Christmas

...and Thanksgiving!

Christmas approaches, and we have to decide whether we shall duck out this year, and hide somewhere else: Florida, Trinidad, Chicago,... There is an endless list of possibilities.
Thanksgiving will be the time to test everything; if we make it through T-day without tears, fights, recriminations, or food burning on the stove or in the oven, maybe we'll stay.

I guess my most poignant Christmas - and I know I've written about this, so feel free to speed ahead to the Next Blog=> button - was the year my daughter had gotten so sick, and we had to take her to Denver to the foremost respiratory hospital in the world - National Jewish Hospital in Denver, Colorado.
We were scheduled to be there about December 17th, during Hanukah, and return home on December 24th, Christmas Eve. We had to put up the tree and ornaments early; set out the presents, and get some supplies that would last a week, so we would have food when we got home late Christmas Eve - back then I think more stores stayed closed on holidays and Sundays and such.

So we had everything looking as if it were on a Christmas Card from the 1890's: joyful and bright, but arrested in time; nothing would change for 7 days, the tree lights would not turn on, nobody would see it, no one would open presents, no one would sing carols, no one would walk in from the cold and breath a sigh of relief at being handed a hot cup of Earl Grey. It was timeless.
Our flight was early, so we left the house at 3:30 in the morning on the day of departure. Everything was in total darkness, and the tree was a vague black outline when I turned to close the door and took one last look.

I've never enjoyed flying. I am very nervous about the whole thing.
It was cold that day in December, so the plane would be de-iced. I had never been on a de-iced plane before, so I pushed aside my toughts of various dooms, and awaited our arrival at the de-icing station.
It turns out the de-icer is some sort of glucose: sugar, and they spray the plane, and the taffy melts down over the windows, totally obscuring the view. Being ever the optimist, I thought how great it was to be mummified within a cocoon of sugar.

It was a good flight. It was a crisp, clear cold day, not yet winter, the solstice being four or five days off.
I wasn't in a good frame of mind, and flying made me nervous. As I looked out the windows, now clear of de-icer, I thought that in a world of crappy alternatives, the fate of dying together as a family, when the bloody plane crashed in South Dakota or Nebraska, was not a bad way to end it all.
Believe it or not, this thought did cheer me up considerably. I no longer felt the fear of flying. Whatever the outcomes were, I had embraced them all, so I was feeling chipper once again.
I could see everything clearly by the time we were nearing the Mississippi: ice reflecting off various lakes and bodies of water that I thought - silently and like a gleeful child - "Wow! I wonder if that's the Father of Waters? No! Maybe that is!" and so on. Of course, I did it silently. No need to scandalize the people around me with an unseemly display of thrilldom!
I talked to my daughter about the terrain over which we were flying; I smiled and chatted with my wife; I engaged the fellow I was sitting next to in conversation, and never once was I pinched by that tinge of regret one gets when one plunges into premature conversation, then scampers around looking for an exit.
The plane landed all in one piece at Denver International. It has an unusual tent-like appearance with a white roof punctuated as if with tent poles, and pulled up along their lengths: we called it Snow Goon Airport, since the white cones of the roof seemed to remind us of the Calvin & Hobbes comic strip episode about Snow Goons: where Calvin's ugly snowmen come to life - in his imagination.

It was like Eden. The people were all that surprisingly wide-open, hospitable, and glad-ta-see-ya way that I am not at all familiar with. I gaped unbelievingly at them. "Where did you people come from?" I wondered. I ended up at The Tattered Cover Book Store soon; I believe it was on or near Cherry Creek at the time. I don't think it is now. I purchased a book by Rupert Sheldrake, and I read it avidly.
My daughter spent most of the time at the hospital, undergoing tests, treatments, clinics, classes on maintenance. It was Hanuka, so there were Hanuka decorations everywhere. When Hanuka ended, those decorations came down, and the Christmas ones went up immediately.
When it snowed in the morning, it was melted away by noon.

We travelled around a lot, going through the mountains, visiting the towns there, gasping for breath at 5,000 feet plus after climbing a flight of stairs leading up to some tourist look-out or ranger station. We saw snow boarders sail through the sky - snow boarders were relatively new then - and disappear down a declivity, where we could only see the snow-capped tops of mighty pines. I pulled the car over, and we went over to the side to see if we could spot them, but there was only a snowy slope and the fence of pines, and trails of new cut snow where the mad men had steered.

My cousins lived nearby, but they were too busy to see us. It was Hanuka and Christmas, after all.
And since I hadn't seen them in 20 years, I really should have called weeks ahead. I should have. And I would have, had I not feared they would invite us over......and I was really just into enjoying my misery right now, and I wanted to focus on how miserable I was, and how cruel fate was, and how remote that God was in his sky-cloud-village of fluff and gilt.

We came home late in the afternoon; it was not yet night, but it was the gathering of the dark that precedes the winter night, the sombre grey backdrop where we paint people in black coats walking in front of blurry headlights on a street: dark mufflers and ebony hats in our peripheral vision.

It was fully night when we got home. You know, I don't remember the flight home, nor the drive home; it seems as if every detail of the journey out was engraved into my memory, but the homecoming was blank and cold and grey...until we turned on the lights, and the Christmas tree lights sprang into a photon chorale of "In Dulce Jubilo...nun singet und seid froh...!"
And there was cake to be warmed up and eaten, tea to be drunk, milk and cookies; there were presents to be opened.
I already had opened mine.