The Things We Keep

Every year on Christmas Day – and only Christmas Day; some things are diluted if too familiar – I get out my still-functioning Walkman, bought 20 or so years ago when the technology was already becoming obsolete, but because running with a Discman was a non-starter for the teenage me. (Yet another example of my kids will never know how good they have it).

And then, Walkman ready, I pull out the dubbed cassette tape that has Tom Paxton’s Christmas album (1988) on one side, and Raffi’s Christmas album (1983) on the other, with the song list for both written out on the cassette sleeve in my father’s handwriting. I connect it to my Bluetooth-capable speaker, and imagine the warring technologies finding middle ground, this one day a year.

It’s possible that one year this tape will just crumble to dust, or whatever that thin ribbon of plastic eventually devolves into. But until then, once a year, it is the soundtrack to holidays past and present and future. It’s my childhood, with aunts and uncles and cousins stamping snow off their boots and closing the back door against the cold with the happy jiggle of sleigh bells that always hung there. It is stocking feet on thin-planked hardwood floors of rich, glossy oak. And the smell of hot chocolate in the morning, and hot cider in the afternoon. It’s the velvety tactile treat that were the sofa and living room chairs, and it’s sitting in a circle, taking turns opening presents around the room, youngest to oldest.

Last year, I was Scrooge and the Grinch. I probably stopped just short of the drunk Santa in Miracle on 34^th Street, not in actual drunkenness, to be clear, but in general holiday drear. The holidays came too quickly on the heels of the election and I just couldn’t. I grudgingly allowed holiday cheer to go on around me.

This year, maybe, inversely, because the world is unalterably different, and we are unalterably different, and maybe because sometimes we just need the feel of familiar floors underneath our feet, I was ready for Christmas music the week before Thanksgiving, much to my oldest daughter’s judgement.

“It’s too soon,” she said.

But mindful of how quickly the holidays go by, I made them listen to a solid 30 minutes of classics while we made cranberry salad, watching the berries bubble and pop, before switching them back to January through November music.

I bought winter hats and scarves. I smiled as Hershey kisses wrapped as Santa’s hats hit the shelves. I ordered Christmas cards that arrived before the leftover turkey was gone.

“It’s too early to send them,” I was cautioned. “Not before December.”

And so I tucked them away, but sometimes I took out the clear-band shrink wrapped set and smiled back at those smiling faces in their new winter hats and faux snow. In a season of good tiding, it felt peaceful just knowing that they would travel across the country and across oceans to find their way toward people I have loved through all different seasons.

I bought an artificial tree this year. A pre-lit artificial tree. It’s the first time I can remember putting such a thing up. Real trees were the currency of my childhood, when we went out as a family to a Christmas tree farm and took a wagon and a saw and cut our own. And then as an adult, living a little more urban experience than my childhood, we bought Christmas trees at our traditional Christmas tree lot, at the corner of Colfax and Monaco, where maybe they didn’t have hot cocoa, but they had candy canes that they gave out to children.

But this year, I bought a fake tree.  And I love it. It’s cheerful and doesn’t need to be watered and hasn’t dropped a single needle that has found its way through my socks to my bare feet.

 

We bought new stockings. All different, because sometimes life is about matched sets and sometimes it’s about embracing what’s changed. But we put onto the tree ornaments that I have had since before Tom Paxton and before Raffi. My first Christmas, and each of the girls’ first Christmases. Homemade ornaments and glass ornaments and ornaments whose glitter has stubbornly hung on for decades, at least enough to remember.

And we put up ornaments that we bought just this year, a panda for Samantha, a dragon for Eva. It’s Christmas past and present, and knowing that we’re keeping traditions that we’ll springboard into the future, as we add new ornaments and experiences and people and memories to our circles.

My brother is my rock, and my bridge. My bridge between those long-ago childhood Christmases, when we all had the same stockings, and when we formed buffet lines in the kitchen and filled plates to eat – just a few times a year (because some things become diluted if done too often) – at the multi-leafed Amish oak dining room table, the table that also accumulated dozens of homemade iced sugar and gingerbread cookies in a festive glow of color. My brother who can remember not quite so long ago when my girls were more excited by boxes than presents, and when opening presents would last all morning, because they would get so distracted by this new or shiny or interesting thing, that the rest would simply wait. My brother who arrives after stockings, which are done in the early morning, but whom we wait on for under-the-tree presents, patiently even, and never questioning the order, because that’s the way it’s done. Because that’s how traditions work. They cheer us, and they buoy us and they ground us.

This year, the floors underneath me are different, but the ornaments on the tree are familiar, even as the tree is new. Advent calendars counted down the days of December, we made gingerbread houses and cookies, even though we didn’t use Great-grandma Rinehart’s recipe. But next year we will. And we’ll wake up and have hot chocolate in the morning, and open stockings, and wait for my brother, and open presents in a circle from youngest to oldest, and have a big Christmas lunch and thumb through new books and talk about Christmases past and the new year ahead. Because the occasional disruption in tradition doesn’t disrupt the forward momentum of the years; it is only the exception that proves the rule. These are the things we keep. And really, they keep us.