The recycling bin is overflowing, the wrapping paper stowed away. You can see the living floor again. Which is to say that the hurricane that is Christmas has roared through our house. In its place is a sudden calm that I try to interpret as peace.
Outside a gentle rain is falling. I just walked through it. I didn’t mind that the drops were dripping down my face. I welcomed the cool air, the sodden smell.
Christmas Day is over. Now comes the hard part.
Our old house has seen better days. The siding is dented, the walkway is cracked, the yard is muddy and tracked with Copper’s paw prints. Inside is one of the fullest and most aromatic trees we’ve ever chopped down. Cards line the mantel, the fridge is so full it takes ten minutes to find the cream cheese. Which is to say we are as ready as we will ever be. The family is gathering. I need to make one more trip to the grocery store.
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
“Here, Celia, you usually like to hang this one, right?” said Claire last night, handing her sister a bright pink high heel slipper ornament with glitter and feathers.
“I remember when I got this ornament,” Celia said. “It was one of those parties where you exchange gifts and people can take them from you and I wanted this one so bad.” And she got it.
Meanwhile, Suzanne found her cello ornament and attached it to a heavy branch while Claire hunted for her “Baby’s First Christmas” ornament.
Decorating the tree is a holiday ritual with little courtesies and observances I didn’t even realize we had until we did them all over again last night. Each one is precious.
At points last evening I found myself floating at the edge of the hubub, as Tom, the girls and their friends laughed and talked and decked out our full, fragrant fir tree (which, we all agree, is one of the most beautiful trees ever). I wanted to be enough on the edge of things to be aware that I was part of them. But I also wanted to be in the moment because such moments are rare. So I busied myself stuffing tissue back into the ornament boxes and carrying them downstairs. Even from our storage room I could hear the laughter — it was as clear and silvery as a Christmas bell.
Photo: wallpaperhd.org
Yesterday at lunch I walked to the Botanical Gardens to see the garden train display. The trains were cute — and the children there to see them were even cuter — but what captivated me most were the replicas of the Capitol, Supreme Court and other monuments and presidential homes made of acorns, pine cone scales, mosses, lichen and grapevine tendrils.
It was a magical, miniature world, full of “fairy flats,” “critter condos” and other whimsical structures. It made me want to drink a shrinking potion and clamber right in. It made me want to be a kid again.
But the beauty and wit of these tiny structures also reminded me that there are worlds we cannot fathom — and that in itself is something to celebrate.
Photo by Paul Jean. Captured from Roaming the Planet blog.
Christmas is coming whether we like it or not, so once again we drove west into the rolling foothills of the Blue Ridge. Last year we were some of the last customers of the year to cut our tree. Yesterday we were not. It was a sunny noontime when we arrived, more than two full weeks before the big day.
We walked up and down the slope, savoring the view, the scent of the pine and fir, the sound of dogs barking. (Our own dog barks too much to come!)
It was notable, I think, that the lovely tree we finally found was one we’d overlooked in the very beginning. So we had come full circle in our search.
An e-mail arrives, an e-mail about gratitude. So does inspiration travel in these wireless days. It reminds me of specifics: not just the feast but the pumpkin praline pie at the end of it.
And it reminds me to take inventory. To look up, pay attention, notice the trees outlined against a blue sky, the mountains that rise behind them.
Sometimes gratitude wells up unbidden. A glance, an aroma, and it floods the being. Other times it must be coaxed as a flame is coaxed, first the spark, then the kindling, finally the log and the blaze. It will roar again, this fire. All it needs is time and fuel.
Until the Viking warrior sat down across from me on Metro, I was planning to write about how there are now 7 billion people alive in this world. I had my head down in the Express, my mind riffing on population growth, limited resources, oil shale and other frightful topics when I looked up and saw someone who looked like this.
The Viking made a self-conscious entrance into the Orange Line train. The horns of his helmet tangled with the Metro railing and his seat mate looked a bit askance. The Viking’s friendly nod and greeting did nothing to brighten the day of his dour fellow commuter. But some of us were chuckling behind our newspapers.
I took the time out from my scary computations ( the world population has doubled in my lifetime and is projected to be 9 billion by 2050) to revel in the fun of the season.
A Viking on Metro. Happy Halloween!
In much of the world, the day after Easter is a holiday. In the Washington, D.C., area, it’s the day of the White House Easter Egg Roll, which was one of those things I always meant to do when the children were little but never quite had the energy to pull off.
I wondered this morning, is Easter Monday known for anything other than being the day after Easter?
Turns out, it is. In Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, Easter Monday is Dyngus Day or “Wet Monday,” a day when boys wake girls by pouring water over the heads. There’s a large Dyngus Day celebration in Buffalo, New York, too, involving polkas and squirt guns.
This reminds me of another holiday. The festival of Songkran in Thailand is when people pour water on your shoulders or head (or sometimes blast it at you from a fast-moving truck) to wish you a happy new year. Tom and I spent our honeymoon in Thailand and for seven days were dowsed every time we walked outside.
I’ll spend Easter Monday as I spend most Mondays — writing, editing, reading, walking and doing laundry, which is about as close to ritual purification as I’ll get today.
Before there was President’s Day there was Washington’s birthday, and it was today. It was my grandmother’s birthday, too, and when we were young and still had cousins, we gathered at the house on North Hanover to celebrate. The cake was the kind of densely, heavily iced ones you don’t see anymore — maybe the ingredients have been outlawed — and my stomach would ache after eating a slice.
It’s funny how you can remember some details from childhood, and I can remember those cakes. Because of the day, they were adorned with a cherry tree and a little axe made of mounded, brightly colored icing.
To a child the idea of a Washington’s birthday cake seemed perfectly natural, but now I think about the confection and the story (which many now consider a fabrication) of our first president chopping down a cherry tree with his little hatchet and then admitting he did so to his angry father. It was a mild transgression, as presidential transgressions go; it was innocent and old-fashioned and as sugary sweet as the icing on those cakes. It was the sort of thing we believed in long ago.
I’ve always thought January 2 a less than savory date. The universal going-back-to-school (and work) after the holidays date. This year most of us got a one-day reprieve, so today is the day of reckoning.
Suddenly the world seems dark and cold again. Holiday lights are down, boxed up till next year. Christmas trees line the street, stripped of their decorations, with only a few forlorn scraps of tinsel or a forgotten ornament or two as evidence of their former glory.
It seems a good, contrary move then to post a Christmas photo, a shot of our kitchen table, the sun streaming in, the warmth of the season captured.
