Sliding Into Sentimentality

Today, I bookmarked three Christmas movies to watch on Netflix. Granted, they were the much vaunted queer ones but still, they were Christmas movies.

I used to feel a literal pain in my back teeth at the site of Christmas decorations. The same sharp twinge that came from biting directly into a stale lemon candy stick, you know, the kind that only seem to be sold in farm stands and gift shops on Cape Cod. Schamltz made my skin burn; unearned earnestness made me flinch; any emotion that wasn’t delicately strained or bathed in camp was very hard to process.

But then came this year. This terrible, terrible year and I will take sweetness in any form it comes in, even if it is the equivalent of those packets of honey substitute they give out at the breakfast buffet at especially sleazy motels, and not the real thing bursting poetically from the behinds of bees.

As a younger person, when I saw this appetite for sweetness in my elders, I pitied them. My mother, who has had a long and interesting and very hard life, used to collect these figurines of Black babies. They were made out of pecan husks, somehow, she claimed, and she bought three or four of them every time she went to visit here cousins down south. The Black babies were always in various forms of play—pulling at each others’ pigtails or sitting on disembodied stools. Often times they were literally eating watermelon. One figurine was of a little Black boy joyfully cavorting in a barrel of cotton and when the head chipped off during a move and my mom kept the figure anyways, just with the disembodied head beside it, I made the very tasteless joke that it looked like it was commemorating a lynching.

At sixteen, I could not understand how my mother, an emotionally intelligent woman, was suckered in by those awful, kitschy-in-the-wrong way, figurines. Couldn’t she see how hoaky they were? That same spring I coveted a silver lighter at Urban Outfitters that had a Billie Holiday portrait inset on its base. I didn’t have Urban Outfitters type of money at 16 but I flattered myself that I had the taste to appreciate such a fine specimen that certainly was not the same as the sentimental knick knacks arrayed across my mother’s credenza.

But having lived through a pandemic and a complete upending of all major aspects of my life this year, I have to say I get it. I understand the need for comfort. I sleep now curled against the softest down comforter I can find. And I will watch my Christmas movies, but only in secret, a vice, consumed on my laptop, not the communal tv, so no one in my family can see how soft I’ve become.