Christmas Past and Present

Christmas is one of the best stories of our species. Each time it comes around, it catches, lifts, and unplugs me from the mundane world that steals away childhood magic. Without fail, it presses me against a frosty windowpane where I look back in time. And this is what I see, what I remember.

The wintry light. Slanting through the leafless New England woods, curving along the winding country roads. The hardening pastures. The stonewalls where the first delicate dance of snowflakes will gather.

The grown-ups. Changed, softened, secretive. Like children they became, as if a terrible weight flew from their sore shoulders. One day I would know that weight.

The department store windows, alive with beckoning dreams. Meeting Santa, my eyes and mouth their widest ever. The colored lights, transforming faces, casting pools of red, green, blue and yellow onto graying snowdrifts.

Our manger, chipped and worn, the cattle lowing in the plastic grass. My father, redolent with the stirring smell of the Christmas trees he sold. In my mind, he was in league with Santa himself.

But most of all, I remember my mother. Full of the busyness and wonder of her motherhood, living the role she wanted to play. Her hands and heart weaving a potent mantle of nurturance, taking us down a Christmas path I strive to recreate.

Now, once again, Christmas approaches, pushing emotional buttons, pulling psychological strings. The memories rush in, with mother at the bow. But this year the new revelation I have is that Christmas, at its heart, is very much about motherhood, because it is about birth. The birth of a dream. It is not just about the man who was born, called Jesus, who had that dream, it is also about the woman who bore him, who loved him, and accepted the many ways, which in trying to heal our hearts, he may have broken hers.

And this makes me think of another mother--the mother of us all, Mother Earth--and how we must heal her heart, her choking rivers, her smoking forests and her fading blue skies. As I gaze back through that window, I see that most of my Christmas memories are the sights and sound of the natural world. The Christmas tree, the wreath, the holly, the howling wind shaking snowy boughs, the aching beauty of winter’s moon on a crystal pond. Mother Nature is the very essence of Christmas. She is the story behind the story of who we are. She is what we must preserve. Merry Christmas, Mother.

DEANNA McKINSTRY

North Hollywood