MindSpinner

I just bounced downstairs to check on something. Through the oval cut glass that forms the center of the front door, I could see flashing colored lights across the street. An ambulance? The police?

No. Christmas. Christmas has come at the neighbors’. A tall tree lights the front window, and two artificial trees twitch in perpetual spasms of light - blinking colors and white, colors and white.

I am fond of Christmas, I really am. I used to mark its coming by lighting a candle at midnight, looking out my window at the starry sky and the darkened fields, and listening to the night as if it might whisper something to me. I remember my father taking us to find the perfect Christmas tree from a lot. This took hours, and the tree was always too tall when we got it home, and there was great trouble in shortening it and setting it up. Decorating my father’s Christmas trees took three days and more than 600 ornaments, some of them far older than I am, now boxed in the eaves at my mother’s house. My father loved trains, and model trains were a staple gift for years during my childhood. Partly for that reason, I love the fact that train tracks lie just below the bluff at the back of my yard, and trains rumble by. They do not keep me awake at night. They bring me memories.

I remember my mother reading us Christmas stories - of the nativity, of Santa’s workshop, of the ghost of Christmas past. I can see the picture in the books, even now.

My brother and I were always horribly spoiled at Christmas with too many gifts, yet somehow we were not spoiled at all, because neither of us is greedy or self-centered now.

When my children were small, I made them the magic of Christmas, too. We made Christmas cookies with cookie cutter shapes and decorated the cookies with colored icing. We gave them as gifts. Sometimes I’d cut big ones freehand, too, rocking horses or angels or Santas. When my son wanted a Superman figure and Superman figures were, remarkably enough, not being made at all (we were between movies, I guess), I sewed a tiny Superman suit, with little red boots and a cape, virtually perfect. The Superman that could not be bought in any store stood twelve inches tall under the tree, looking dashing, though remarkably like Prince Eric from The Little Mermaid dressed up, a resemblance duly noted some years later. I made a tiny elf shoe with a turned-up toe and a bell, to leave behind in the fireplace. When they asked about Santa, I told my children that Santa was the spirit of love and giving; I was careful not to lie, not really. I never changed my answer.

Now their two half sisters, still just an infant and a toddler, are growing up in a house where there will not be elves and such, or Santas or sleighs. This is a religious household. I asked my children, “Would you rather have known that there was no real Santa from the start, or were you glad you had the magic while you were young?” They think for a minute and say they’d choose the magic all over again. Perhaps they’ll understand through their lives that love can always make a little magic.

Christmas was always holy, too, and it’s still holy somehow, even though I know now that it takes the winter solstice for the birthday of a child born at a different season of the year. No matter, it is a dark season, and we need light, and song, a tree in the house, gathering, giving, and the thought of divinity incarnate come midwinter. If Christmas didn’t exist, we who celebrate it would have to reinvent or borrow or revive something else, just to get through. Instead Christmas did all of these things.

But I’ll be confounded if it’s all supposed to start at Halloween or Thanksgiving, or if it’s all about the malls in the city on the river thirty miles away and shopping bags and going further into debt. I hid out all Black Friday and went nowhere at all. I will shop, such as I shop, mostly online. I’m hiding out from Christmas until I’m ready for Christmas to come. Twelve days was a good idea. More is like eating too, too many sweets, wrapped in shiny foil. I’d like to hang a sheet over the front door for a week or two, until I’m ready for a fresh green wreath instead and that trip to buy find the perfect tree, or close enough.