The Christmas Chair

There is a strange tradition in my family, but it doesn’t go back that far. Even so, the Christmas Chair is something we cherish. The history of it is both funny and, kinda not, I guess.

My maternal grandmother wasn’t what you would call an observant jew. I don’t think she ever was, but by the time I knew her she certainly wasn’t. Which is fine, of course, I mean hell my own immediate family history with religion is kinda kooky.

Here’s the shortest version: My mother and father both converted away from Judaism before they even met and raised their kids by sending them to Catholic school but never doing anything close to religious at all ever and kinda mingling up different stuff from all over.

Right. Moving on.

Back in the early 50s, when they’d been living in Staten Island for a bit, and my mother and her brothers were in their teens, my grandmother decided they should celebrate Christmas, not Hannukah.

Hannukah was Jewish. Jewish was different. Jewish didn’t fit in. Did she worry about problems from being the Jewish family on the block? Did she just want to fit in, from imagined pressure, or real pressure in the neighborhood?

I don’t know, she never said, just wouldn’t address it when asked.

If you think about it, it’s kinda dark, really. At least potentially, and with enough evidence (given society then and the area) to make you wonder.

But the thing about my grandmother was that she did things her own way. She decided they would celebrate Christmas but wouldn’t go as far as a tree being allowed. No decorations, either. But the lack of a tree is critical to this.

So the kids wanted to know, since it was Christmas, what should they put their presents under?

Obviously, my grandmother designated a chair.

Because to her this made perfect sense. Couldn’t have a tree, in her mind, but still wanted to fit in and celebrate Christmas. So you needed presents, because Christmas. But where to put them, because see once more: No tree. Well, obviously, a nearby chair. Not a table, not just in a corner, no, they had to go under a chair.

And once they went under that chair once, why would you change it to be a different chair? It was like a fake tree, in a way, to her. You could just reuse it, and the designation never wavered.

The chair itself was a fairly rickety spindly chair. I wouldn’t trust it to hold more than maybe 120 pounds, max. No one sat in the chair, normally. Decorative chairs. They used to be a thing I guess.

And every year, they would put presents under the Christmas Chair.

One year my uncles got my grandfather a set of new tires for the car. They wrapped the tires, stacked them, and sat the chair on top of them.

Because presents went under the chair. That was the rule.

We heard about the chair for years, and then one day when I was a kid, my grandmother redecorated, and the chair ended up in the apartment I grew up in.

That Christmas we had a flash of genius.

When my grandmother came over she saw there were presents for other people but nothing for her. She seemed sad, as she sat, carefully perched on a rickety chair that had come from her house. She was the only one who dared sit in it.

And we laughed and told her to look under the chair. Because, how could she have not noticed, that was the Christmas Chair. And so her presents were under it.

The chair is still at that apartment, but no one uses it now, no presents go under it anymore, I hear, of course since my grandmother passed over a decade ago. But it lies in wait. Because one day it shall, somehow, serve as the Christmas Chair once more. I’m sure of it.