Distance, illness and weather kept us from gathering this holiday as we usually do. But eventually, the east coast contingent of my family came together for presents, food, conversation and controlled chaos. We solved a few world problems — though gun violence and climate change continue to elude us — and had some laughs, too.
Now we’re back home watching the snow fall. No walking in the suburbs today.
It’s time to stay inside, read and make soup.
This morning I thought about a scene from one of my
favorite Christmas movies, one I hope we’ll have time to watch in the
next few days. In “It’s a Wonderful Life,” Jimmy Stewart has just
learned he faces bank fraud and prison, and as he comes home beside
himself with worry, he grabs the knob of the bannister in his old house — and it comes off in his hand. He is exasperated at this; it seems to represent his failures and shortcomings.
By
the end of the movie, after he’s been visited by an angel, after his
family and friends have rallied around him in an unprecedented way,
after he’s had a chance to see what the world would have been like
without him — he grabs the bannister knob again. And once again, it
comes off in his hand. But this time, he kisses it. The house is still
cold and drafty and in need of repair. But it has been sanctified by
friendship and love and solidarity.
Christmas doesn’t take away
our problems. But it counters them with joy. It reminds us to appreciate
the humble, familiar things that surround us every day, and to draw
strength from the people we love. And surely there is a bit of the
miraculous in that.
Photo: Flow TV
Strong gusts bend the bamboo beside our deck, riffle the hollies, berry-less this year. The sky is an angry purple except for a white strip along the horizon. Christmas is riding in on the west wind.
Yesterday’s last-minute shopping meant parking at the far end of town and backtracking to the bookstore. No gloves for some reason, so I crammed one hand into a pocket, used the other to hold the bags. It was almost dark by the time I got home; Reston Town Center was all decked out for the season.
Now I sit in warmth, willing myself to stand, walk upstairs and dress warmly enough for a windy walk. But first I notice how our tree lights are reflected in the window. They’re an overlay of cheer on a gray and unforgiving world.
Last night we put up the tree. We’ve inherited two blue chairs since last year, so we had to move those to make room. The plug we usually use for lights hasn’t worked in months, so we jerry-rigged extension cords for illumination.
And then there’s the tree itself, which looks like someone took a big bite out of the top. There isn’t enough corner to hide its deficiencies.
In other words, it wasn’t our typical tree. And it wasn’t our typical tree-decorating fest. We weren’t all present, and afterwards we sat outside around the fire pit and looked at the stars.
But there was plenty of talking and laughing. Families change; traditions can, too.
This year’s tree doesn’t look like this!
Heaven and nature aren’t the only ones singing this time of year. There are carolers like the neighbors above, who serenaded us last year.
There are scads of sing-along “Messiah’s,” where rusty altos can rent scores and attempt, once more (and just as unsuccessfully), “For Unto Us a Child is Born.”
And then there are people driving around in their cars belting out “Angels We Have Heard on High” at 6 a.m.
This morning, after a particularly rousing carol-fest, the announcer said he knew everyone had joined in on that last number. And just to make it official, he played “Awake and Join the Cheerful Choir” by Anonymous Four.
He might as well have said, “I hear you all out there; I hear you singing.”
How did he know? Was I that loud?
As our part of earth tilts farther from the sun, as days shorten and gray, as night swallows our lives — there’s a good chance we won’t notice.
We’re too distracted standing in line at the post office, searching for ornaments in the dank storage area of the basement, finding if not the perfect tree then at least one with flaws that can be successfully hidden by strategic placement in the corner.
Did the ancients have this idea when they celebrated solstice or whatever holiday we purloined for Christmas? Were these feasts only to appease the gods or shout hooray? Or were our ancestors saying to themselves, yeah, looks like the world’s gonna end any day now, but I have this goat to slaughter and these wild herbs, they might freshen it up a bit, and it seems a shame to let it go to waste…
Because distraction, I think, is one of the surest bets of all. Distraction itself is worth celebrating.
I do most of my shopping in a two- to three-week period in December — not a perfect system, but it works. In order to buy lots of gifts in such a short time, however, I’ve had to head out after dinner — when I’d typically be curling up with a book or a movie — onto the cold, dark highways of suburbia, pulling in and out of massive parking lots, threading my way past holiday displays and shelves of sweaters in search of the right gift for each person on the list.
The other night, looking in vain for help in a large sporting goods store (what is a lure? and how do you tell one from the other?) I found myself in the one section of the establishment that was bustling, the one section where you could find clerks. That would be the gun department.
Don’t think I’ve ever seen so many guns in one place before. There were camo models and long sleek menacing ones and short, stubby almost cute ones. People were milling around cases, speaking animatedly to staff, pawing through boxes of ammunition.
I told myself that guns must be a big seller around the holidays, that these guns are for hunters. Put out of my mind the frightening alternatives.
Still, it was hard to forget that in this entire cavernous store the only place where there was life and activity and conversation, the only place that was lively … was where the guns were sold.
Some houses have candles in their windows. Others, tasteful white twinkle lights around trees limbs and branches. There are spotlit doors with wreaths. And there are icicle lights, easiest to install if you have a slight overhang, which we do not.
A few years ago people started putting not just one large wreath on the front door, but smaller wreaths on every front-facing window, a holiday-decorating escalation that seems like it would be overkill but can look surprisingly nice when glimpsed from afar.
The house behind us drips in icicle lights and spotlit trees, and the house behind that features a snowman and reindeer and strings of lights shining from tree to tree, giving the place a fiesta feel.
Our own house has colored lights along the roof line, around the door, across the shrubbery and up the lamp post. The window candles are missing in action but should be up soon.
We are, in short, decked out for the season. At least we are until I plug in my hair dryer and blow the fuses (which has been happening far too often lately). But except for these black-outs, our house and the others in Folkstone have become what we need most right now: candles in the darkness.
Photo of Bull Run Lights Festival: Virginia.org
Labor Day is a bittersweet holiday. While other nations celebrate their workers on the first day of May, we do it on the first Monday of September. So instead of welcoming the warm weather, we are saying goodbye to it (or good riddance, depending upon your point of view and tolerance level).
The fact is, if you love summer, as I do, you may not be a big fan of Labor Day. It always makes me think of the last jump in the pool when I was a kid, my parents saying, “OK. But this is absolutely the last one. We have to go home. You have school in the morning.”
School in the morning. A line guaranteed to chill the soul of any child, a phrase that still, decades later, makes my stomach do a little somersault.
As the years pass more quickly, though, and as each Labor Day (and Memorial Day, 4th of July and other holiday) leads more surely to the next fete in the lineup, I’ve come to see the first Monday in September as a bellwether in reverse. If summer is good, Labor Day is not so bad. If summer has been summer — hot, sticky, filled with enough swimming and biking and eating of ice cream bars — then I reluctantly, but without reservation, say farewell.
One special holiday memory — which I’m writing about only now because I finally pulled the photos from my camera to my computer — was when the Christmas Eve carolers came to our house. We heard them first, when they were across the street, and lured them over here.
Our neighbor Nancy led the others with her lovely soprano, but every one of the singers held his or her own. They crooned “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” “White Christmas” and other selections, with plenty of whooping and hollering and toasting in between. (Conveniently, they carried their own wine glasses.)
Some of us stepped outside and joined them. All we lacked were the funny hats. But we knew the words, and we had the spirit. And we remember an earlier time on our street, when there were bonfires in the meadow and progressive New Year’s dinners. A time of greater camaraderie and cheer. The carolers made it seem as if those days were back.
After the revelers traipsed off to the next house my Dad turned to me and said, “That’s all I need. That made Christmas for me.” I had to agree with him.
