Day 922, December 21, 2022

The Quick

After noon, the students stopped coming to my office. Even the emails stopped arriving. It was like the surface of a lake just after dawn, a mist hovering just above the water. I was wary to disturb the peace lest I wake someone or something. 

We have reached the quick of the winter. Any little slight, one more added task, an additional forgotten thing makes one feel near the breaking point. And yet, after tomorrow, there will be a release, a gliding into the holidays and the new year. The tight spot in my lower back will loosen up, my left shoulder blade will cease to ache, and soon the kids will be home,

My earliest memories of Christmas involve loose tinsel strewn on branches. I seem to remember a silver artificial tree. There was one particularly spectacular castle made out of plastic bricks (not interchangeable with Legos), that my father stayed up late assembling after I went to sleep. I don’t think he could help himself. 

My mother sewed wonderful felt Christmas ornaments, little elves, boots, snow people. For years these hung on our tree. Then there was the year where my parents painstakingly blew the insides out of eggs and painted intricate designs on the delicate shells. These too, were preserved for years until the mice found the eggs and the elves and the boots and made a mess of them all. It pained my mother to throw out all those memories and history.

I suppose Christmas is also about letting go. Children grow up, they leave, sometimes they are home, sometimes they are not. Some years, Christmas feels lonely. I remember, when I was older, hunting for hidden Christmas presents was an exciting lead up to the holiday, but once some of the gifts were discovered, it was so disappointing to already know what was going to appear under the tree. As an adult, for a time, I always wanted gifts to be something special, something interesting, something particularly chosen, and unasked for. Unfortunately, that ends up being a challenging task to search for the perfect gift, and impractical for people living in apartments or with fixed incomes. It has become much easier to just ask what a person wants, but I still feel like that twelve year old kid staring into the recesses of my father’s closet seeing something I shouldn’t have seen and wishing again for mystery and surprise.

My mother is an amazing gift procurer. I swear she must begin the day after Christmas. Earlier this year, I was visiting and hadn’t brought a change of clothes and complained about how cold I was in the building where I was going each day. My mother came back from some room in the house with a brand new, perfectly fitting button down shirt. How is that even possible? 

While somewhere along the way, I figured out it was my grandfather slipping out of the church party early to drink the scotch and cookies left for Santa and move all the gifts under the tree, my parents have remained magical. They still somehow produce things I need or want, whether it is a warm comforting meal, a nice fitting shirt, or as I received in a recent visit, a grocery bag filled with correspondence from my friends that they saved all these years, probably found at the bottom of some footlocker a decade or two ago. I looked at a few letters, but I am almost too frighted to examine them too closely, and will need to steel myself for a wave of nostalgia. Remember when we all wrote letters?

I am lucky and thankful to have my family, that everyone is mostly healthy and doing well, or getting better, or mostly well. The year feels like one spent out in the open sea. It feels miraculous to be drawing into a harbor to tie up at a dock for a spell. I hope you too are finding a place of sanctuary.