Most years at this time, I just want everything to slow down. Christmas is a week out, and everything is happening too fast. I haven't stopped to contemplate it, and I've been in a hurry to get things done. Maybe this is what happens. I told Robert Campbell the other day that I wanted to be around Christmas things. I guess I wanted to find a mansion all decked out in trees and tinsel to walk through and take my time. It's embarrassing, but my actual words were, "I want to see Santa."
My aunt sent me two old matchbooks this week with my grandfather's name etched into the covers. I started thinking about those great Pries holidays in California with all the aunts and uncles and cousins, and that green ceramic tree my grandmother had in the entryway of their home on Windsor Drive that had incredible multicolored bulbs. I bought a tree similar to it at a thrift store this year for seven dollars and some change. We now spend our holidays in Washington, or in Las Vegas where my husband's parents live. I suppose a lot has changed. Hasn't it?
This will be our last family Christmas in my childhood home. When we drive up Ridgemont hill to my parents' house, I think about my bus driver, Ed, and I think about walking up that hill for all of middle school. I hated that hill. At the end of my parents' cul-de-sac, there is another hill where my brother and Stephen Dutcher would sled in the winter when they were in the first grade. I think of all the people who have left and moved away. I think about how old we all are.
Elizabeth is in town for a few weeks. I hold onto these times together like nothing I can describe. When you have a person in your life who is such a part of you, and you manage to spend most of the year catching up on the weekends over the phone, or sending emails with a couple of lines of important news during your lunch hour, it's really quite something to be able to get together over a bottle of wine, or to walk into her parents' house, door unlocked, on a Sunday afternoon and take off your shoes and throw down your bag and share a blanket on the sofa. But soon she will be gone, and our next reunion won't be until the summer, and the summer always takes too long. Slow down, slow down, slow down.
I am listening to The Beach Boys and The Carpenters and some Doris Day and Frank Sinatra, and I am listening to as much as I can. Every time I listen to a Christmas song, I feel like I'm not appreciating it enough.
The very nature of Christmas is in the anticipation. It's the story of the world waiting for a really important birth, the most important birth the world has ever waited for in the history of the world, and it is a story about everything changing forever. Christmas is major. There is a lot of emotion in it. There is a lot of feeling, and beauty, and it's almost overwhelming if you really sit and think about it. And every year, it happens faster than you think.
