts were exchanged; a shared breakfast of waffles, eggs, bacon, potatoes, coffee and orange juice (with or without champagne) was enjoyed. Conversations were carefully conducted, in keeping with the seasonal spirit — goodwill, and peace on earth.
The old house has been occupied, on and off over the past 22 years, by various members of the Hudson family, but one prominent member of the clan was absent from the celebration this year. The family’s matriarch, Clarissa — mother to our three children, and grandmother to the seven grandchildren — had passed away three weeks earlier, on December 7, at the age of 60.
Clarissa and I had shared 36 years together, spent mostly in Alaska and Colorado, prior to our divorce in 2009… years filled with numerous joyful blessings and happy achievements, and equally, with numerous disappointments and dashed expectations.
As I did my last-minute Christmas shopping in the days leading up to December 25, I was acutely aware of the consumerist, materialist culture that has become an overlay to our lives, here in Colorado and in America — here, a parent pushing a shopping cart loaded with plastic toys; there, a wife picking out just the right shirt or package of socks for her husband; over there, a bachelor searching for the ideal pair of earrings for his new lover.
Making my own selections, I found myself wondering: What, exactly, am I teaching my children and grandchildren about the meaning of life, as I purchase these mass-produced products?
When I met Clarissa in Alaska, back in 1973, she was still in high school, and just beginning to fully appreciate the conflicted culture in which she lived. Her mother was Tlingit Indian, raised in a tiny fishing village where strict tribal relationships and traditions — and dysfunctions — formed the framework of one’s life. Clarissa was the first child from her mother Irene’s second marriage; Irene eventually retired for a long career with the state government.
Her father had grown up in the Philippines, son of a Jewish businessman who, at age 40, had married a 13-year-old orphan and fathered a half-dozen children. Clarissa’s father, William, and his mother and siblings had escaped to Seattle during the Japanese invasion of the Philippines; the grandfather died in a concentration camp. William worked most of his life as a janitor.
When I arrived in Juneau, I naturally brought with me my own set of family values, derived from my own two parents — Californians who had grown up as next-door neighbors on an urban street in Oakland. My mother’s parents had grown up in rural California, and embraced typically American working-class values. I cannot rightly say much about by dad’s parents’ background, other than the fact that grandpa working for the Southern Pacific railroad and grandma was a housewife; they both died before I had a chance to know them. My father became a high school teacher; my mom stayed home and tended to the house, the cleaning, the home-cooked meals.
I suppose we could view the values that we acquire from our parents and grandparents – the values that we bring to our relationships — as gifts. Often, unappreciated gifts, perhaps.
We might also view those values as curses.
When my children were young, I received a gift from a college girlfriend. I can’t say whether it was a Christmas gift, or a birthday gift, or just a random gift — but I clearly remember the title of the book: The Gift.
The book, written by Lewis Hyde — with the full title of The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property — explored the various ways that “gifts” are treated in a few disparate cultures around the world. He wrote, for example, about the gifting traditions that the European immigrants confronted, when they arrived in “The New World” during the 1600s and 1700s. Among the East Coast Indians, it seems, a “gift” was treated as a very special type of possession. If you were presented with a “gift” by a fellow Indians, the item did not actually belong to you — it was merely in your care, temporarily, until such time that you found a person to whom you could past it on to. Such “gifts” were typically items of such value that no one person could be expected to “own” the item. A peace pipe, for example. Or a tribal robe of power. A headdress. A prize horse.
When the Europeans arrived in America, and found themselves the recipient of a gift from an Indian tribal leader — say, a gift of a precious peace pipe, or a perhaps a robe — the Europeans were greatly confused when the Indian leaders appeared a few years later, demanding to know why the gift had not been subsequently given away to someone within the Indian tribe.
Thus the European term, “Indian giver.”
During the lengthy settlement of our divorce, Clarissa and I struggled with the ownership of the old house on Loma Street, where so much joy and sadness had taken place. I was willing to sell the house we’d purchased together in 1994, in line with my upbringing; my mother and father did not view a house as a family heirloom, but rather as a useful but temporary place of residence. Clarissa, meanwhile, argued that she wanted to leave the house to one of our children, as was the tradition among both the Tlingits and the Filipinos.
Our compromise agreement, as part of the divorce settlement, was an attempt to bridge those conflicting values — my view of a house as an investment that should be disposed whenever appropriate, and Clarissa’s view of a house as a family heirloom, to be passed on to a future generation, as a gift.
That agreement was left only partially fulfilled by Clarissa’s passing, but the expectation — that the house would eventually become a gift, left to one of our children — remains. Expectations are powerful, especially when we are talking about the ephemeral world of gift exchange.
The legal system of Colorado, however, is not generally based upon the concepts of gifts and generosity; rather, it’s based upon the idea of written contracts, faithfully and fully executed by both parties — even when they once shared a marriage and children.
What is an old house? Is it a capital investment, meant to be sold, perhaps at a profit? Is it a family treasure, clearly meant as an eventual gift to future generations?
In the very midst of a cold and sometimes heartless legal structure — a structure of written contracts, and agreements, and penalty clauses that we’ve learned to use to define our human relationships — we have our families, and Christmas, and the promise of goodwill and peace on earth.