The Woman In The Red Coat
When my mother died, I thought I’d never enjoy Christmas again. Then my father began dating a woman who shared a surprising link to my holiday traditions
Christmas at my house meant fresh pine boughs wrapped around the banister with velvet ribbon, candles in every window, and homemade dinners for 20 cooked by my mother. She grew up as the only girl in a house full of four brothers, so when she had a home of her own to decorate and two daughters to dress up, she didn’t hold back.
Christmas was a month-long ritual we waited for all year, running errands in our matching red coats. On Christmas Day, we’d open the wreath- covered front door to welcome cousins and aunts and uncles.
Over the years, the dining room table – from my father’s own childhood as one of 13 siblings – was adjusted to expand as partners, then spouses, then kids crowded around, my mother holding court over us all.
I always took for granted that someday my own kids would gather at that same table and enjoy the traditions that had been passed down each December. Life had other plans.
Mum found her tumour on my 21st birthday. She was just 53. She died three years later, on October 29, 2009. I was only 23.
Three years after her death, I made my annual pilgrimage north to my childhood home for Christmas with my dad and sister. We were all putting on brave faces, but I couldn’t stand the bare banister or candle-less windows. I channelled my inner mother and marched up to the attic to hunt for Christmas ornaments.
From the attic window, the moonlight on the snow outside made the trees look beautiful. Mum and Dad had built the house on an old Christmas-tree farm. “Isn’t it wonderful to be surrounded by Christmas all year long?” she would joke. Now her words seemed more like a reminder of what we once had. Dad planned to put the
house on the market in summer.
Up in the attic, I headed towards a box labelled ‘Christmas’. As I moved aside wooden cranberry strands, a yellowed envelope caught my eye. The return address on it was a famous publishing house in Boston.
My mother had been an editor before I was born but had given up her dream of being a writer when she had kids – or so I thought. Inside was a never-published manuscript for a children’s book, dated February 10, 1993. I calculated that I would have been seven, my sister four.
The manuscript was titled The Evil Stepmother (Who Wasn’t).
It’s the story of a little girl who loses her mother to cancer. Her father soon remarries, and at Christmas, the girl returns home to find her stepmother crying with an ornament in her hands: a star with a woman’s photograph. The stepmother reveals that she lost her mother, too, and always misses her most at Christmas.
I read Mum’s book under the bare bulb in the attic, surrounded by her things, and wondered why she had been moved to write it. She was years away from her own diagnosis at the time. Did part of her always know? Did losing her brother, whose dog tags were returned from Vietnam at
Christmas the year before I was born, inspire it? She wasn’t around to ask. There was no stepmother, evil or otherwise, in our lives. I packed the manuscript away, located the ornaments I came for, and forgot about Mum’s book in the craziness of the house move that summer.
Without the home that had been the anchor for so many memories, I detached myself from all things
‘ White Christmas’ was the closest sound on Earth to Mum’s voice
Christmas. I even began to avoid the colour red. Most of all, I avoided Christmas music. I shopped online to ensure a carol couldn’t catch me unaware.
That changed in December 2017. Dad told me he was seeing someone. Could he bring her to Christmas?
“Of course,” I said, stunned but happy.
We hugged each other shyly when we first met. Soon, she had Dad and me laughing. It was going so well that the three of us went shopping to pick out gifts. That’s when the song ‘White Christmas’ began to play over the store’s speakers. I froze.
It was what Mum sang to me as a child to get me to sleep; hearing the song was the closest sound on Earth to her voice. The earrings I was holding in my hands blurred as tears streamed down my face. I was mortified. Dad was mortified. I left the earrings and ran for the safety of the car, hoping Dad’s girlfriend didn’t notice.
We got home, and I went to my room to pull myself together. There was a knock on the door: Dad’s girlfriend. “Can I come in?” “Sure.”
She told me that Christmas was hard for her, too. That she had been a caregiver for her mother as she slowly slipped away from Alzheimer’s.
“Do you see this coat?” she asked, referring to the red swing coat I had complimented earlier. “It was my mother’s. Your dad tells me your mother also had a red coat. Maybe we can wear them together sometime?”
She handed me a small package. I unwrapped the tissue paper to reveal the earrings I had been holding at the store. I remembered the long-ago scene from Mum’s book, and I hugged this woman who made my dad happy, who was offering us a second chance at Christmas.
A year later, my sister and I were maids of honour at Dad’s wedding. Then I
hosted my first Christmas in New York. We decorated with ornaments old and new before taking in the city’s Christmas lights. My stepmother and I walked arm in arm down Broadway Avenue in our mothers’ robin-red coats, cherished reminders of the stylish women who raised us.