Not all carols and chocolate

Ihave confessed to still owning my childhood dolls. I should admit I also have my aunt’s baby boy doll from Christmas in the 1930s. It is an unpleasantly bubble-gum-pink celluloid thing, baby sized, that would have been quickly mashed and mangled in families more boisterous than mine.

A brother would have jumped on it immediately, and thought it worth a spanking, and I understand what would have been his revulsion. But there was no brother at the time.

The doll feels no thicker than a balloon, and weighs nothing, so I can’t account for the way it still holds on to its celluloid life. It could easily have been punctured with a hat pin, or trodden on. It could have been slyly melted on the coal range, or, being highly flammable, burst into flames at the touch of a match. But none of that happened.

I’m stuck with it because it’s a survivor, and I respect that, and also because of its backstory.

When I found the doll among my aunt’s things, after she died, it triggered memories of Christmases past, virtual blood feuds. My mother and her sister fought like hellcats on and off, and the episode of the dolls from Dunedin is part of the family saga.

The doll lies hidden in a box now, key to the repressed memory it unlocks, the ritual of my mother’s Christmas dramas. No Christmas was complete in my childhood without them. Her power to dampen spirits and wreck an event was unparalleled.

Perhaps it was having the full cast of family characters to act up to that triggered her act, or my uncle might have asked her why her gift to him had been one of those ridiculous miniature aprons people supposedly tie around gin bottles. That would have set her off. But the saga of the dolls from Dunedin was the star turn.

It began with a doll each from their Dunedin aunts one long-ago Christmas. But one doll was a boy, and the other a girl, and that was trouble. Whichever doll my mother got, she would want the other, which her younger sister would cling to, and in my childhood they still reenacted the same fight up and down the hallway, an operatic tragedy on fine summer days so peaceful you could otherwise have heard the bees humming in the garden.

Surprisingly, my aunt had won the first brawl, way back when, but that didn’t stop my mother’s sense of grievance, and only enhanced my aunt’s triumph.

Nor did they tire of repetition. The same lines were yelled, more or less, the same furious tears wept, while my grandmother and I retired quietly to the twin beds in her bedroom, to lie on the pale yellow candlewick bedspreads and wait for the storm to pass.

That was Christmas. Yes, there were presents given and received, and nice things to eat, but there was the constant threat of emotional explosion. In those days that was inexplicable, but in the years since we’ve learned a lot about head injuries and their lasting effects. My mother had a serious head injury in her teens which could account for the sudden emotional storms.

Christmas is never what you see illustrated on greeting cards. There are bound to be tears and cross words among people – family – with little in common, and a bunch of bad memories between them. Let’s not pretend that it’s all singing carols and too much chocolate. If the truth were known – and I have a doll as evidence – it’s just as likely to be a brawl.