Our 96 year old house after the first day of snow. We got about 6 more inches after that, and are due for more over the next 24 hours.
Saturday, December 20, 2008
To the soundtrack of a Charlie Brown Christmas
I figure I have, at most, three viewers. Hello, love of my life! Hello old flame, whom I wish lived about 2000 miles closer! Hello rare and precious friend.
I am excited that we have been buried in snow this week, necessitating a rugged and heavily clothed approach to Christmas preparations. We have been doing some fairly glorious sledding. I have gathered most of the items from which the magic will be spun on Christmas eve. I have begun to anticipate the smells of Christmases past as I make my family's traditional dishes, and also to anticipate the children coming downstairs after Santa comes, their squeals of delight and their happy faces. It is one of those times when everything comes together despite the gaping holes left by the absence of loved ones, despite the emptiness of the religious overtones, despite the commercialism. What is left, after all these years, is the joy of seeing my children believing in magic for a day. It is also the precious gift of remembrance, the smells that take me back to my Grandmother's house, the ornaments I remember hanging on dozens of other trees. I am not a traditionalist, by any stretch, but for the past decade or more, I've felt like I live in a world I hardly recognize. I could never have predicted 20 years ago what my life would be like today...cell phones, the internet, my mysterious infatuation with science, my complete loss of faith in most things I took for granted, my strange husband, my even stranger kids...none of it is remotely as I imagined it would be. Why am I not an artist, and how the hell did I end up in the upper left corner of the country?
Christmas is a blessed bit of continuity in my unexpected life.
I am excited that we have been buried in snow this week, necessitating a rugged and heavily clothed approach to Christmas preparations. We have been doing some fairly glorious sledding. I have gathered most of the items from which the magic will be spun on Christmas eve. I have begun to anticipate the smells of Christmases past as I make my family's traditional dishes, and also to anticipate the children coming downstairs after Santa comes, their squeals of delight and their happy faces. It is one of those times when everything comes together despite the gaping holes left by the absence of loved ones, despite the emptiness of the religious overtones, despite the commercialism. What is left, after all these years, is the joy of seeing my children believing in magic for a day. It is also the precious gift of remembrance, the smells that take me back to my Grandmother's house, the ornaments I remember hanging on dozens of other trees. I am not a traditionalist, by any stretch, but for the past decade or more, I've felt like I live in a world I hardly recognize. I could never have predicted 20 years ago what my life would be like today...cell phones, the internet, my mysterious infatuation with science, my complete loss of faith in most things I took for granted, my strange husband, my even stranger kids...none of it is remotely as I imagined it would be. Why am I not an artist, and how the hell did I end up in the upper left corner of the country?
Christmas is a blessed bit of continuity in my unexpected life.
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