Today has Never Happened Before

Last year I struggled at Christmas time, and I think it boiled down to the fact that despite my best efforts, I was not able to recreate what we'd had in prior years. Despite the traditions we held to, despite the constant chorus of carols, it fell short of magic for me. I wrote a poem. A lament of sorts.

But then it began to dawn on me that I was looking at this all wrong. So I wrote yet another post: Fresh Christmas, and I felt better because I had a plan. But I'll be honest--it felt thin and unsatisfying, because I came to it barely in time to give it a try.

However, now that another year has sprinted by, I'm having a chance to practice in real time what I glimpsed last year: to add to my collection a newly minted, never-happened-quite-like-this Christmas. And I'm glad to report that the sadness of last year is not gnawing at me like a hungry shadow.

Instead,  I'm finding that this year, I want Christmas to be whatever it will be, and what it is--a day, a season that has not happened in quite this way before. Rather than trying to make it fit a pattern I absorbed when I was a child and then have tried to re-capture every year since pretending lost its realness, I am watching Christmas 2016 unfold.

This is not a lesser season for the fact that members of our family are halfway across the country, and others halfway across the world. It is not a lesser season because gift giving this year looks different. It is not lesser because activities are not as group oriented as on other Christmases. Something can only be lesser by comparison.
And how can we judge as lesser a day that has never happened just because it doesn't mimic one that has?

To re-create Christmas is an impossible task. Even if every piece matches, we're older, changed, and it's not the first time. In the act of re-creation, the magic of discovery is replaced with the damper of comparison.

And it is not by comparison we discover new treasures. It is by viewing each day, including this Christmas as a one-of-a-kind event, a day, a season that has never happened before and will never happen again in exactly this 2016 way. We can do familiar things with an eye for the unfolding of the new day, and let each variation and repetition of traditions be part of a unique occasion.

In holding too tightly to Christmas past, we can miss the wonder and the gift in Christmas present. In measuring this day against others, we risk missing the wonder it holds, risk not being fully present or fully enjoying what is. So I don't know what Christmas 2016 looks like.


I'm  going to find that out, one new discovery at a time. 

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.