Christmas present and past.


As I get older, I naturally fall into a contemplation of what was and what could have been. This is particularly the case with Christmas. For one reason or another, in Canada, Christmas has become the ultimate family event. As families age and children move to homes of their own, obligations require that they celebrate this annual event in places other than what their parents have traditionally called home.

My wife and I spent the first decade alternating Christmases between her folks and mine. Her parents would delay Christmas on the years spent at mine. Now, my wife and I find ourselves in the same situation as our parents, only our children are not separated by a few hundred kilometres, they’re separated by thousands. So, for us to get together at least once over the Christmas holidays isn’t always possible.

The year my daughters were two and four, we spent Christmas at my parents. Nicola had made dresses for both and they kind of looked like dolls. My parents must have spent the previous few months building them doll houses which were as much works of art as toys. Our daughters just loved them and played with them all Christmas day and the next. The following day we had to leave because Nicola’s parents were expecting us in Tumbler Ridge.
The girls in their pretty dresses playing with their new dollhouses

My mother was very upset. All that work and the joy it delivered and now it was over. She made leaving very difficult and I can understand why. She wanted this moment to last forever. Obviously, it can’t but in another way, why shouldn’t it? Life is transitory but does memory have to be? Now, she’s lost her husband and many of her friends and, with little to celebrate in the moment, memory is much of what is left. Memories like those shared with our daughters and with me and my siblings the many years previous.
Christmas the next year at Nicola's parents with a new brother in tow 
We have many ways of celebrating the past most notably Remembrance Day when we recall the sacrifices made by others on our behalf. Both my grandfathers fought in the trenches during World War I as did my father-in-law so I’ve always found this day a little sobering. But what about Christmas? What about good memories of the past? Why couldn’t it be a celebration of the moment for the young people and a celebration of the past for those of us getting a little long in the tooth.

This year, we’re not even celebrating Christmas in our own house. We’re staying at an Airbnb on Vancouver Island where my middle child now resides. My youngest will be joining us and we will also have Nicola’s brother in attendance for Christmas dinner. But, it won’t be as good as past Christmases because my eldest and her husband won’t be in attendance. They’ll be celebrating Christmas in the U.K. with his parents and family who must have felt last year like we do this.

So, this Christmas, I will celebrate the moment as well as feel grateful for all the Christmases of the past. Thus, it’s always be and always will be. Hakuna matata. Have a good Christmas or whatever you celebrate this season.
Friends and family at Christmas dinner last year. 



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Television - oh how it's changed.

Image
Crank phone with shared line A little over a year ago, my wife and I cancelled the landline for our home phone. The number was transferred to Nicola marking the end of an era. No more checking phone messages at the end of a holiday. No more telemarketing. No more phoning our house and wondering who’ll pick up. (which our daughter misses the most. Now, she has to decide which parent she’ll phone where before, it was a crap shoot.)   The landline symbolized home. To know a phone number was to know an address. It began with a stem phone with common connection shared among neighbours followed by the rotary phone, then the pushbutton phone and finally, the cordless phone. And then, the cell phone. The cell phone has no sense of place. It goes with its owner to work, a restaurant, a friend’s, on holiday or the side of the road where it fell from a pocket.   The old television with rabbit ears In the same tradition of our landline, my wife
Read more

Cancel or Decouple, that is the question

Image
  Cancel or Decouple? Have you been cancelled? I believe we all have in one way or another. We were cancelled by our neighbours. I don’t know why although my wife blames the dogs, particularly Pippa, our female cairn terrier who likes to pee on Gordon’s pristine lawn. They used to like Finian, our male dog, because he would visit them and watch the goldfish in their pond. Then, Finny pooped on the lawn and that was the end of his visits. But they’d still say hello when we’d catch the other’s eye while out gardening, hanging laundry, weeding the stones or whatever. I do that on the street. If someone catches my eye, I say hello whether I know them or not. It must be an old man thing. One day, they just stopped saying hello or acknowledging our existence whatsoever which isn’t easy because there isn’t a fence. (Weird as it may seem, the only line differentiating our property from theirs is a slightly different arrangement of rocks on the ground.) Betty especially has ignored us. Nicola’s
Read more

Leaving is very hard to do.

Image
Leaving a community where I’ve spent almost half my life was extremely difficult. Leaving a house where we’d really enjoyed living for the last 14 years is also difficult. As I sat for one final time on the couch in the basement and, to be honest, had a little cry, my wife told me that we would always have the memories. However, like music and smells, memory is attached to places and by leaving places, we lose a bit of memory. Our eldest’s paintings of tropical fish in the downstairs basement, the stockings hung by the fireplace on Christmas eve in the upstairs family room. Opening those stockings on Christmas morning. Our ridiculously huge Christmas trees harvested along access roads, our backyard where we’d planted trees around the perimeter to provide a screen from the neighbours and a connection to the forest beyond. The woodpeckers that would come every year to feed their young at our feeder. The bounty of apples provided by the tree in the front yard we’d planted the first
Read more