My Kids Told Me They Were Spending Christmas On A Cruise With The “Fun Grandparents.” When My Son’s Mother-In-Law Asked Me To Feed Her Cat Since I’d “Be Home Alone Anyway,” I Told Her I’d Be In Bethlehem

My son waited until I’d cut the pumpkin pie to tell me I wouldn’t be having Christmas this year.

It was the Sunday after Thanksgiving. I’d done the whole dinner again for the leftovers crowd, because that’s what we’ve always done in our family. Turkey sandwiches on my good rolls, the cranberry relish my husband loved, the last of the pie. Shane and his wife, Tamsin, were at my table in Syracuse with their two kids, Wynn, who is fifteen, and Wiley, who is ten. My daughter, Sabrina, had driven up from Binghamton.

Shane put his fork down and cleared his throat the way his father used to before he told me he’d bought another boat motor.

“Mom,” he said. “So. About Christmas.”

Tamsin looked at her plate.

“Tamsin’s parents booked a cruise,” Shane said. “For everybody. Caribbean. December twenty-first to the twenty-eighth. Ziggy and Sherri are paying for the kids’ cabin. It’s kind of a once-in-a-lifetime thing.”

“Everybody,” I said.

“Well. Us. And Sabrina’s going too. Sherri invited her.”

I looked at my daughter. Sabrina turned pink.

“She said the more the merrier, Mom. I’ve never been on a cruise.”

I set the pie server down very carefully.

“And me?”

There was a pause. It was one of those pauses I’ll remember for the rest of my life.

“We figured you wouldn’t want to,” Shane said. “You don’t like the heat. And you get seasick on the ferry. And you always say Christmas should be at home.”

All of that was true. That was the worst part. Every word of it was true, and none of it was the reason.

The Fun Grandparents

My name is Tova Wexford. I’m sixty-eight. I was a dental office manager for thirty-one years, and I was married to Walker Wexford for thirty-nine years. He’s been gone four years this March.

Ziggy and Sherri Upton are Tamsin’s parents. They are, as Wiley once explained to me with great sincerity when he was six, “the fun grandparents.”

I don’t hold it against Wiley. He was right.

Ziggy sold a chain of tire stores in 2016 and has been on vacation ever since. Sherri has a laugh you can hear across a parking lot and a different pair of sunglasses for every day of the week. They have a condo in Naples, a pontoon boat on Skaneateles Lake, a golf cart with a sound system and a standing reservation at a steakhouse where the waiters know the kids by name. When Wynn turned thirteen, they bought her a phone. When Wiley turned eight, they bought him a dirt bike. I bought him a book about sharks.

I’m the other grandmother. The one with the good rolls and the jigsaw puzzles and the rule about no phones at the table. The one who still makes the kids write thank-you notes.

For thirty-nine years, Christmas was at my house. Walker would put the lights on the blue spruce out front the day after Thanksgiving, even when the ladder made me nervous. We’d do Christmas Eve at church, the kids in their pajamas by ten, stockings at six in the morning, ham at two. After he died, I kept doing every bit of it, ladder and all. Shane put up the lights, and I made the ham, and the house was full.

I suppose I thought it always would be.

“Since You’ll Be Home Alone Anyway”

I didn’t cry at the table. I’m proud of that. I wrapped up the pie, I sent everyone home with sandwiches, and I hugged my grandchildren goodbye. Wynn held on a little longer than usual. She’s fifteen and mostly communicates in shrugs, so I noticed.

Then I closed the door and sat down at my kitchen table and cried until the dishwasher finished.

Two weeks later, Sherri rang my doorbell.

I want to be fair to Sherri. She isn’t a cruel woman. She’s just a woman who has never once in her life thought about what something might feel like to someone else, because she’s never had to.

She was standing on my porch in a white puffer coat and big sunglasses, even though it was December in Syracuse, holding a house key tied to a pink ribbon.

“Tova, hi! Listen, quick favor,” she said, already pressing the key toward me. “You know our cat, Sundae? The girl who usually watches her is going to her boyfriend’s for the holidays. Could you swing by and feed her while we’re on the ship? Just once a day. Twice if you’re bored. Since you’ll be home alone anyway.”

Since you’ll be home alone anyway.

I looked past her, back into my kitchen. The calendar on the fridge still had the twenty-fifth circled in red, the way Walker always did it. The ham I’d already ordered from the butcher was written on a sticky note by the phone.

And something in me, something that had been very polite for sixty-eight years, sat up straight.

“Oh, Sherri,” I said. “I’m so sorry. I won’t be home.”

Sherri’s hand, with the key in it, stopped in midair.

“You won’t?”

“No,” I said. “I’ll be in Bethlehem.”

She lowered the sunglasses.

“Bethlehem,” Sherri said slowly. “Like… the Holy Land?”

“Pennsylvania,” I said. “But I appreciate the thought.”

Hotel Bethlehem

I hadn’t booked anything yet when I said it. I want you to know that. The words came out of my mouth first and the plan came after, which is not how I’ve done anything in my life.

But I knew exactly why I’d said it.

In December of 1983, Walker and I drove down to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, for our first Christmas as a married couple. We were twenty-five and twenty-six and broke, and we stayed one night at the Hotel Bethlehem on Main Street because Walker had read somewhere that the whole town lit up for Christmas. It did. There were candles in every window, a huge lit star on top of the mountain over the town, and a Christmas market where Walker bought me a little glass ornament shaped like a pickle, because he said the German shopkeeper told him it was good luck.

We always said we’d go back. We never did. There was always a reason. The kids, the mortgage, the dental office, his back.

That night, after Sherri had driven off with her key, I got out my reading glasses and called the Hotel Bethlehem.

“I’d like a room,” I said. “December twenty-second through the twenty-sixth. For one.”

The young man on the phone said they were nearly full, but they had a room on the fourth floor looking out over Main Street. It cost more than I’ve ever spent on a hotel in my life.

“I’ll take it,” I said.

Then I called my friend Sigrid, who is seventy and has been a widow longer than I have, and told her what I’d done.

Sigrid was quiet for a second. Then she said, “Tova Wexford, I have been waiting four years for you to do something stupid. I’m so proud of you.”

The Pickle Ornament

I told Shane two days later. I called him on his lunch break.

“Bethlehem?” he said. “Pennsylvania? By yourself? Mom, that’s four hours. In December.”

“I’ve driven in December for fifty years, Shane.”

“But who are you going to spend Christmas with?”

I let that one sit there for a moment. I thought he might hear it. He didn’t.

“I’ll be fine,” I said. “Have a wonderful cruise.”

Sabrina called that night, worried. “Mom, are you doing this because you’re mad?”

“No, honey. I’m doing this because I’m sixty-eight and I’ve never done it.”

That was true, too. Mostly.

I packed my good wool coat and my boots and the red scarf Walker gave me the last Christmas he was alive. I packed a thermos. And on the morning of the twenty-second, before I left, I went into the attic and dug through the ornament boxes until I found a tiny glass pickle wrapped in yellowed tissue.

I put it in my coat pocket. Then I drove south.

Christkindlmarkt

Bethlehem calls itself the Christmas City. I can tell you it has earned the name.

The hotel lobby had a fireplace and a fourteen-foot tree and a woman in a velvet dress playing carols on a piano. My room looked down on Main Street, where every window in every old stone building had a single electric candle in it. That night I stood at the window for an hour and watched the snow start.

I’ll be honest about that first night, because I promised myself I would be. Around nine o’clock, I sat on the edge of the bed in my good coat and very nearly drove home. The room was beautiful and it was quiet in a way my house is never quiet, even now, and I kept looking at the second pillow. I thought about Walker in 1983, standing at a window just like this one in his terrible brown corduroy jacket, saying, “Tova, look, the whole town is lit up for us.” I thought about my children on a ship somewhere, and how nobody had asked me if I wanted to come, and how I’d had to find out what I wanted all by myself.

Then I called Sigrid.

“I’m sitting in a hotel room by myself at Christmas,” I said. “What on earth was I thinking?”

“You were thinking you deserved a window with a view,” Sigrid said. “Is it snowing?”

I looked. It was.

“Then go to bed,” she said, “and get up in the morning and go buy something you don’t need.”

So I did. I went to bed. And for the first time in four years, I didn’t set an alarm.

The next morning, I walked to the Christmas market. It’s held in big white tents near the old steel mill, and it’s full of glassblowers and woodcarvers and women selling knitted mittens. It smelled like cinnamon and hot cider and wood smoke. I bought a cup of mulled wine at eleven in the morning, and nobody said a thing about it.

At a booth selling glass ornaments, I asked the man behind the counter if they had pickles.

He smiled. “Every year,” he said, and pointed. There was a whole row of them, green and gold and shining.

I took the old one out of my pocket and showed him. “My husband bought me this here,” I said. “Christmas of 1983.”

He held it up to the light like it was a diamond. Then he gave it back to me very gently and said, “Then you’d better have a new one for the next forty years.”

He wouldn’t let me pay for it.

That afternoon I went to the oldest bookstore in America, which is right there on Main Street, and bought a mystery novel. I ate a hot pretzel. I took a guided walking tour with a retired history teacher named Ulrike, who told us that the town was named on Christmas Eve in 1741 by a group of Moravian settlers singing a hymn in a log house. I didn’t think about the cruise for almost three hours at a time.

Then my phone buzzed.

It was Wynn.

Wynn

Grandma where r u?? Mom said ur in Bethlehem. Like the real one??

I laughed out loud in the middle of Main Street.

The Pennsylvania one, I typed back. With the star.

A minute later, she called me on video. I could see her in a small, dim cabin with a porthole. Her hair was in a messy bun and she had on a hooded sweatshirt. She did not look like a girl on a once-in-a-lifetime vacation.

“Hi, Grandma,” she said.

“Hi, sweetheart. How’s the ship?”

She shrugged. Then she sighed. Then, because she’s fifteen and I’m her grandmother and she’s been holding it in for three days, it all came pouring out.

Wiley had been seasick since the first night. Shane and Tamsin weren’t speaking because of something about the drink package. Sabrina was sharing a cabin with Wiley and had barely slept. And Ziggy and Sherri, the fun grandparents, had spent nearly every evening in the casino and nearly every afternoon in the spa, which kids weren’t allowed in.

“We saw them at dinner last night,” Wynn said. “Grandpa Ziggy kept calling me Wendy.”

“Oh, honey.”

“And there’s no Christmas stuff,” she said. Her voice cracked a little. “There’s like one tree in the lobby made of champagne glasses. Tomorrow’s Christmas Eve and they’re having a foam party by the pool.”

I looked up at the stone buildings with their candles, and the snow coming down, and the huge star glowing on the mountain over the town.

“Wynn,” I said. “What time is it there tomorrow night?”

Christmas Eve

Every Christmas Eve, the Central Moravian Church in Bethlehem holds candlelight services. I’d read about them in the hotel brochure. I got in line an hour early and stood in the snow with a lot of other people’s grandmothers.

The church is plain and white and beautiful inside, with tall windows and dark wooden pews. At a certain point in the service, the ushers come down the aisles carrying trays of lit beeswax candles, each one wrapped at the bottom with a little ruffle of red paper so the wax doesn’t drip on your hands. They hand one to every single person. Then the lights go down.

I’d already called Wynn. I’d propped my phone in my scarf so she could see.

When the lights went off and the whole church was lit only by hundreds of small yellow flames, and the choir began to sing, I heard a little sound come out of my coat pocket.

It was my granddaughter, somewhere off the coast of Mexico in a cabin with a porthole, crying.

After the service, I stood on the church steps with my candle, and she said, very quietly, “That’s what Christmas is supposed to look like.”

“I know, honey.”

“Can I show Dad?”

“Of course you can.”

I didn’t hear from Shane that night. But at 1:14 in the morning, my phone lit up with a text from him. It was just one line.

I’m sorry, Mom.

I read it four times. Then I turned off the light and slept better than I had in four years.

Christmas Day

I want to tell you that I spent Christmas Day alone and was perfectly happy. That would be a nice story. But it wouldn’t be true.

I spent it with Ulrike, the retired history teacher, and her sister, Tilly, and a widower from Delaware named Severin Upshaw. No. I’m going to stop myself, because Sigrid is going to read this and get ideas. He was just a nice man who knew a great deal about railroads. We met at breakfast in the hotel dining room, where they’d seated all of us singles at one long table by the window. We ended up spending the whole day together.

We went to a sing-along in the hotel lobby. We walked up to see the putz, which is what the Moravians call the big nativity scenes they build with moss and little carved figures, sometimes taking up a whole room. We ate a ridiculous Christmas dinner of roast goose and red cabbage. Tilly ordered a second dessert and dared the rest of us to judge her.

At four o’clock, I posted three pictures. The star on the mountain. The candles at the church. Me in my red scarf, holding a new glass pickle up to the hotel Christmas tree.

Sherri commented within ten minutes. Looks cold!!! 🥶😂

I didn’t answer her.

Wynn commented, too. Best grandma. Saving me a candle??

I wrote back: Already did.

The Twelfth Night

They flew home on the twenty-eighth. I drove home on the twenty-sixth. Shane called on the twenty-ninth.

“Mom,” he said. “Can we come over?”

“Of course.”

“No. I mean. Can we have Christmas? Wynn says it didn’t feel like Christmas at all. And Wiley spent most of it throwing up. And honestly, Mom, neither did I. I kept thinking about your ham.”

I smiled into the phone.

“Christmas isn’t over until January sixth,” I said. “That’s Little Christmas. Ask Ulrike. She’ll tell you all about it. Come on the sixth. All of you. Sabrina, too.”

“Great. We’ll bring…”

“Shane,” I said. “You’re cooking.”

There was a long pause.

“Me?”

“You. I’ve done forty-three years of Christmas dinners. You’ve been on a cruise. I think you’re well rested.”

He laughed. It was Walker’s laugh. I hadn’t heard it come out of him in a long time.

Shane’s Turkey

On the sixth of January, my son cooked his first turkey in my kitchen with his father’s apron on and his phone propped on the windowsill playing a video called “Turkey for Absolute Beginners.” Tamsin made mashed potatoes. Sabrina did the green beans and burned the almonds and we ate them anyway. Wiley set the table. Wynn put her beeswax candle, the one I’d saved her, right in the middle of it, still wrapped in its little red paper ruffle.

Shane put up the outside lights that afternoon, even though it was January. Every one of the neighbors honked.

The turkey was a little dry. Nobody said so. Shane carved it with Walker’s old carving knife, and his hands shook a little, and when he finished, he looked at me across the table.

“Is this how you always felt?” he said. “Like you just ran a marathon?”

“Every single year,” I said.

“I never noticed.”

“I know, honey,” I said. “That was sort of the point of Bethlehem.”

Bring the Ice

Just as we were sitting down to eat, the doorbell rang.

It was Ziggy and Sherri.

Sherri was holding a bottle of champagne and wearing a fur hat. Ziggy was holding a pie from the grocery store that still had the price sticker on it.

“Wynn told us there was a Little Christmas,” Sherri said. She looked, for the first time since I’ve known her, uncertain. “We weren’t sure if we were invited.”

I looked at the two of them on my porch, in the cold, with their store pie. And I thought about Walker, who never in his life turned anyone away from his table.

“Come in,” I said. “There’s plenty of turkey. Shane made it.”

“Shane did?” Ziggy said, astonished.

“It’s a little dry,” Shane said from the dining room.

We had dinner. It was loud and crowded and the gravy was lumpy, and it was the best Christmas I’ve had since Walker died.

Over pie, Sherri leaned over to me and said, in what she probably thought was a whisper, “Tova, listen. Ziggy and I were talking. We think next year maybe we’ll skip the cruise and do Christmas here. With you. If that’s all right.”

I took a sip of my coffee.

“That would be lovely, Sherri,” I said. “But I’ve already booked my room in Bethlehem for next year.”

Her face fell. Across the table, Wynn put down her fork.

“Two rooms, actually,” I said. “One for me. And one for anybody who wants to come see the candles.”

Wynn’s hand went straight up in the air like she was in school. Then Wiley’s. Then Sabrina’s. Then, slowly, Shane’s.

Sherri looked at Ziggy. Ziggy shrugged.

“Can we come?” Sherri said.

“Of course,” I said. “Bring the ice. And Sherri?”

“Yes?”

“You’ll need to find someone to feed the cat.”

The glass pickle hangs on my kitchen window now, where I can see it every morning. The old one and the new one, side by side.

If someone in your family is about to spend another holiday home alone “anyway,” share this with them. Bethlehem has plenty of rooms, and the candles are free.

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