Today we made paper chains for the tree and snowflakes for the windows.
Life may creep along hour to hour, day to day– but mostly it’s made up of those crystal clear scenes — some hard– some happy — the ones that move our hearts. That make us who we are. An entire year can sometimes be summed up in blowing out the candles on a cake or saying the wrong thing and wishing you could take it back.It seems that this season, the days and weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas, are loaded with memorable moments all mixed up in the past, present and future. It’s rather emotional, and I know I’m way too sappy– but sometimes I cry for no reason except that I’m happy– or maybe I’m just really tired… No wonder the most enduring of holiday stories is Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.
Everything about a crowded Christmas at a family house is full of ghost stories– thankfully, our ghosts are pretty good ones– that Afghan on the couch was crocheted by Poppy’s Grandma Angie. “Poppy had a grandmother?”
“Yes, and she just helped me tuck you in.” (Angie was a Fitzpatrick and probably the source of that red hair on three of our grandchildren.)
I have missed the chaos of a houseful. I love it: the piles of boots and coats in the mud room, the sink full of dishes, the counters of snacks.The noise. WE can’t even hear the radio much less any carols. “The brownies are all gone? I only had one!” “Someone bake some more.” “The kids have had enough sugar, let’s take a break.” “How about apples and cheese?” “Make sure the dogs don’t chew the toys on the floor” “Will someone hold Henry?” Where is Lila?” —
One minute my children are laughing about high school escapades and the next bemoaning the lack of sleep life with their children involves. Then everyone goes to the pool or the gym or takes another walk (“invigorating” was how Ella described the cold rainy gale on the beach today. In a couple of days it’s supposed to be 35 degrees colder, -5) and I babysit. Last night before dinner, they all went out to the distillery together and we watched the little ones. As parents, you hope your children will grow up to be friends, but it’s not something that you can make happen– I’m grateful that ours are close. It takes the pressure off. (Maybe we will sail around the world? Hardly. Home is my favorite place, or at least within a few hundred miles of it. I don’t have the clothes for anywhere else.) What matters to me is that they have each other, and it looks like the next generation of cousins will too–
The polaroids that I’m storing in my mind (and heart) of these few days are mostly the quieter, unplanned, random sort of moments. Like when Emilia woke up early from her nap, and we didn’t want to wake up Lila and Henry so we got out the matryoshka Santas. I even put on Handel’s Messiah so she’d imprint on some proper Christmas music ( not that Robert Earl Keen’s Merry Christmas from the Family isn’t a classic in it’s own right, and all of us can sing-a-long to that one, but still…)
When Luca draped the chains on the tree he noticed the shoe– I kept the kids’ first baby shoes and hang them on the tree every year– that little Adida’s sneaker was Christian’s. It’s already too big for his daughter.
