The Unwatch

By Anne Marie Oomen
Sun contributor
This essay was previously published in Traverse Magazine
As small children, my siblings and I made a tradition of watching for Santa on Christmas Eve. Five restless kids waited at the single-paned, north window of the old farmhouse, tugging pajamas, poking ribs, fighting for space at the glass. We breathed away thick frost so we could stare through frostholes to watch Santa land. We placed our hands on the glass and melted handprints on the window until we were scolded. We tumbled against each other like puppies, too young to think how our watch must have paralleled the shepherds.’ Too young to think of the silliness of such a thing.

When we become, to our surprise, adults, the watches fade, replaced instead by “unwatches.” Now, we are too cool to admit that we still delight in “watching.” Over time, we develop its opposite, the “unwatch.” These unwatches evolve after we leave the farm, when we have gone away to college, jobs, travel, and various adventures such as marriage or politics. Just as our parents decide to clean out our rooms, we do what most kids do—we come back, especially at the holidays. We drive the blue highways skirting our Michigan orchards to the old white farmhouse where for years our parents, having pretty good survival skills by then, sponsor the unwatch.
Rule One: We have to arrive home on Christmas Eve in time for midnight mass. We come, drifting in with our boyfriends and girlfriends, our fiancés and spouses. We drink hot cider punch.
Rule two: We attend midnight mass together, crowded into two long pews where we are only occasionally reverent. We sing our own version of carols, reinventing verses that would have shocked the choir if they could have heard the words we mutter just loudly enough for those in close proximity to hear. “Oh, little ton of battered ham…” was typical of these fractured carols. Despite our mockery, we cannot miss mass. We may be irreverent but we know our roots. And besides, mass is the rite of passage that leads to the Unwatch Breakfast which occurs, not in the morning, but in the middle of the night, beginning as soon as we arrive home from midnight mass.
Rule three: We are not, wouldn’t be caught dead, watching for Santa. Santa is a mercenary figure invented by nineteenth century card companies to turn a quick profit, didn’t we all know? Santa is the propagation of commercial enterprises that take advantage of small children and old people. We are above all that. While we were NOT watching for him to show up, we try to catch each other watching. This behavior produces conversations that border on the ridiculous.
“Hey, Dad, how come you’re up this late?” I ask
“I’m keeping company with your mother.” He winks.
“I think you’re watching for Santa.”
“No, I’m flirting with your mother.”
“You’re sure you’re not waiting for Santa?”
“Look at this woman. Do I need to think about Santa?”
“You’re right, Dad.” I know when I’ve lost.
Or my brother Tom asks my sister, “Hey Marijo. Why you staring out the window? Watching for Santa?”
“Just looking at the stars.” Very coolly.
“You’re looking for the reindeer, aren’t you?”
“I’m looking at the big dipper.”
“Star light, star bright, where’s that guy you were starry about last night.”
A chorus of groans would follow.
“Hey, you’re singing Christmas carols.” Rick accuses Patti.
“I like them.” Patti’s humming.
“You’re trying to lure Santa.”
“With this voice?”
“You got that sinus infection again?”
“Right.”
We sit around the oak table, eating homemade venison sausage and scrambled eggs with green pepper and Velveeta. We talk until dawn, covering everything from the price of cherries to the price of a wedding dress, from making mulled wine to making babies. We make coffee and pour eggnog laced with the last of Dad’s whiskey. We linger and yawn and wait and pretend not to wait. Through this long unwatch, we have been together. The mask that we didn’t care to watch out for a bearded myth in red or for each other would fall away. We had come again to the single-paned window, breathed away the frost, looked through the glass into our own small darkness, poked each other in the ribs and placed our hands on the cold. Sometimes we see stars, but mostly we find our own and each other’s breath, a miracle we never grow out of, that we need only the smallest of guises to reenact as something it is not.
Anne Marie Oomen chairs the Creative Writing Department at the Interlochen Art’s Academy. She lives near Empire.