One fact of late marriage is that (unless your new spouse has managed to alienate all of them) you acquire along with him a well-established family.
Since Don has (so far) not been disowned, I got the Curtis/Baranskis and their extremely well-established Christmas Pierogi Party, which happened yesterday. In case you’re wondering, this does not involve actually eating pierogi. That, I hear, comes later. This is a family pierogi assembly line. Roll dough, stuff dough, pinch dough, boil dough…and, I’m sure something comes after that, but I have no idea what. I was at the roll-stuff-pinch station.
It was fun. Don’s daughter talked to me about her future plans. Don’s sister talked to me about their new cat. Don’s brother and I got into debate about whether the beanie baby balancing on the chandelier was a turkey or an ostrich. You know. Typical Christmas stuff.
I had to leave early because I’d procrastinated some of my weekday work, and I found myself, on the drive home, thinking about Christmas. Bittersweet, a little. My parents’ old house sold this week. It’s not ours any more. We can’t go home again. We won’t make cheese puffs or crescent cookies or Christmas fudge. We won’t decorate the tree with gingerbread men or sit in the living room on Christmas Eve and sing O Little Town of Bethlehem.
“O Little of Town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie,” I hummed this morning. I felt suddenly like I was going to cry. And suddenly, also, I felt like I needed to reflect on Christmas. And so I did. I took my blue pen and my blue cloth notebook with the anchor on the cover, and I commenced to write.
I wanted to write about Christmas, but not the one that’s bearing down on us now. Not the stultifying American Christmas with its manufactured music and plasticine snow. Not the one that sends us scurrying to mall after mall, where the smell of over-sweetened nuts mixes with the sickly fluorescence of the lights and makes us feel harried and confused and as though we might need to stop a minute by that ridiculous fountain and put our heads between our knees.
Not that one, but rather the one that has come to my mind’s eye ever since I was a child, and I sat on the floor in a lost-now living room and listened to my family sing O Little Town of Bethlehem. I saw it then, as I see it now, the silent town on an empty plane, low buildings tucked cosily one against the other, sleeping dreamlessly, as above it the most magnificent clouds swirl in a starry sky.
I saw it then.
And I see it now, this morning, but, looking closer, I see it differently. I see it now, town like a soul caught in the tumult of all it can’t control. Seismic shiftings. Despots, kings. Private tragedy. Aborted dreams.
I see its dark and winding streets where the curbstones are piled high with hopes and fears. Years’ worth of Christmas catalogs, thumbed through and now forgotten, dragged to the street and stacked beside the rubbish bins.
Is there any point in wandering the streets of this town, so lost in slumber it cannot even dream? Well, let us see — come with me. Come with me, no not that way, not without to Christmas distractions, but rather within —further in.
Walk with me down the dark alley you’ve ceased to bother with. Blind alley, you thought, lost to time. Come, be led by the hand past doorway after locked doorway, past all the doorways you’ve knocked on so many times you’ve cease to believe that anyone dwells here, deep in the back alleys of the soul. Come with me.
I (or no, not I, but, rather, someone other than I) will lead you past a turning you’ve never reached before, to a door cracked open. Light shining in darkness; hope and fear pulsing together in the place where the two meet.
You will witness there both a birth and also the end of the world. Apocalypse of all your preconceptions making way for something new borning within you.
Ancient thing that walked along the oceans that lapped the dawn of time; ancient thing, but also new. Light as labor pains. Christmas born (and born and born) within the soul of you.
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