The Thief of Christmases Past

We’ll be setting out cookies for Santa Claus on Wednesday, as we do every year on Christmas Eve. But they won’t be served this time on the white china plate that my children love, the one decorated with drawings of Santa and his reindeer, with “Cookies for Santa” engraved along the edge.

No, that plate disappeared last December, along with a box of Christmas doodads filched from our front porch by a grinch whose theft stole the spirit of our holiday.

There was little of much monetary value in that box--some Christmas decorations, a few cassette tapes of holiday songs and a well-worn copy of “The Night Before Christmas,” with pop-up figures illustrating each page.

But it held a lot of memories, linking me to a past I’m not quite ready to give up.

The decorations had been made by my children over the years--the wreath of handprints, the plaster of Paris Christmas tree, the burlap rendering of the three wise men--and went up on our walls and shelves for display each Christmas.

The tapes--picked out by my late husband and me--were of Christmas carols by everyone from Gladys Knight and the Pips to the Los Angeles Philharmonic. They’d been the backdrop for every Christmas celebration my children can recall.

And the book--its binding worn, held together by a red ribbon--was the one I read to my children every Christmas Eve, as they snuggled together all in one bed, trying to stifle their anticipation long enough to fall asleep.

Small things on their own, but they were the instruments of our family traditions, the tangible things that connected us to fading memories and reminded us each Christmas of the pleasures that can coexist with pain.

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I was heartsick when I discovered the Christmas box missing. I was packing for a family trip back to Ohio and wanted to take those mementos along. But when I checked my front porch, where I knew I’d left it, there was one plastic, red crate where there should have been two.

Ours is a neighborhood where bikes can sit on a sidewalk for weeks and roller-blades left outside don’t disappear, so the notion of theft never entered my mind.

But after an hour of searching--the yard, the garage, the closets upstairs--I began to consider the unthinkable. Someone had sneaked onto my porch, rifled through my boxes, piled what they wanted into that single red box and taken off. With my memories.

A talk with my neighbor confirmed what I feared. Seems someone had stolen from his house too. His daughter’s pet rabbit--cage and all--had disappeared early that morning from their front porch.

My hurt was deep--out of proportion, it seemed, to the magnitude of the loss.

But it wasn’t just a plate, a couple of tapes and some homemade decorations. It was my sense of security that thief stole, and my hope that Christmas for my three children and me could ever be as innocently lovely as I wanted to pretend.

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Christmas is not an easy time for us. It’s the time of year that Daddy died--one week before Christmas, four years ago--and that gives our celebrations a bittersweet edge.

We’ve drawn comfort from the fact that some of the things we loved doing together would still go on, that our family’s Christmases could, in some ways, resemble what we used to know.

For my children and me, there was something of their father in that plate, those tapes. . . . They were evidence for us of a life before tragedy came calling, a time when our family was like everyone else’s.

I’m bracing for that sense of loss this year. It’ll be the first time since Daddy died that I’ve trusted us to spend Christmas alone--without flying out family members to distract us or traveling back east to join their family celebrations.

And it feels like we’re starting all over this year, reinventing Christmas without the familiar props that tell us what it’s supposed to be like.

It’s scary drifting into the future this way, unleashed from the moorings that tied us to our past.

But maybe we’re more resilient than I think. Maybe any version of “The Night Before Christmas” will do, and Santa won’t mind eating cookies from a paper plate.

Maybe this is how it should be this time around . . . new traditions being created, new heirlooms-in-the-making, and a reconstituted family that’s strong enough now to stand Christmas alone.

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Sandy Banks’ column is published Mondays and Fridays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.