We Live Where We Are

Christmas

With all this talk about what Christmas means, I thought I'd throw in my own 2.3 yen.

Now that I am a certified, card-carrying adult, Christmas has become a respite from responsibility, a brief return to the simple and powerful magic created when families converge to eat, play card games, and talk, just talk. I am fortunate in that my relatives are all alive and living within the short span between the Mason Dixon line and lower Virginia's Blue Ridge mountains. When I go home for Christmas, I go home, my family and the landscape of rural Maryland overlapping like layers of a watercolor.

I think of my uncles, their work-callosed hands squeezing my biceps, their faces changed in small, nearly imperceptible ways since the previous year. Aunts to be greeted with meek hugs. Close-aged cousins, once my closest friends, now with opaque lives, new jobs and relationships, interests I never knew about. Everyone is one year older and, though I try ignore it, I am strongly aware that I know nearly nothing of what has happened in their lives between these Christmas bookends. They sum it up for me with impossible succinctness; the job is going well, the kids are doing such and such, we went to Florida for a few days this summer.

If there is one thing I've forsaken by living so far away these past seven years, it's familiarity--family. Now, in our present attempts to relate, we rely on the tensile strength of our pasts, bridge-building with those small memories we've used for years to define one another. To my aunt, I'm still the nephew perpetually kicking her shins for telling me Superman isn't real. Cousin Matt always always sides with me. Dwayne is forever the cool younger uncle who lets me stay up all night playing his Super Nintendo. Because we never see each other, these memories, stretched endlessly into the present, are all we have. Yet somehow, they are enough. Trite and true, cliched or not, family is family is family.

And Christmas, for me, is family. Jesus is there, sure, but like a backdrop or, better yet, the stagelights. Setting the scene, illuminating all of us--grampa as he throws a few fake punches, testing my reflexes, the endless supply of young cousins wailing and breaking their new toys, grandmas watching proudly, brothers sharing a plate of pie, and the parents and their siblings playing Uno and laughing over shared vacations twenty years past.

I simply can't wait to be home for Christmas. Hope to see you all soon!