Five years ago at this time of year my parents had just recently separated. I was 20, and living in Rhode Island with my then-boyfriend. I had called home sometime around Thanksgiving, and pretty much out of the blue they told me the news. The last I'd heard, my mom was recovering from surgery after they'd removed some abnormal (basically pre-pre-cancerous) tissue from her underarms, and my dad was nursing her to health by helping where she needed it, giving her baths and washing her hair. I never even realized they were having marital trouble until the day I heard my dad had moved out.

Since then I've often asked myself sardonically, "Why the hell did they choose the holiday season as the time to do that?" I know of course that they didn't choose, that it just worked out that way, but that doesn't change the fact that the first Christmas of the separation has tainted every Christmas thereafter.

I was home by Christmas Eve, which I don't really remember probably because I've blocked it out. But I know my dad came over and stayed 'till the kids were in bed (I had three younger siblings), and that he then slept in the TV room in the basement so that when they woke up he'd be there in the morning. And all the gift tags still said "From Mom & Dad." In other words, Everything's Normal!

My mom, in a flurry of spending my father's money before it was no longer hers to spend, had maxed out all of the credit cards. I -- the oldest, the most vocally disapproving, the most able to grasp the situation and all its complexities -- was the recipient of a lavish, therefore utterly depressing, bounty of gifts. Again, I've forgotten most of them except for the crowning glory, which was a lovely $500 mahogany trunk from the Pottery Barn. Understand that this was a glaringly luxurious gift in our largish blue-collar family -- the vast majority of presents under the tree were always well under $100 each. It squatted there amongst the toys and books, hulking, obscene, embarrassing. I knew very well what the subtext of the gift was, especially once I'd observed that the rest of my siblings had been a bit short-changed, receiving fewer gifts than usual, and cheaper ones.

I don't think my dad had bought anything for my mom, unsurprisingly, as she'd requested the separation and he now resembled the living dead. But in her desperate attempts to buy Christmas spirit and normalcy, she'd tried to go shopping for him, and all she could find -- being practical-minded but terribly misguided -- was a nice stainless steel set of salt and pepper shakers. In a million words I could never convey the horrific sadness of those shakers.

Somehow, at some point that morning, I ended up in the kitchen with my mother when she abruptly put her arms around me and started sobbing. She clutched me hard, like a frantic child, in hysterics over the salt and pepper shakers. She told me she'd tried to find something else, something better, but she couldn't find anything. And wouldn't his friends think she was such a bitch, giving him those. In my panicky discomfort my mind turned to how odd it was to think of my dad as someone having a bunch of friends, with whom he'd commiserate about his bitchy ex-wife. I felt like I was in someone else's life.

Soon after the giftgiving ritual, my dad offered to show me his new place, and we took my baby sister with us. On the car ride out there I stared out the window at the bare, dead-looking oak trees flitting by, and the stubble of snow on the ground, while my dad held my hand. I vaguely remember him telling me that my mother had convinced him he was a terrible person, and I remember him saying he'd look in the mirror every day and say to himself, "You fucked up. You fucked up." It took most of concentration just to not cry. I'm not even sure why I was determined not to cry -- I guess I thought one us had to be strong.

My dad's new place was being rented to him by a longtime customer, who had also recently divorced and was therefore sympathetic, for rent at a fraction of its worth, and light caretaking duties. It was way out of town, through the woods, on a huge plot of land, but was really just a summer cottage. One of my dad's responsibilities was to winterize it a bit.

He showed me inside and while he was changing his clothes in the bathroom I had time to take it all in -- it was one room, kitchen separated by a counter and one wall of floor-to-ceiling windows. I was dimly aware that it was kind of cute in a beach house way, but mostly it was terrible and pathetic. After paying for a big house and yard for nearly 25 years, my dad didn't deserve to be renting a beach house, cute or not. He had no stove, and mostly ate prepared meals from the grocery store. The house came with a ghastly white wicker couch and table and a tiny woodstove. He'd bought a bed, a plain eiderdown, a very bachelor-looking blue recliner, and TV/VCR to entertain my sister when she was there. Everything he had in the way of appliances I recognized as crappy discards from our -- from my mother's -- house. An old Mr. Coffee, a cheap toaster oven, little else.

After seeing the house, he brought my sister and me outside, telling me this was her favorite thing about the place, and we walked out behind the house to where the yard ended in a dropoff. There was a plastic table and chairs nearby, but no fence or rail at all, and we stepped right to the grassy edge and looked down.

We were standing at the top of a 90-foot cliff, a sheer drop to a private beach below. Waves rippled against the shore in miniature. The pale earth of the cliff was streaked with clay. The ocean stretched to the horizon, blankly serene. It was stunning, and beautiful.

That's the last thing I remember about that Christmas, and the last image that rolls through my mind as that holiday unfolds and unfolds repeatedly, continually, throughout this season.