Christmas Callbacks

I spend a lot of time thinking about when I was younger. I am newly beyond the cusp of young-adulthood, and thus should still be more prone to thinking ahead to the near- and long-term future I have in store for me, pondering the dynamism and uncertainty in which it exists, but I find that my fondness for "then" is greatly strengthened by the season. As the days are shorter and shorter, the nights cooler and cooler, I am without a doubt at my most in tune with my own personal timeline and the memories that come along with it. Multicolored lights are draped across awnings, trees, and fences in the neighborhoods I drive languidly through on my way home from work. I peer into the tall windowpanes in the living rooms I can see from the street, noting the Christmas trees that have cropped up. I feel warm thinking about this time of year, even on the most bitterly cold of nights. This stretch from early November to the end of December--encompassing my birthday, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, to name a few notable days--is filled with some of my clearest memories.

I remember my first LEGO set, a Christmas present from my parents: a drawbridge guarded by knights clad in armor, valiantly defending against a green, flame-spitting dragon. I played with it for hours upon hours, until I ultimately dismantled it in an attempt to expand a craggy castle that I was gifted for my birthday the next year.

I remember trips to the snow with my family, long car rides spent with pent up anticipation for sledding and snowball fights and hot chocolate from a thermos. Exhausted at the end of the day, I slept on the car ride back, wishing desperately that it snowed a little closer to home.

I remember waking up in the middle of the night, terrified, at the pounding of sheets of rain against the wall separating my bedroom from the front yard, the screams and howls of the the inclement weather leaving me paralyzed under my covers, trembling and praying my parents would come scoop me out of my bed and rescue me from the terrors of the storm.

I remember my beloved dog being carefully dragged across the threshold of our entryway during one such storm, covered in a tarp, violently shaking and seizing. I sobbed as my parents explained that he needed to go to the hospital but they were going to take care of him, they promised. He returned slow, unsteady, confused, unable to eat or walk or pee on his own. Within two months, with patient walks and all the love and phenobarbital we could give him, he was the same goofy dog. He lived another nine years.

I remember performing in holiday concerts in middle school, the culmination of months of semi-fruitful practices during band class where any given trumpet player hitting the note correctly was an exercise in quantum uncertainty. One year I played the full concert on antibiotics, struggling to breathe through my second bout of pneumonia in less than two months, feeling thankful that at least drumming didn't require me to blow to produce sound.

I remember curling up on the couch to watch my older brother and his friend from out-of-state play video games and rekindle their long-distance friendship during winter break, always wishing that I'd be invited as a tagalong to their overnights so I could feel like a big kid too. Over the years, I would watch this friendship fall apart due to drugs, and feel sorry that my brother was losing his oldest friend by refusing to participate.

I remember finishing my calculus final in senior year of high school, then immediately going home to prepare to fly east to see my grandparents. My grandmother was dying of lung cancer, the news tainting the whole warmth of the season that year, and I tried to drown my sadness in romantic love that too proved fleeting. I spent the whole trip in a sort of out-of-body experience, and was numb when two days after returning home I received the news that my grandmother had died.

Some of these memories still have lingering pain associated with them, but over the years they have dulled and been softened by the underlying memory of this season for me: throughout it all, moments triumphant or tragic, is a bedrock of gently glowing lights, soothing music, warm cookies, and childlike whimsy--anticipation of gifts to be given, games to be played, time to be spent with family. It is this magic that was so strongly imbued in me as a kid that it permeates my days and nights through November and December, and I am constantly, inescapably, joyfully called back to these feelings every time I pass by a store with its holiday decorations in the windows or a kid skipping alongside their parents shout-singing "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer." I am prone to letting nostalgia hit me hard, but it is always so unrelentingly palpable around Christmas that I find myself swirling back in time several times a day. I allow myself to be swept up in memory, and when I return to the present that fondness stays with me. I am at peace, content with the life I've lived and the goodness that surrounds me.

It's Christmastime, and I can't wait to see what this year brings.