Unwrapping Memories
No doubt the first thing you did today was turn here expecting a daily dose of dread. Not here. Not today. The holiday season in general and Christmas in particular are unique moments in our annual cycle of seasons. Year-end holidays share a common thread: family, introspection, celebration at completing another year, resolutions for the next and sharing of the past. The memories of these times will differ naturally over years, but the happy holiday context remains constant like an emotional girder.
Can you recall the pure joy of childhood Christmas? Bright lights everywhere. Intense anticipation. The magic visit with Santa Claus and its silent rehearsals. The eve’s exquisite waiting. The excitement conjured in the bedroom dark, waiting, maybe sleeping, and finally the incalculable joy come the hour of dawn -- or possibly the one before -- at the full-blown, color-lit realization that the red flannel suit had come. And the same warm family faces were present again to share.
It’s hard sometimes years later to recall the fragrance of such memories but worth trying. Adults allow so many distractions to encroach nowayears. The stumbling economy. The “Sale” signs. The zero-interest, zero-down car deals. They’re very nice. But is something going on we don’t know about? There’s Washington’s infernal, eternal bickering. The same feuds erupt privately everywhere, except it’s always safer to criticize others from afar than face our own shortcomings up close. There’s talk of smallpox, which seems anything but small. War is possible, disconcerting, frightening. Is it our imagination or has “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” played more this year?
Newspaper pages carry regular tales of those who pray and prey. We witness car chases and drug deals, murders and baby abandonments, embezzlements and robberies. We hear of inventions and discoveries, of selfishness and selflessness. And there are since 9/11 more obvious worries, a greater readiness in public and private to ponder once-outrageous what-ifs. It’s understandable but still distracting.
We were so busy yesterday preparing for today and so tired last night that we had no energy for excitement, just a need to sleep and perhaps remember.
Once there was a father and son who, soon after the festivities, dragged their live Christmas tree to the frontyard. There, with pick and shovel and tinsel traces still dressing needles, they set the little tree free to grow. Now, almost 50 holidays later, that retired Christmas tree towers twice as tall as the house. The father is gone. So is the tinsel. But not the tree. Nor all those once-new memories made indoors in front of it on a happy holiday morning not really so long ago.
It took some effort to excavate that old memory. But that’s what holiday mornings should be for.