Is that Grammy’s wig?
Or how a grey hairpiece causes chaos, disharmony, & sudden outbreaks of love in our family every Christmas
By Matthew Carroll
My grandmother, God bless her, is the closest the Carroll clan of Boston comes to a saint. Which is why the wig she wore daily was considered a relic of the highest order. And why it’s sudden reappearance a few years after her passing (sorry, we’re American Irish; people “pass”, they don’t die) has split the family into two warring sides.
Grammy — Elizabeth Carroll—was small in stature but big in spirit. She was an Irish immigrant from County Waterford, who mended the family’s many wayward with unending cups of tea and good advice. She wanted only the best for her two kids and unreasonably large brood of grandkids. Gram would toddle around her third-floor walkup apartment in Roslindale, cheerfully dispensing nine decades worth of earned wisdom, while heating up frozen chicken bits for visitors. (Wonderful grandmother; not such a great cook.)
In a word, she was beloved. When she died in 1987, at the age of 93, the entire family grieved. (That’s a lot of grieving: Our family could fill a football stadium. One of Gram’s children, Betty, was a nun, who had no kids. But Gram’s son, John Jr., made up for that lack — he, with my stepmom, Penny, have eighteen kids— yes, that’s right, 18. I’d explain, but it’s … complicated. )
Anyways, the family was thrown into a disorderly, raucous mess a few years later when her wig — grey, rayon, and uncombed — showed up as a Christmas gift.
It’s an occasion from which the family has yet to recover.
On a day when peace and harmony are supposed to rule, the “gift” split the family into feuding sides. There were those (like me) who laughed so hard they thought they’d rupture their spleen.
And those who believed the devil himself stalked the earth again on cloven hooves, because what kind of nut job would defile a saint’s memory by gifting her wig? Betty, after all, had insisted that the wig should be burned after Gram’s death.
My brother Ted confessed to the unholy present. Or maybe it was Cathleen. (They disagree who did it first.)
The wig was included as part of the family’s annual Christmas celebration, a Yankee swap. (For the uninitiated: A Yankee swap is when everyone brings wrapped gifts and puts them in a pile. Gifts can range from the goofy, like reindeer earmuffs, to the practical, such as gift cards. People take turns picking out a gift. The fun part is this: If you don’t like your gift, you can swap it with anyone else who picked before you. If that doesn’t sound like fun, just imagine the tussle that erupts when someone tries to replace Uncle Melvin’s grab gift of a six-pack with pink furry slippers.)
Who actually received the wig that first Christmas has been lost in the mists of family lore. But the uproar was remembered clearly. As was what happened the next year — the wig reappeared. And the family feud started all over again.
So like all good Irish families, once we realized that a simple act could totally infuriate beloved siblings, we immediately repeated the act … again … and again… and again. Fun!
Grammy’s wig became a Christmas staple, alternately angering and tickling family members. Somehow, some way, it always ended up with a family member who got the joke. Because if it ended up on the other side of the family, there’s no doubt about what would happen — it would be disposed of, respectfully. And that would be the end of a wonderful family tradition.
But it didn’t happen. Not even when my niece got the wig a decade ago, when she was a sweet teen. That wasn’t supposed to happen. I had put the wig in the pile myself that year, and I screwed up. I broke the unwritten rule. I was supposed to keep an eye on it so that if some young niece or nephew picked it up, I could give a discreet cough or nod and warn the child away. We didn’t want some kid passing out in sheer shock.
I missed seeing her picking out the package—too busy trying on reindeer earmuffs, probably. But I didn’t miss the expression on her face when the grey wig rolled on to her lap. Remember how those sweet young things looked in the Freddy Krueger movies when Freddie himself popped out of closet, waving his nicely-sharpened razor fingers? Yeah, like that.
My poor niece. I thought her mom, my sister Judithe, and my brother Chris, were going to have coronaries. Maybe they did—I was laughing so hard I might’ve missed it.
But my niece seems to have recovered. She’s a highly successful nurse these days. (Although I am reluctant to ask if she has any nightmares…)
One Christmas about five years ago, the wig failed to make an appearance. No one knew where it was.
“You got it last year,” my sister Cathleen said to me.
“Nope, sorry, not me,” I said. “Maybe Peter got it.” But I couldn’t remember who received it last and no one else could either. Or would admit to it.
And that was that. No more wig. Pretty sad, really. Because even if the tradition comes across as disrespectful, we all loved Gram. And the wig reminded us of her, and what a wonderful person she was, and how much she loved all of us. So it was nice to see that wig, that old grey wig, suddenly pop out of box.
Bang, there the wig would be, and us grandkids would instantly think of Gram, and we’d be back in her tiny two-bedroom apartment, sipping tea and eating grilled cheese sandwiches, that along with a boiled dinner, was one of the few foods she could make well. We’d listen to her stories of work as a maid during World War I, at $3 a week and 13 days work every two weeks.
Or how one day while walking to an Irish football game in Boston she stepped on a cow patty in her brand new shoes. She was so upset, until one of her friends, explained the upside: “Don’t worry, it’s good luck — that means today you’ll meet the man you’ll marry.” (How Irish is that? Literally turning crap into good luck.) And that was the day she met John Joseph Carroll, big and burly, and an Irish immigrant like herself.
We all had reason to love her. A devout Catholic, she prayed long and hard for many and peppered her letters to those living away from home with “TBTG” and “JMJ” — think textlike abbreviations such as “LOL” or “IMHO”, except these stood for “Thanks Be To God” and “Jesus, Mary and Joseph.”
When I was a struggling college students, my expenses exceeded income by a few bucks each week, no matter how I stretched. So I’d visit Grams, and she’d stuff a $5 or $10 in my pocket, just enough for me to get by. There were plenty of other grandkids besides myself who found a little extra stuffed in a pocket, too.
My wife, Elaine, and I eventually bought the triple-decker Gram lived in. We settled on the second floor; she stayed on the third, where she’d lived for decades. Every morning I’d swing by Gram’s for a daily breakfast of an English muffin (she bought raisin, my favorite, of course).
We reciprocated with lamb dinners (her favorite) and new sneakers that made her feel like she was 16 and could go dancing again. She talked with us about lively radio talk show hosts and TV news personalities like Natalie Jacobson and whether she was a little too friendly with weatherman Dick Albert, especially since her husband Chet was co-hosting right beside her.
She had her ups and downs. An operation on her cataracts was “like a miracle,” she said in her lilting brogue. She could see clearly again.
The wig came about because her hair simply fell out as she aged. She wore it all day. Only at night did she replace it with a night cap.
Christmas was special to her and Betty, shopper extraordinaire, who would make sure we all got what we wanted.
So when that wig appeared at Christmas, we’d all laugh and maybe cry, just a little, thinking of how much we missed her. It was sad when it was gone.
Then I was cleaning out my closet this summer. You’ll never guess what I found in a dusty box.
Oh joy, I thought. Oh, baby. “The wig lives,” I said to my wife, Elaine. She rolled her eyes.
So Grammy’s wig made a triumphant return this Christmas, before our typical Christmas crowd. At the center was my father, the family patriarch, at 86 still working full-time in a demanding job, Gram’s son, the apple of her eye. He was surrounded by a bunch of his sons and daughters, and their sons and daughters, plus neighbors, friends, and folks who just happened to wander through the open door. It was a loud, fun-loving group.
Near the end of party came the Yankee swap.
It’s poetic justice that my brother Ted plucked that special present from the pile. He started the tradition, after all. When he opened it up, and the wig fell out, it was just like in the old days — roars of approval and disapproval, and shouts of “Put it on! Put it on!” So he did.
And once again we remembered Gram. Thanks, Gram, for everything.
Matt Carroll is the oldest of 18 siblings. When not trying to stir his enormous extended family into an uproar, he works on the Future of News initiative at the MIT Media Lab. He can be followed @MattatMIT. He writes fiction under the name Sean Patrix. Blog posts on everything he writes can be found here.
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