Christmas 1964: The silver aluminum tree with the red balls and the color wheel (red, blue, green, yellow) is in place in the living room. On Christmas morning, my mother slips on the freshly waxed floor and falls flat on her back. I am three. I approach her with a book I have just unwrapped and say, “Read, Mama, read.” My father observes, “Yeah, Mama, as long as you’re just lying there not doing anything. . . .” 

Christmas 1965: My father is hospitalized, my mother is with him, and I am at my grandparents’ dairy farm, where I receive the ugliest, instantly most-hated doll ever made. She wears an orange dress. 

Christmas 1966: My father has died three months earlier. My grandfather has a heart attack on Christmas Day and dies the next day. At the funeral home, I am transfixed by red-and-white-striped carnations, which look about as natural as my grandfather in his casket. 

Since the Christmases of the 1960s are clearly deteriorating, fast forward to the 1970s. 

Christmas 1972: A big, square, gift-wrapped box is delivered to our house a few days before Christmas. My nephew, who is almost three, falls across it and exclaims, “A color TV!” It is not a color TV, but a little black-and-white portable TV on which I will watch “Sonny & Cher,” “The Midnight Special,” and, on weekends, many late-night swashbuckling movies starring Errol Flynn. 

Pick any Christmas in the 1970s . . . because the year doesn’t matter. At some point, I will come upon my mother alone in the living room, the darkness illuminated only by the color wheel. The aluminum tree is long gone; now there is a white flocked tree, which the color wheel bathes in its rotation of primary colors plus green. My mother stares at the tree and tears run down her face. I don’t know how to make her feel better. This happens every year. Sometimes I ask her if she’s okay; she always says yes. Sometimes I slip away unnoticed, because I think she wants to be alone with her pain. 

Christmas 1983: The last time I travel to Mississippi for Christmas. Green tree, same color wheel, which is at least 20 years old by now and undoubtedly a fire hazard. My two older sisters spend a couple of days circling one another, spoiling for a fight, until one erupts between them on Christmas night, complete with physical violence. My mother cries. I start to think that separating myself from my family is a damned good idea. 

Christmas 1990: The last time I will see my mother. She is visiting me in California. I am baking and decorating (the tree is designer-perfect in red, gold, and purple) and thinking that during this nice, long visit, I can repay her, in a small way, for all the years she took care of me. A week before Christmas, the accusation comes out of nowhere: She doesn’t feel welcome in my home. I am so stunned that at first I think she’s joking. It is quickly clear that she is not. I think, “I am not going to cry, and I am not going to apologize,” because I can’t think what I’ve done to cry about or apologize for. But soon I am doing both.