A Walker in the Suburbs

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.

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.

Watch a movie every year and soon you will be able to predict each comment long before it’s made. All of us marvel at Bing’s mellifluous voice and Danny Kaye’s smooth dancing. There will be a disparaging word or two about Rosemary Clooney, despite my reminders that she was George Clooney’s aunt. And it’s true, this film is probably not her finest.

Her sister, played by a dancer named Vera-Ellen, earns the most comments for her impossibly long legs and tiny waist. It’s not easy to pig out on Christmas cookies while watching this movie.

Every year I get the giggles when the housekeeper, played by the great character actress Mary Wickes, just happens to be reading Variety while tending the phones. “What housekeeper reads Variety?” I shriek. “Mom, you say that every year!”

But we all do. That’s the joy of watching this movie together. The ritual of repetition, of small family traditions that come around each year — part of the joy of Christmas.

Celia and I were talking in the car the other day about the meaning of Christmas. I was distracted, negotiating the traffic, thinking about what I had to do after I dropped her off. I mentioned the word “family.”

“I thought Thanksgiving was about family. It seems like every holiday is about family,” she said. And of course to me every holiday is about family, but in varying degrees.

What I should have said, what I wish I’d said, is that Christmas is about hope. It celebrates the birth of a baby king. Not a full-grown king but a king-in-making, and as such is more about the potential than the actual. It celebrates our turn back to the sun and days of warmth and light we can only dream of at this time of year.

It is, then, a day to celebrate something often in short supply in government, in families and in daily human lives — a belief in the unseen.

Every year for the past half dozen we’ve driven west into the rolling hills of Loudoun County to cut down our Christmas tree. It started as a lark and has become a tradition, one we uphold even when cries of “it’s too far” or “I have homework” almost rule it out.

Yesterday we took two dear friends, so there were seven of us in the car, and it was an occasion. It didn’t take long to find the Douglas fir of our dreams, hack away at the trunk and topple the tree. We drug it down the mountainside, paid for it and lashed it to the top of the car.

This morning I learned that the Snickers Gap Christmas Tree Farm is closed for the season. We just made it.