Christmas

I sit down with the intention of having poetry kind of erupt from her fingertips: I mean summoning charms, little rivulets of gold memory, ponderous, heavy question marks, the tinkling of baby laughter. How my kid brother describes fishing: awful twenty minutes, horrendous, misplaced hours, all for one minute of absolute joy.

Today is Christmas, 2009. I've been thinking all day about all the Christmases I can remember, and subsequently how my feelings about it have changed over the years. Christmas is a big deal, here. We have two trees because all of the handcrafted, handpainted German ornaments (and English, French, Canadian, Indonesian ornaments...) that my mother has spent her whole life accumulating, naming and lovingly fondling simply do not fit on one evergreen anymore. She has, also, a collection of porcelain Dickens houses--not strictly Christmas but winter-related--which are miniature replications of all the different buildings almost every character in every Charles Dickens novel has entered. Among these are Fagin's Hideaway and Scrooge and Marley's Counting House. They live above the bookcases. There are little lights, which plug into the wall, which we stuff inside the houses so it looks as if little people occupy them.

On the mantle, there are the Santas--I could run downstairs to count how many, but I'm in my pajamas. Probably around fifteen. There are some cloth Santas, some black Santas, some fabric Santas, human-sized, abstract, some carry puppies, some have lists or packs on their back, some have wands, some stand upright and others are squashy and must lean against things. There is one Mrs. Claus.

We have living things, too. Sticky fingers, stained with powdered sugar. Cold feet, from snow drifts outside (happy incident this year!), absurdly rosy cheeks from a) all the alcohol we consume and b) loud laughter, from large company or baking stress. Four dogs running around the house, and a cat. There is wrapping paper and Johnny Mathis and cider mulling in a pan, episodes of Mad Men competing with A Charlie Brown Christmas for airtime space, there are Spode Christmas plates made out of bone china, which we must be very careful when we handle in the dishwasher. The nitty-gritty of OUR LIFE, as a family, can simply not be summarized any more neatly than this--these, twenty years of Christmases, let's say fourteen spent sentient.

Once, I re-adapted "A Christmas Carol" and forced my cousins to perform it in the old Hendricks living room, Christmas Eve. Most of rehearsal was spent herding little ones and making the paper chain Marley had to wear. Once my Aunt Bessie came to Christmas with an oxygen tube and pack, along with my Aunt Margaret (or was this the same year?) who simply sat in a chair and stared into space, saying nothing to anyone. Once we gave my grandmother a terrorist of a golden retriever, just plopped the ball of fluff into her rickety hands. We've been sledding. Each year I go shopping, hardcore, with my cousin Leslie and we buy more things for ourselves than other people. More than once, my father has crafted some elaborate charade around my mother's gift--making everyone antsy about his failure to get her a good present until we learn it's stowed somewhere hidden, or masked in a different box. I've gotten bikes, chairs, all kinds of ways to play music, dolls, clothes, candy, a record player, guitars, a sewing machine. I've known six different pets on Christmas day. I've suffered through church services, methodically and dutifully, secretly loving carols and belting them as much as I can. There is just so MUCH here, and it's all about that semi-mythical state of existence that most people in college seem to start to want to deny--roots. This is where I come from: my family, at Christmas.

It's strange to be nineteen and remember. It's young, I know, but my sister doesn't wake me up at 3am anymore, and I don't get castles or tents or adventures of my own creation anymore. There's never been anything more magical than all that three week shenanigan to me--at least not until high-school, and delayed gratification, and recycling wrapping paper, and conceding to the "spirit of Santa" over the flesh and blood existence of a jolly, fat intruder. And don't get me wrong, it's still magical, but if if I were to trace the way I have changed and aged in a most deliberate, detailed fashion I could find it all in Christmas--the inverse time it takes me to wake up these days, the presents I receive, the way I write them down, and the way my heart feels. I miss being so outrageously JUBILANT! I try to look for the perks in being wiser. I know there are some.
I look at older people, receiving even less presents, and I sometimes think about dying. Fifty Christmases from now, maybe. Or, two.

People--myself included--like to ask "do you think you've changed much at college?" or more specifically "how have you changed since college?" And the first thing I think is--how can I even begin? How can I tell them about crying and colors and rolling around on the floor and "framing" and ardent believing and poor decisions, how can I explain art and emotion and what I have decided I know about love, friendship, solitude, family, confidence? I never can. I don't. I come up with some hackneyed, write-off of a reply: "I guess I'm a little more responsible" or "LOL I'm learning to feed myself or save money!" but beyond just cheap, these explanations are flat-out lies. I have changed--or perhaps the world around me, and what I take in has changed--so very drastically that I have a hard time these days knowing at all what I want, what I believe and what I need. Christmas reminds me, but twofold: sipping tea (or coffee. Who AM I?), fretting about my waistline in regard to a new pair of pants and a plate of cookies, analyzing the emotional journey behind episodes of "Mad Men", crying over "Our Town", sitting with my family and talking about the same old things as ever, I know that I am these roots (these comfortable comfortable roots) but also more. It's both bracing and strange, in the way that strange can feel sad. I know where I am, for certain, for real.

At dinner tonight my Aunt Caroline unceremoniously shoved a copy of that old editorial, "Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus" into my hands and asked me to read it before we all had dinner. This comes from a long legacy of rather thick prayers, so the rupture in pattern was welcome. The editorial was first published in 1897; it's an editor's response to a one Virginia O'Hanlon, who asked for a point-blank response to that question the title implies. I remembered it because timidly, in our old house, years ago, I shuffled outside of my mother's room one day while she was either getting ready to leave or coming in and I asked her the same question. She asked me what I thought, and looked me in the eye for a long time before she gave me a copy of this semi-epic testimony. And years later, I read it at dinner--only this time, paying attention to the words in a new way, and trying desperately to ignore a small devil in the back of my cranium who begged me to pay the slightest attention to voiced endings...

So childhood ought not be extinguished, says the editor. So all the world's delight is found in intangibles, says the editor. I am comforted. Ha. Was I ever sad?
V