An orphan’s guide to celebrating Christmas

December 25 was always a day of sadness for my family, and in that way also for me.

On Christmas Day 1950, my father’s younger brother died in his lap. A week or two earlier, 8-year-old PJ had stepped on a rusted can. This was rural Ireland before the good years. Their home had no running water or heat and the leak had not been properly cleaned. When tetanus took over PJ’s body, my grandparents knew he needed help. But the hospital was three hours away and no one in town had a car.

Finally a good Samaritan showed up. In his backseat, my dad held PJ over his legs as they rushed to Galway – but they never made it. My young father returned from that horrible journey and my grandmother said to him, “Be careful that your father does not throw himself into the tide.” Then she went to bed and stayed there for a year.

“After that there was no more Christmas,” my father told me. “Pop used to whistle – but after PJ died, never again.”

The song also left my father. As an adult, he tried to celebrate Christmas for the sake of my older sister and me. But I guess it was never easy. After my mother died when I was 8, and my sister 9, it must have been almost impossible.

Until we went to college, he managed to put up a tree every year. And he paid a friend to buy us presents. But by late afternoon on the 25th, PJ’s wound would cut into him again. At my aunt and uncle’s dining table he started a wild drunken argument. A few times he stormed out, leaving my sister and me behind.

My father’s holiday behavior became more chaotic as he got older. He refused to leave the house on the 24th and 25th and told my sister and me to do whatever we wanted. But I couldn’t leave him alone. We sat in the dark living room and at one point he told me about PJ again – how his body became as stiff as a board, how no one could help.

My father looked up from his spot on the couch and said, “This is good. I can talk to you like I used to talk to your mother. Then he asked, “Why are you crying?”

“It’s just so sad,” I whispered.

He tilted his head, thought about it, and nodded, Maybe that was it.

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How do you celebrate Christmas? when you have no traditions – and no family?

After my father passed away ten years ago, I was left with questions.

I still had my sister, and at first I clung to her. She and her husband generously hosted me for a few years. But at gatherings with their extended family, I didn’t matter as much as I did to my father; I was the odd one out. And during the last holiday I spent with them, six years ago, I felt so alone in the world that I vowed to make a change.

But what? When December came, I bought thrift store decorations. I have placed two artificial trees, equipped with lights and Art Deco angels. I placed wooden nutcrackers on each side table. But dealing with streamers was easier than making plans. I declined my friends’ invitations, afraid that their family gatherings would make me feel more like an orphan.

The holidays were just around the corner when I finally made arrangements: I would make a Christmas Eve party for it my dear friend Jamie, who would pass my exit on I-95 on his way to his parents. Jamie is a vegan who loves stuffing and sweet potatoes, so I cooked a full table of side dishes, although the surprise of the meal was a tofu turkey. I sent Jamie off with the gift of a plaid flannel shirt and went back inside to hang up the ornament he had made for me.

On Christmas morning, my sister and I opened our presents together over the phone. Late that afternoon, I pan-seared filet mignon as a special treat for myself and a recently divorced friend. I raised a sip of wine to my meat-and-potatoes father, who had spent much of his life protesting my vegetarianism. (“An occasional piece of steak is good for you!” he would say.)

When I served my favorite dessert – molten chocolate cake – he was with me at the time: Before PJ died, my father tried to share the only gift he had received with his little brother: a rare gift of chocolates from a city dweller. But PJ was already too far gone to chew.

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For so long, I longed to make Christmas brighter for my father. But his past weighed too heavily on both of us. He often said to me, “I just want you to be happy.” And I replied, “I will be happy if you are happy.” He could only shake his head.

Now I can finally do what I couldn’t do when he was alive: celebrate. This year is the fifth annual Feast of the Faux Chickens with Jamie, and also the fifth Feast of the Fillets, with several divorcees, among my nutcrackers, angels, and trees.

And this 25th there will be someone new who will share my hard-won traditions with me, a man called me can make me happy, which also makes me happy. We toast my father again with the meat and chocolate. And I will be grateful that I can do for my father what he couldn’t do with PJ: hold him and let him go.

Maura Kelly is a contributing writer at Harvard Public Health; she is working on a memoir about the five years she spent as a hermit.