Oh Silver Bells....

            It’s difficult to write about Christmas without being sentimentally cliché.  Season of giving, families gathering, peace and joy, etc.  It’s also difficult in many ways to avoid being cynical about holiday stress, materialism and overindulgence.  So, in an attempt to avoid all of that, I starting thinking about Christmas and what else might be said about it. 

            The idea I keep coming back to is this- I love Christmas.  I love the lights and the shopping and the wrapping and the cookies and the snow and the anticipation and the whole package.  It makes me happy.  And, god bless them, my family has always made Christmas a special, happy time and, as my grandmother pointed out to me, our family has been gathering in the same general way for the past 60 years, tacking on kids, spouses and grandkids as they happen along.  The details have evolved and developed over that time; the gathering spot, the food and the rules for the Yankee Swap may be different from year to year, but the sentiment is the same.  And each year on Christmas morning, we have been blessed with an overabundance of generosity.

            For me (and my brothers in particular), the gift-getting was the huge focus throughout our childhood.  I know my parents spent a good deal of time shopping for gifts they knew we would love, making sure the three of us were equally spoiled, and hiding them where they knew prying eyes were least likely to sneak a look.  But now, looking back, the gifts are the least important part.  That’s not to say they weren’t wonderful and exciting and so so so special.  There are certain gifts that I will never forget opening (ie. strawberry lip balm from The Body Shop that all my friends had, circa 1992- amazing!), but when I look back at Christmas the exact items are not what stays solidly etched in memory.

            It is the feeling I get when I remember Christmas as a child.  My dad slowly and precisely turning the pages as he read The Polar Express.  The cool green linoleum of the kitchen floor of my grandmother’s house as we ran through to the dining room for dinner.  The thrilling anticipation of sneaking down the stairs with my brothers at 3 am on Christmas morning to peek at the haul from Santa.  Trying to see how much whip cream you could get away with spraying on your apple pie.  The Johnny Mathis Christmas CD on repeat.  The embarrassed pride I felt when my parents gushed over the gifts we bought them at the elementary school holiday fair, (ornaments made out of popsicle sticks, anyone?).

            Thinking about these things, and the thousand other Christmas memories I have that are jogged back to mind every year when I see the popsicle ornaments that have survived, makes me think about my own kids and what their memories will be.  Because I think that is why Christmas makes people so happy.  For one day you get to be that kid you were, opening presents, believing in magic, carefree and overjoyed.  On Christmas, if only for a few hours, you can set aside those distractions that normally plague you, and not think about bills or unemployment or divorce or laundry or the price of gas.  Granted, you may have to cook for a houseful of people, or drive three hours to make it to your in-laws, or regret that there isn’t more under the tree for those that deserve it.  But I know for me, being able to focus on that childish happiness, and helping to create the same sense of wonder for my kids, is what makes it what it is.

 

            I may not have avoided cliché, but what the heck.  Merry Christmas.   

I Wish I Was Cold As Stone

Her hands were pressed against the stone.  The cold had run down from her fingernails, now as grey as the rock, through her hands and along her wrists, slowing the blood in the blue strings of her veins, spreading up her arms and into her chest.  She willed her heart to stop pumping so that it wouldn’t stab with every beat.  The tingling in her folded legs had long since faded, leaving her numb under the stiff folds of her jeans.  She had worn them for weeks, sleeping or awake, not bothering to wash them or fold up the fraying cuffs to keep them out from under her feet when she walked.  Now they were soaked through with old rain the ground still held, making her skin underneath pale and wrinkled.

            If she noticed the cold, she didn’t show it.  She didn’t lift her gaze from the words etched in the stone, but traced the letters with her eyes one by one, spelling out the words, examining every sound, every syllable until she reached the end and could start over.  Her lips moved, forming the words, allowing the sounds to echo inside her, so different from the way they sounded months before when she spoke them out loud.  The idea of pushing the sounds out of her mouth to strike the solidness of the air around her head did not seem possible.  Only her eyes and lips moved.  Short hours passed and she did not shift to relieve the strain that pulled across her shoulders from being hunched over.  It was a constant battle- the desire to stop the hurt that threatened her rationality and the need to feel physical pain in her body. 

            Others came.  They talked to her, or they didn’t.  It didn’t change.  Their presence, their words didn’t move her or alter the position of each finger laid carefully on the stone.  Darkness came and her eyes would have strained to see the letters if they weren’t already carved into her.  Her eyes eventually closed, but moved behind the dark lids, still tracing the M’s and the B’s and the L’s.  If rain fell, if fog moved in, if frosted dew covered the dry grass, she didn’t know.  She knew the sun wouldn’t rise, the day wouldn’t come to warm the stone or dry the earth under her.  She imagined the world floating to a stop, ending orbit, slowing its broad spin through the night so that the thin crust of the moon overhead would be the only light to ever again be cast down on that place. 

            It was a resting place and so her body rested, arrested in its vigil, endless in its watch.  There was no walking of souls, no howling winds, no haunted voices that whispered in her ear.  There was only her body, slowly dropping into the ground, absorbing through the creases in the rock that formed the words her mind repeated.  There was only herself, woven into the grass, seeping down to the dirt, falling piece by piece, so slowly that no movement could be seen.  She was whole on the outside, but cut through the middle with weakness, veined like marble.  Two hands on the stone and nothing else.