This Holiday’s Rare Gift Exchange: the Feelings We’ve Ignored

From what I hear, you had to be there.

From what I hear, I wish I had been.

We may need future historians to tell us how much our day-to-day lives changed after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11. Or even if our lives did change.

Until then, anecdotes like the one I heard about a Christmas dinner party in Rossmoor may suffice as evidence.

A friend of mine--a colleague at the paper--told me about the party at a friend’s house. He didn’t provide chapter and verse but made it clear that something moved from person to person around the dinner table that evening that wasn’t ordinary.

I’m not going to identify him or his friends, because the idea here isn’t to intrude on their privacy or embarrass them.

Even my friend isn’t making a big deal out of things. He’s more or less wondering himself: “People say everything is different after Sept. 11,” he says. “Maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t.”

He describes a friendly group of six couples that in recent years has held a “progressive” party where they go house to house and share their bounty. This year, they settled on one couple’s home.

Eventually, they got around to the main attraction: sitting around the dinner table and talking.

You probably know the ritual. Friends kibitz, swap silly stories and delight in poking fun at each other. My friend remembers when the group celebrated one member’s 50th birthday and filled the house with laughter and ribald tales.

That was supposedly the bill of fare for this year’s Christmas party.

But a strange thing happened, and my friend isn’t certain why.

As the group assembled around the table, one of them suggested that each person announce, in turn, something for which he or she was thankful.

This hadn’t been done before. Nobody had prepared speeches. My friend went first and, caught off guard, talked about family and good health.

But as the “microphone” was passed around the table, the words became more poignant, the disclosures more personal. People let down their guards in ways they rarely had; a group that had always been friendly but seldom had shared gut-level feelings now was, more than ever, doing so.

“It escalated to such a personal thing,” my friend says. “To feelings we hadn’t expressed about each other in years past.” By the time they’d gone around the table, at least some of them had tears in their eyes.

To my friend’s recollection, nobody specifically invoked Sept. 11. But he can’t help but think that on some level, the shared spectrum of feelings that came out of that day inspired the words around the table. Just as almost all of us had trouble expressing feelings on that horrible morning and the hours that followed, so have many among us dug deeper since then to realize what matters most in life.

Of his group’s intimate conversation that night, my friend says, “Our paths cross, but we feel they don’t cross enough. We don’t say things [to each other] that we should say.”

Who knows how many other Christmas parties like that unfolded across America. Obviously, that one wasn’t unique. In fact, it brought to mind an e-mail my sister had sent earlier this week to a group of friends and relatives.

It was one of those Internet postings--this one titled, “This Christmas Is Different.”

Sample refrains:

“Last Christmas we valued things that were costly; this Christmas we value things that are holy.

“Last Christmas we were thinking about the pressure we are under at the office; this Christmas we are thinking about all the people who no longer have an office.”

I’d suggest that there’s a common wavelength here. What happened around that table in Rossmoor echoes across the country.

Sure, it’s another Christmas season, another hectic round of shopping and traveling and partying.

But I venture to say that for millions of Americans, this one won’t be forgotten.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com.