A wedding gift to her and Grandpa, it perched on top of their china cabinet every Christmas season, casting its gaze upon all who dined in the little red brick duplex on Huddleston Avenue.
As a child, it creeped me out.
Maybe it was the dour countenance of the angel, who rather ominously stole the show from the King of Kings by virtue of forced perspective.
Or perhaps it was the weary eyes of the crackled, bedraggled figurines as they trudged to the stable in a zombie trance.
Regardless, childhood Christmas dinners at Grandma's house commenced with eyes glued to china plate, wondering if Santa Claus might just be a healthier Christmas alternative after all.
Grandma's nativity--a little girl's nightmare since 1981.
And I inherited this heirloom. And every Christmas of my married life, I've allowed it to haunt the mantle of my home.
I'm a big girl now. I can handle it.
Like most antique enthusiasts, I love heirlooms because they whisper stories. Though I am not in the habit of conversing with inanimate objects, save a few necessary swear words when my sewing machine jams, I have been thinking about my grandma a lot since I resurrected her old nativity from its seasonal cellar grave a few weeks ago.
Grandma was many things atypical of traditional grandmothers.
She loved her office job at Polysar Plastics. Fiercely proud of her Scotch-Irish heritage, she could rock a plaid woolen Pendleton suit like nobody else who ever dared to wear shirt-to-skirt plaid.
She loved dogs. Grandma was never one to gitchy-gitchy-goo peoples' babies, but she could carry on entire conversations with any random dog she met on our walks down Huddleston Avenue.
She hated to cook.
She got us all hooked on garage sales. The Saturdays of my childhood summers were spent with the five of us and Grandma, crammed into our Chevy Malibu Classic, scrounging the yards, sidewalks, driveways, garages, and houses of the good residents of Summit County to unearth whatever sticker-priced bargains tickled our fancy. "Treasures," Grandma would call them.
Grandma had a love and respect for the English language, and she was not shy about sharing her enthusiasm. One of my favorite memories of Grandma at her finest is when she tersely informed our waitress at Jack Horner's restaurant that she would have liked to order the mozzarella sticks (my siblings' and my favorite) but that the menu had mistakenly spelled "mozzarella" with two R's. Clearly, she could not order a misspelled appetizer. When the waitress quipped they would taste just the same, Grandma gasped: "They most certainly would not taste the same! 'Mozzarella' spelled with two R's would taste like mud!"
None of us kids got "mozzarrella" sticks that day.
She was never without a good book in the evenings, and she sure as heck never missed an episode of Jeopardy. Grandma could spout correct answers to every single clue with a supernatural speed that would put Ken Jennings to shame.
She had a distinct human side, though. Mom tells me Grandma was often short-tempered while trying to raise six kids on North Hill. Even during their duplex years when it was just her, Grandpa, and my disabled uncle, Grandma would frequently retreat to the spare bedroom to type the family history or dye intricately beautiful Ukrainian Easter eggs while listening to Mitch Miller records on repeat.
Brief oases of individual expression to prevent the soul from drowning in the ordinary.
Sounds familiar.
As a child, I loved my grandma, but I never fully appreciated her. Many times, like the time I fell off their exercise bike and she promptly informed my mom that it wasn't a toy for kids, I wondered why she couldn't be the milk and homemade cookies sort of character flaunted in story books as the grandmotherly ideal.
I am learning, though. On these seemingly endless days when I'm nearly one lost binky shy of a mommy meltdown and motherly love and responsibility battles a need for retreat and individuality, I feel like I finally understand Grandma a little bit better.
This Christmas, the nativity and I have reconciled. No longer do I drop my gaze in submission to the ominous angel. Nor do I shudder at the zombie shepherds. Maybe after thirty-three years, we finally understand each other. An unlikely kinship among the crackled, bedraggled, and weary. Haunting and misunderstood to the casual observer. But beautiful in trudging forward.
Seeking a glimmer of peace.
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