Christmas is memories to have and hold, and memories still to come. Christmas when I was five was exciting. It was comic books and presents on Christmas Eve. It was going to a neighbor's spruce-tree windbreak for a Christmas tree and topping an evergreen so tall that one could see clear to town from up there, clear to grandma and grandpa's house.
The air was crisp, and still. The snow was crunchy underneath our boots. It was always sunny. Every day. Later in the evening on Christmas Eve, it was trying to stifle giggles and not fight with my brother as we snuck out of bed and peeked down through the black curliqued iron grate in the floor of our upstairs bedroom, trying to see Santa down there.
Trying to see why we had been sent off to bed, while he still lingered. Wondering why he sounded so much like someone we knew. We were amazed that Santa and our parents had so much to talk about. And somewhat confused as to why anyone would drink something made out of raw eggs that tasted that bad. Christmas day when I was five was building snow forts outside with my brother and all the cousins. It was mittens that were soaked and hands that were so cold that tears came to our eyes after we were called in to warm up. Christmas Eve at 15 years of age was Brylcreamed hair and pegged blue jeans. It was going to church and wondering whether I was too old to take one of the paper bags of candy and peanuts that were handed out.
Wondering about it, and thinking about how right it had felt in the years before, and trying to figure out just when I had grown out of that nice feeling. I did take one. There seemed to be more peanuts in there than I had remembered. In the years before, those bags had seemed to contain a kind of magic; now, the same stuff was in them, and somehow the magic had left. Christmas Eve at 25 was staying behind, at home alone, not going to church with the parents, inexplicably reluctant to face a church full of people when I felt so empty inside. I had only been home from Vietnam a few weeks. I was, I realize now, a little crazy. I was someone who looked like me. Someone everyone else thought was me. Someone everyone else viewed with a mixture of respect and uneasiness, because I had been somewhere they hadn't. Because I had done something they hadn't, some things they weren't certain about. And they weren't certain about anything to do with that war.
Christmas day that year was someone who wasn't me, who smiled until his face ached. Now, years later, I enjoy the memory of many Christmases far more pleasant. There are memories of three daughters growing up in our own first home, and a duck named Leroy, whom we rescued one winter after he had frozen one foot off. The duck named Leroy clumped around the house like a peg-legged pirate as he explored the place. He was like one of the children. He went slap-clunk, slap-clunk, as he waited for us to run his bath, where he would swim in small circles and entertain the kids, and dive for kernels of corn, and be as happy as we were.
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Those Christmases with little kids were years of wrapping paper strewn about the floor in a happy mess through which the kids crawled and hid and peekabooed. They were easy Christmases, because it isn't hard to find presents to delight young children. Those Christmas days were toboggan rides, and more wood for the fire, and home made ice cream--something finally made out of raw eggs that tasted like heaven.
And kids' hands that hurt when they warmed up after making snowforts and snow angels. One memory in particular: The other daughters wondering, before they were able to read, when Christmas would be named after them, instead of their sister. We asked them: What do you mean? They answered that each thought it highly unfair to always have only a "Mary" Christmas.
Christmas is memories to have, and memories to build. It is people who will hold you up a little when you are leaning, as occasionally happens under the weight of Christmases past. It's now college boyfriends, some of whom will turn out to be keepers, and sons-in-law, who already turned out to be keepers. Pretty soon it will be grandchildren, who will definitely be keepers. (The first have just arrived.)
Some Christmases will naturally be better than others. If it's not too much to ask, good or bad, please let them keep coming. And let me be here as long as possible to count them.
