Fresh Christmas

I've spent the last month or more capturing Christmas--to try to feel once more what I felt as a child, and to help my kids, now almost all grown, capture it as well. But this Christmas morning, I find I have a new perspective. Despite what I've just been doing, I now realize that it's not about trying to relive Christmas past, as if those few fleeting years of my childhood or my kids' childhoods were the epitome of what Christmas should be.

This is the last year I'll do that. From this morning on, what I want to do is let each Christmas season unfold its own unique treasures. We can't always have everyone here. We can't always do exactly what we did that one year when it was perfect for me or some other person. But we can live in the now and treasure what's happening this day.


Of course we'll probably still have our traditional foods: grasshopper pie on Christmas Eve. Cinnamon rolls on Christmas morning. (Why we use this occasion to slam ourselves with sugar, I have yet to define, and truthfully don't want to, because we literally only make these things once a year. Some things you just have to hold on to)!

But with the possible exception of food, I don't want to be looking backwards at Christmas except to reminisce. I want each December 25th from here on out--and I figure I've got at least 35 more to go--to be uncharted territory, as in reality, each new day is never and can never be a repeat of the one before it.

I want to add to my memory bank a newly-minted, one-off Christmas, vintage 2015, instead of trying to relive but never quite recapturing the magic of some other time time. Next year, besides God, who really knows how it will be? Who knows who will be here. Who knows what the weather will be, the dynamics, the tree.

We'll have to discover what unfolds. That's what we're doing today, and rather than feeling like it is less than other years because not everyone is here or no small child is present to add wonder, this Christmas is perfect because it is fresh and new and unexplored.

Let the celebration begin! 


Once everyone else gets up, of course. Me? I'm on my second cup of coffee :-)

Farewell, Big House

It's official. 
We have sold our big old 1883 Victorian Farmhouse in Missouri. Nostalgia washes over me even as I write that. What a wonderful and magical season we had there. Nine years. I love the big, open rooms with the wide gracious halls. I love the two staircases, the porches, the views, the Missouri farmland with its line of trees like green billows covering hills, the wind sweeping over hayfields like waves of an inland ocean, the line of stalwart Sycamores marching up the driveway.

This is the place my children spent the last years of their childhood. My oldest was married on its steps on a perfect October day. Christmases seemed like something out of a Dickens novel--not the sadness and the social injustice, but the lights across the way where our neighbor's lovely house (built in 1893) stood out like a castle in France, and our own Christmas tree filled the window bay with twinkling joy. Even the drafty old windows we remember with affection, and laugh at how on  cold winter nights, the icicles on the tree would blow in the breeze.

Recently I chatted with a friend. "You're putting down roots, here, then?" she asked, and I realized that yes, yes we are. We're sowing ourselves into this place completely and fully, for as long as that may be. 

I never thought we'd be moving from Missouri after 23 years, but again, I cannot see the future. All I know is that I am very glad to be here in Northern California, and that though I love the old house in Missouri, I would not trade it for what my life is now. It would not bring back my children's childhood, and though part of me is grieving for the season that now is past, I am not content to look backward, as if my best and dearest days are behind me.

Even now, in the quiet before the day begins, I catch the scent of this year's Christmas tree, and pondering the possibilities of the coming days and weeks, I know that the past, precious though it is, is past. The future is yet to be. But here, now, today--I live.

I treasure those things that have passed into the realm of memory. But I don't want to be stuck there. I want to keep adding daily to the treasures of life, and living now the season I will look back on with the same fondness I now feel for our time in the big house.