Christmas 2020

 

It’s 7 o’clock on Christmas morning.  The house is still asleep.  Outside a milky blue glow to the east silhouettes the trees and telephone poles.  No snow this year.  Just an icy stillness beyond the windows.  I am the first one up, as always, so I have already played Santa and stuffed the stockings that now hang distended from the mantle.  In a few hours all the packages underneath the tree will have been opened, their wrappings scattered about for the cat to play with.  But for now, there is a look of perfection, a kind of symmetry in all the squares, rectangles and oddly shaped bundles under the tree.

 The silence of winter,  The memories gathered over seventy Christmases.  Yuletides in the desert.  Yuletides by the sea.  And the almost ancient family ones in the heart of suburbia, when petty differences and misunderstandings were temporarily set aside for the laughter and comfort of home.  And mom was Mom.  And dad was Dad.  And the siblings were not a nuisance but necessary cogs in the familial wheel.

 The lites shine brightly this morning in spite of the decades.  Each ornament seems to have its own story so that the tree becomes an anthology of little vignettes and events, bound by the turning earth and all the people I love and have loved, and all the places I have been like this one, with a decorated tree in a corner of the room, on a cold morning in December and the beginning of another winter.