Last Christmas, I gave Maria a new Iphone as a gift, she needed it for the videos and photos she had begun to take so skillfully. She burst into tears, upset, almost traumatized. I had never seen anyone get so upset by a Christmas gift, I knew it was something much deeper than the present.

I  was shocked by it, but I wanted to try to understand it better. She couldn’t really explain it herself, other than to see she really suffered on Christmas. She never felt more invisible or lost.  The holidays are especially charged for her, as they are for many people. The mere mention of Christmas can be disturbing for her. If you believe in Post-Traumatic Stress – I do – there were all of the symptoms. She was shaken all day, unable to eat, it was a painful thing to see, let alone feel.

I did not want a Christmas gift to be a painful thing for  her.

Holidays are charged for me also. Except for my sister, whom I rarely see, my family is gone, dead or scattered or out of touch. My daughter is in New York City, and has a full and engaged life there.

Maria and I sometimes see ourselves as orphans, but also pilgrims. Mostly, we have left the past behind, but sometimes, the past does not wish to go. We are in a new world, building our own family, struggling to make sense of holidays and what they mean to us, past and present. Maria has told me more than once that if she had a choice, she would treat Christmas as any other day without work, a day of quiet, being with the animals, reading and talking, walking in the woods.

This week, the loud and greedy holiday drumbeats have begun, interrupted for a few days by the Paris tragedy and the political posturing that followed. Black Friday, the national all-in-one corporate holiday,  is upon us.  In the past few years, we let the holidays be about bargains and discounts for screens and gadgets, and most of us seem to love it. Sometimes I get angry about it. My family stole the meaning of the holidays first, and now Corporate America has bought the holidays wholesale and transformed them into a giant cash mob.

The children of today will have a curious sense of what the holidays mean, or perhaps once meant.

So I told Maria I had a long overdue revelation. Although she always insists I do not need to buy her presents, I explained to her that I do need to buy her presents. For one thing, she never buys herself anything that isn’t in a box at a thrift store. For another, she doesn’t think she deserves any.  I don’t need to go to excess, nor is there money for that. I don’t need to buy expensive things for  her, but I do need to think of her,  get her presents that are modest but thoughtful. That show I am thinking of her. Love is often about the small things, if we forget them, we will soon forget the big ones.

Maria is wearing one of my holiday gifts in this photo above.

I got her another this weekend. I reserved the Round House at Pompanuck Farm for five or six hours. I am giving her the gift of a silent meditation, just the two of us, maybe the dogs as well. We will bring some food, we will be together in  silence and absolute quiet. We’ll take some walks – Pompanuck is very beautiful surrounded by woods and trails – I’ll bring some earphones and listen to music, Maria will so some yoga.

I can’t speak for her, but I will think hard about my life, what I want from it, where I want it to go.

And we will experience our love for one another in the peace and quiet of solitude, away from the gadgets and devices and arguments and violence of the world. This is important for both of us, I think. I have always believed in order to have a good and meaningful life, I have to think about having a good and meaningful life. Maria is the same. I discovered this when I went upstate and bought a cabin and spent a year reading the journals of Thomas Merton and thinking about the rest of my life. It was the turning point of my life.

I am giving Maria another gift, I announced this morning. There will be no gifts on Christmas, it will be like any other day. We might go to a movie, or sit and read, or walk in the woods. We might visit friends or watch something from Netflix. We might do all of those things. But she will be known and understood and listened to, perhaps the greatest holiday gift anyone could give to one other. She gives me that gift every day.

Maria was so happy to hear about this gift, she beamed and smiled and thanked me, much more than she did for the Iphone. This gift made her happy.

I see now that we can never reclaim all those holidays of the past, we can’t rewrite them.

We long ago stopped blaming anybody for them, we are all doing our best.

We have to build our own holiday together, our families do not seem to have ever quite understood or accepted us. It’s nobody’s fault, it’s just the way life breaks sometimes. But we don’t have to wallow on that old pain or re-create it thoughtlessly.  We don’t have to follow that great curse of families and do what is expected of us.

The people who might have understood this do not, and that is something we have accepted.

It’s ironic because Christmas is the only holiday my family, a Jewish family, ever celebrated. There was always something forced and excessive about it, as if the misery and pain of the year could be washed away with a hundred gifts in one day. So our Christmas will have but one big gift.

No gift, perhaps the biggest one of all.