X-Mas is a comin'
Below, scroll down, is a NYT column that catches me this morning at 5:21 and still pitch black dark outside. I’m afraid there are children who board the school bus in the predawn and are delivered home after dark, what misery. But today’s Saturday, isn’t it, a reprieve.
Looking across the room I see the sofa we bought at a Southern California furniture store that fall 1969 just before my ship deployed for WestPac and whatever contribution we made to the Vietnam War. The elegant new sofa in our living room on the moss green carpet of our house in Chula Vista, San Diego. The house was our first purchase, brand new, the builder had done a good job, except that the outside walls were not insulated, so the hot western wall could make our bedroom unbearably hot on summer and fall afternoons. No air conditioning either, didn’t need it most of the year. That was Southern California sixty years ago.
One evening - - Linda, Malinda and Joe must have been in Arizona visiting Linda’s parents - - I stood at the open floor to ceiling window in that bedroom and froze still and silent as a skunk walked by five or six inches from my feet.
That same house we emptied of precious things one afternoon and loaded them into the cars as we watched hot coals drift our way from the wildfire on the nearby mountain range and settle on our wood shingle roof.
It was to us the perfect house, though, and later as we PCS’d to Ohio I missed it until a letter from our neighbors wrote that after we’d moved out a huge tarantula had been found in our garage.
I’d loved living in San Diego, well remember sadness as I drove away early a mid-summer morning in 1971 knowing I’d likely never return. Although it was my sea duty home-ported there that had finally, once and forever, turned my Navy career plan upside down and, our first night at sea, November 1, 1969, on the way to eight-months deployment in WestPac, I’d resolved to retire as soon as possible - - which I did in February 1978.
For me, with my antipathic aversion to authority, going back to working for my father in his seafood business starting at age nine, there was no way a grown man should tolerate a job where the higher powers could decide where me and my family would live.
Life as a parish priest was infinitely different. My bishops lived far away, and never bothered me anyway. I remember once, early on, when I needed to be away from the parish for several days, wondering who I needed to ask permission, then realizing that I was on my own.
Melissa’s NYT column below only relates to my above thoughts in that she triggered my wandering mind to recall holiday seasons over the years. Favorites: the first day of Christmas Vacation my years at Cove School. Christmas 1956 when Linda and I got engaged. All the Christmases when our children were little - - our first Christmas Eve in Virginia, would have been 1966, we got Malinda and Joe to bed frantically excited, and I made it worse by going outside to the window by their bedroom and jangling a string of bells. Driving through snow, heading for “midnight Mass” our first winter in Pennsylvania.
Christmas morning, it would have been 1973 in Ohio, when Tass, our toddler, a year and a half old, climbed into her new doll cradle and shrieked, “Mom! Look at Her!!” She was so unexpected, special and doted on, and at that age she knew that "Her" meant herself.
Holy Commotion at Holy Nativity on Christmas Eve, the more chaotic the merrier.
The Holidays started yesterday when school let out for Thanksgiving Week. I mean to love every second of it, and I hope it creeps by very slowly.
For life and those who share it with us,
RSF&PTL
T90
Pushing off
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We’re on the precipice of The Holidays now, again: where has the time gone, where has the year gone, where is my life going, etc. If you’re traveling for Thanksgiving, perhaps you’re already gone, reading this in the security line at an airport less crowded than you expected. Do you dare admit some optimism, that this trip could go off without incident? But this is just the beginning of your travels, of course. Who knows if the good luck and the good weather will hold — here’s hoping.
The holiday season has its own engine, one that’s been gaining momentum since Halloween and will shift into ever higher gears as we hit the straightaway that leads to the year’s end. There’s an urgency that can feel both exciting and overwhelming. There’s a tension in all the stock holiday scenes: cheery and/or awkward gatherings, delicious and/or overcooked proteins, snowy and/or soggy backdrops. Not many days left, and so even in moments of abundance, there’s a scarcity underneath.
How much of this is real, and how much of it is just our acceptance of the fiction that the end of the calendar year is a deadline by which certain things must be accomplished? Remember when marketers tried to scare you by announcing there were only so many “shopping days until Christmas” left? In the era of “buy it now” and same-day shipping, a shopping day seems quaint. Yes, vacation days and insurance deductibles must be exploited or lost, but otherwise, there’s a comfort in knowing the end of the year isn’t really a finish line in any meaningful way.
An old friend wrote me a month or two ago suggesting coffee, asking for dates that worked this fall. I forgot to respond, and this week she followed up: “Frankly you could suggest Jan. dates — I get how time is compressing right now!” My immediate response was one of shame. I’d dropped the ball! And then that feeling of scarcity: Yes, time is compressing, and there’s not enough of it, and let me count exactly how many days are left in the year so I can really feel the squeeze. (After today, 40!) And then gratitude for the reminder: Some things can wait until January.
Most things, really, can wait until January, and maybe they should. If your holiday season already feels too packed, here, on the Saturday before Thanksgiving, then see what might be shifted. If you’re dreading that post-holiday lull when Christmas trees lie felled on the curb and you have no reason to wear your “fun” sweaters, then now’s the time to joyously, eagerly move what you can to next year. Your holiday to-dos and celebrations need to stay put (although, if your family is flexible, no one’s stopping you from moving them, too), but the optional stuff — the coffee dates and catch-ups, the movies and books you keep meaning to get to — won’t expire.
Every first weekend of January, I go away with the same group of friends. It’s a tradition that feels defiant: In the severe landscape of the Northeastern winter, when December’s merrymaking is receding to memory, there’s a reprieve, a reminder that we don’t have to get all our fun in before the clock strikes midnight.