everyday life

Christmas is my favorite holiday.  This month is a special time for those of many faiths, but since I am Christian I will refer to Christmas in this post.  I hope it does not offend.  This is also a season that is now driven by an overwhelming institutional materialism that really bothers me.  Do I buy presents for my children and other people close to our family?  Yes.  And I enjoy it.  But do I feel a mounting unease at what Christmas seems to have become, all around me?  Yes.

I’ve written a lot about ritual and how important it is to my family.  That’s more true at this time of year than at any other.  More and more, our small family traditions feel like a beachhead against the rampant commercialism out in the world.  I find myself turning inward, this year as I’ve done in the past, touching our small olive wood creche from Jerusalem almost reverently and hanging a boxwood wreath on the front door with a deep feeling of joy.  I’m not sure exactly why, but our rituals feel more important than ever.  So I wanted to share some of them.  I’d love to hear how you mark this season, if it has meaning to you and your family, whatever your faith.

We burn an Advent candle on our kitchen island (see above), and every single time I light it I think about how important one of my most treasured themes – darkness and light – is at this time.  Dusk falls earlier and earlier, but we have our small steady candle in our kitchen, and the light of our every day lives.

We only buy presents for the children in our families, our godchildren, and a couple of very dear friends.  This cuts way back on the shopping we have to do, and allows me to really focus on choosing gifts for the people in my life that I know will be most delighted by them.  I do give a lot of books, but there are games and electronics and clothes in there too.

Every year I tie a celadon satin ribbon around the large boxwood wreath on our front door and put out some special decorations around the house.  Our stockings aren’t as special as I would like (I’m still working on the needlepoint stocking I started when Grace was born) but our tree brims with memories.  We pick out a tree in a couple of weeks, not and on that day each child chooses a new ornament.  So we have all the new ornaments from each year, as well as a sterling bell marked with the years that Matt’s mother always gives us and many other dear ones.  A wooden bridge to commemorate the Covered Bridges Half Marathon, an Adirondack chair for Basin Harbor Club, a golden snitch and so many more.  Every year I also have a personalized ornament made for each child (silhouettes one year, doll-like fabric faces another, their names on porcelain disks another) .  I grew up with the annual tree trimming being a huge celebration, and like my childhood trees, ours is sentimental more than elegant.  Years ago Grace asked me why our tree wasn’t “as fancy” as many of those she saw at others’ houses.  I told her that our ornaments may not match, but they were full of meaning.  After a long, appraising look at the tree, she concluded that our tree may not be fancy, but it was “full of love.”  And how.

For several years we’ve participated in a program with the local homeless veterans shelter.  We receive one vet’s holiday wishlist and buy gifts for him or her.  Grace and Whit help me wrap the gifts and write our veteran heartfelt cards.  Christmas carols feature in our traditions: one weekend afternoon we bake and decorate cookies and dance to carols in the kitchen and we sing them after dinner on Christmas Eve with my oldest and dearest friend and his family.

It was that friend whose family was at the heart of the annual Solstice tradition, which ended in 2012 and which I still miss.

If this season is holy to you, how do you mark it?

We have lived in our house for a long time.  We moved in in the summer of 2001 with plans to stay here for a few years before moving on.  As it turns out, we are still here.  This fact has several ramifications on our daily life, almost all good.  One in particular is on my mind lately.  This house is full to the rafters with memories.  Every room holds ghosts.  This is the house in which we celebrated our first anniversary.  It is the house in which I sat two days later and watched the television coverage of 9/11, my new husband in LA, having flown out the night before instead of that morning .  It’s the house to which we brought home both of our babies from the hospital.  These walls have witnessed joy and sorrow, laughter and tears, first birthday parties and baby showers and engagement celebrations and many tantrums and even more glasses of wine.

I thought of this the other day when I stood behind Grace in her room as she rubbed cream into her face before bed.  I could not see myself over her head in the mirror because she is almost as tall as I am now.  Suddenly the image of her 4 year old self, standing in the same spot in the room, concentrating hard to write her name, spindly letters sprawling across the paper on the easel, almost knocked me over.  The Margaret Atwood poem that was the preface to my college thesis, Spelling, rose to my mind:

How do you learn to spell?
Blood, sky & the sun,
your own name first,
your first naming, your first name,
your first word.

The next morning I walked into Whit’s room to find him sitting cross-legged in the yellow-upholstered glider that stands in the corner of his room, reading a chapter book.  I spent so many hours in that glider, rocking him, nursing him, watching the moon out the window of his room.  And here he sat, buzz-cut, almost 10, reading to himself as he rocked quietly back and forth.

The past is animate in every corner of this house.  I sat in the kitchen rocking chair with a week-old Grace on my lap, looking mutely at my doula and nodding silently as she encouraged me to seek help for my already-overwhelming post-partum depression.  I labored by myself with Whit in the darkness of night in our bedroom, pacing back and forth, Ina May’s book open at the foot of our bed.  I have taken more pictures than I can count of Grace and Whit with their grandparents on the yellow couch in our living room.  We have celebrated Thanksgivings, Christmases, and hundreds of family Sunday dinners at our oval mahogany dining table.

I’ve written often about how time confounds me, about the ways that the past rises up through the present, augmenting and haunting it at the same time.  This is something I experience on a daily basis in my own home. The past and the present are layered together in a way that enriches my everyday life and tints it with sorrow at the same time.  When you’re this aware of the past, it seems to me, there’s an inevitable thread of loss and longing that is sewn through your days.  While I don’t think this is true merely because I’ve lived in my house a long time, I do think I confront specific and highly-textured reminders of what was more frequently because of that.

Even now, as I write this, I’m sitting  in the room where I paced for so many hours, a colicky Grace in the baby Bjorn, hoping she would finally fall asleep.  I am looking out the window at the tree whose branches I watch cartwheel through the seasons every year.  Down the hall is the bathroom in whose tub a baby Whit giggled, his plump body in a starfish-patterned bath seat.  When I walk downstairs I will wade through memories from over 13 years.  And the ghosts who populate those memories make me simultaneously sad, grateful, and intensely aware of my own life.