Christmas Anyway...

Christmas Anyway...

Sitting here this morning thinking about Christmas. How it was the mid-year lifeline for me when I was a kid. My year was neatly broken into two pieces, like a saltine cracker.

Summer and my little league family... and Christmas. In between was school, which was wonderful (I was very blessed with great teachers at every stop along the way) but at home it was suffocating. I always say "I didn't have a home...I had an address."

But for whatever reason, Christmas was a two week break from the overwhelming nature of the house I grew up in. It was like someone called a truce in a war. I think it was because we had people coming to visit over the holidays and my mother and her husband wanted to put on a game face and look like they were actually happy 52 weeks a year.

Whatever... it have me a break from the real them for a couple weeks and I'd take it any way I could.

Plus...I really really love the holidays. I love every holiday that hits from Halloween to Orthodox Christmas (Epiphany)

Thanksgiving is really just the opening act.

I loved neighbors and friends visiting. I loved singing in the school Christmas concert (when you could still call it that) I loved learning about Hanukkah in school and celebrating with my Jewish friends. I loved watching every single Christmas special on TV. The cartoon ones and clay-mation ones for kids and the adult ones, like Bing Crosby, or Bob Hope during the war. Most of the time they bored me but I watched dutifully because it was Christmas and that's what you did. (It's amazing how much of those old classics I absorbed and how much I love them now)

I loved being a paper boy at Christmas and my customers giving me a card and a tip. Sure, I appreciated the money but what I really loved was the recognition..."Thanks for doing such a good job." I didn't hear that at my address.

I loved giving gifts to my teachers. I loved flipping through the Sears wish book and circling the things I dreamed of.

I loved singing carols and hearing Christmas music on the radio. I loved the way a tree smelled. I loved thinking that maybe this would be the year that this two week reprieve would somehow extend itself 50 more weeks and things could be better at the address. I soaked it up and threw myself into it as much as I could. Like I was charging a battery that had to get me through the next four months.

Christmas got me through to spring. Spring got me out of the house more. That's how I endured.

I think I took a little piece of each Christmas and stored it in my heart when I was a kid. A few memories each year that I filed away to use as a template for the Christmases I would one day have as an adult.

As a dad.

Even before I got married and before I had Daisy, when I was single and had my first apartment the first thing I did was have a Christmas party.

I'm sure it's why I always decorated so much. And got so into the season... especially after Daisy was born. It was to make sure that she had happy memories of Christmas. And it was to remind myself, I suppose, that Christmas was still as special as it always has been.

I have a photographic memory. I'm very visual. Of all those "photos" I hold onto in my heart, so many of them have twinkling lights and tinsel and smell like pine. And I wanted my daughter to have the same snapshots.

But you get older... and within those photos in your memory are a few that you created. The ones you'd always hoped would develop and take shape. The ones that were more plans for the future than memories of the past.

You wait for them but the picture never develops. Or it's blurry and out of focus.

Or you missed the moment and the picture just isn't there.

When you put your heart and soul into Christmas every year, these pictures are hard to take. "It wasn't supposed to look like this. It wasn't supposed to be like this..."

Even that is a lesson from Christmas past. Sometimes you didn't get the thing you most wanted. So you lived with it and opened the things you did get, and it was Christmas anyway.

I have to admit that this year its been harder to get into the season as I usually do. I wrestled with just putting up the tree this year. I didn't want to watch Christmas shows or listen to my Christmas playlist.

It took a few extra days but I did it. A few movies and a handful of songs and Christmas showed up, as usual.

Christmas doesn't look like I dreamed it would when I was a kid and thinking about "someday." But it's Christmas. It's probably the only legacy I actually have from my childhood that's worth hanging on to... and making better.

So...I did it anyway. So far Christmas is 60-0 against the Grinch and old Ebenezer. It still doesn't look like the one I hold in my heart... maybe it never will.

But it's Christmas anyway.

And that's enough.

Merry Christmas y'all