Vortex
Christmas at the family friends'. I mean the friends my sisters and I grew up with, the people down the road.
We've known them for over three decades -- a German-American couple my parents met during their brief Methodist phase. The wife was, I'm told, our Sunday school teacher, though I have no recollection of this.
Two sons: the adventurous older boy and the quiet brother he teased and pushed around. The quiet one went into criminology and is now making six figures; the adventurous one has struggled, financially and psychologically, but his latest business venture seems to be a success.
If you want to feel conscious of the passage of time, there's nothing like having Christmas dinner with people you've known since age seven. Their house is almost as familiar as my own childhood home.
Each year we've usually shared one or more of the major holidays. Our turn followed by their turn. For three decades (I missed a few during my peregrinatory twenties), the same ritual. Greetings in the foyer, coats collected, the hugs and cheek-kisses, the kids taking stock of each other. It's as though all the Christmas dinners over the years have really been the same dinner -- an eternally suspended moment which we keep returning to.
If I inventory details -- graying hair, incipient baldness, tiredness around the eyes -- I can see that everyone has aged. This only heightens the intrigue. We're the same, and yet we've changed.
Add to this the fact that Christmas is already a very chronology-heavy holiday. Even more so than New Year's, when the nostalgia gets laid on so thick it becomes campy. Christmas feeds depression as well as fostering joy; I usually experience both, plus a kind of existential vertigo, and at least some of this has to do with the clock.
Thankfully, there are new people here too: spouses and significant others, children, babies. They keep the event from drowning in time and memory.
10:49:39 PM 
|
|
