The holiday season–that busy stretch of weeks between Thanksgiving and the New Year–is often filled with Comings and Goings. Someone traveling somewhere and remaining for a while. Guests. Visitors. We had many. Did you?

Here’s the thing about Comings and Goings: some are more welcome than others. 

We definitely welcomed my parents.

They arrived the day before Christmas Eve and stayed for just over a week. In that window we took walks and ate lots, watched the third season of The Crown and then, hungry for more of England’s royal family, The Queen. We debated politics and theology; listened to Bach and Christmas carols; stayed up late and slept in; made, packaged and delivered Christmas cookies to the neighbors. My father repaired a faulty electrical socket in a bedroom and took lots of pictures. My mother did most of the laundry, cleaned up the kitchen, and played the piano.

It was lovely.

We also welcomed Shanna’s family.

Her parents and two siblings arrived December 20th and left January 2nd. They stayed with Will and Shanna, but we got to see lots of them nonetheless.

We celebrated Christmas Eve with them at Will and Shanna’s house. We celebrated Christmas Day with them at our house. And we celebrated New Year’s Eve together (plus three (most welcome) friends), eating raclette and playing games and finally ringing in 2020 outside at the firepit, where we toasted a new decade and then sang a hymn or two.

We welcomed Bill’s brother Ray, who came to us from Pittsburgh, and also his mother and brother, who live nearby.

All of these were Comings that were, as I said, Most Welcome.

But we also welcomed some Goings.

There was, for starters, the possum on our door step the night before Thanksgiving. Presumably lured by cheeses that cling to empty pizza boxes (stashed en route to the recycling bin), it was captured by my dog when I was heading out the door to borrow corn syrup from my neighbor.

Despite my dog’s having caught it in her teeth (I made her leave it); despite the possum’s proximity to a human’s front door; despite being a wild creature threatened by a dog keenly interested in catching it again, that possum remained. It played dead for hours on our top step, mostly obscured by the pile of empty boxes, but leaving exposed one tight claw and the sharp teeth that circled its open mouth.

We don’t know when it left, but were very pleased that it was gone in the morning.

The thing about Unwelcome Visitors, I’ve found, is that they don’t know when to leave– which was the case with the squirrel that, for a time, inhabited our Christmas tree.

When I awoke a few weeks before Christmas to hear it banging around in our breakfast room, I didn’t know it was a squirrel. I thought it was the cat (our cat doesn’t bang around) or the dog (who was lying on her bed). I certainly didn’t think it would be a wild animal, a squirrel caught in our many-windowed breakfast room. When I came upon it, still blurry with sleep, the squirrel was throwing itself against said windows, trying desperately to get outside.

I called the dog away from the room. And the cat. Then I called my husband. We opened doors and windows (outside it was 30-odd degrees and raining) and did all we could to usher the wild, frightened and somewhat bruised creature out of the house.

So it (logically) ran from breakfast room to living room and hid in the Christmas tree.

The sheriff wanted to carry the tree out and set it free. Durham’s answer (in this instance) to Animal Control, he wore boots and heavy gloves and had Squirrel-in-House Experience. But despite gentle prodding with our broom, the squirrel wouldn’t leave. Yes, it emerged a time or two and raced around, hiding temporarily under the sofa, threatening to go upstairs, and (always) missing the open doors that beckoned it outside. But every time it darted forth, it found its way back to the tree again.

In the end, the tree did not have to be carried out. The kindly sheriff kept at it until–in what was a third or fourth round of mayhem–we assume that it found a door.

We were Very Glad it went.

Yes, we had our share of comings and goings, of both the welcome and unwelcome variety. And we had one other: a Going-and-Coming, a Departure-and-Arrival. But it wasn’t an arrival here. It wasn’t a coming to us. It happened on Christmas Eve, but we didn’t see it.

On Christmas Eve, Emma and her team of nine left Kona, Hawaii for Athens, Greece. As we slept, as we celebrated Christmas, as we enjoyed the quiet Day After, Emma was flying halfway around the world.

She arrived in Athens on December 26th at 5 p.m., and she’ll be there for ten weeks, working with Youth With a Mission to serve refugees. These are people who know Going in ways I’ve never understood it: necessary, frightening, desperate. And their Coming to Greece, too, is likely full of fear. I’m hoping Emma and her friends can bring them some small relief.

We would have loved to have had her home for Christmas, but we’re so glad that she is where she is.

And when she gets home in March, we’ll be overjoyed to welcome her.

All photos by Richard Brewster with the exception of the above, which was sent to us: Emma playing guitar on Mars Hill in Athens.

The post Holiday Visitors appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

Dear Friends,

I wanted to give you something for Christmas. Something free and different.

Yes, yes. I know that everything on this website is free (okay, well, if you click the links to my books you’ll see that the books aren’t free). And the Advent readings are certainly free. But they aren’t different.

Okay, maybe they are different. I don’t know.

I’m starting over.

Dear Friends,

I have a Christmas present for you. And this is for you even if you don’t celebrate Christmas, don’t get Christmas, or even if you are a Bah Humbug kind of person.

I hope you’re not. But still.

This is a Christmas present for everyone: adult and child alike, solitary or in company, at home or away. It’s for anyone who likes words and even for people who don’t realize they do (one of my not-so-secret aims is to show you that you do like words, that you actually love them–did you know?). It’s a gift of something simple, brief, and lovely. Something you can enjoy once or again. Something that will make you think and imagine or that you can turn your mind off to and just let the words come– as they will, as they want to.

(Well-aligned words are Such Lovely Things, don’t you think so?)

Here’s the gift: I’ve read aloud and recorded something Favorite of mine, and I’m inviting you to listen.

What is it? It’s a short story. No. A poem. No. A Memory and a Conversation, a look over the shoulder, a Christmas or ten of them heaped up and then unspooled in a glorious line of words.

It’s Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales.

Who is Dylan Thomas? Dylan Thomas was a Welshman and a poet. He lived a short, loud and inebriated life, and he loved Christmas. He loved his memories of Christmas, anyway–the Christmases he had known when he was a child in (you guessed it) Wales.

He wrote A Child’s Christmas in Wales, and the work is certainly a testament to his love for and fond memory of his childhood Christmases. Well, whether or not he actually loved these memories is, I suppose, up to question, as he died in 1953. We cannot ask him. But this bit of prose certainly suggests that he loved those Christmases Past and snow and Wales in the snow.

Any work of literature mustered up in love is worth something, isn’t it? Add to that Thomas’s adjectives, his specificity, his brilliant and tempered use of alliteration; include his evocation of the child-mind, so richly done in this text; his appreciation of postmen; his love of mystery; his brilliant description of uncles (“there are always uncles at Christmas”) and aunts.

It’s so so good.

And it might be difficult to follow. So allow me to explain that this is a memory, and memories come as they will, right? Often memories lead to other memories in ways that make sense to our minds at the time but that, written out, might be confusing to the one who is following along.

Know that this is what is happening here: someone is remembering his childhood Christmases, and he is doing so in the aggregate: all-in-a-heap. One thought of Christmas past leads to another, and just when you are really and truly settling in to this stream-of-consciousness, you realize that he is now relating these Christmases to someone else–likely a child.

In fact, the way that this narrative becomes a conversation makes one wonder if Thomas is himself one of the uncles he mentions who has been dozing (and remembering) in front of a Christmas fire, and then has been interrupted by a niece or nephew and so begins telling them what he has been reliving in his mind.

It’s wonderful.

And, as I said, it’s for everyone. For people who began their holiday celebrations last night with Hanukah. For people who have never heard of Christmas. For people who celebrate Christmas in the summertime, never with snow. It’s for you and your children, for your baby who can barely crawl. For your great-aunt who might even now be “teetering at the sideboard.” For the uncles who are on their way to your house for the holidays.

Why is it for everyone? Because it’s beautiful–and beauty is for Everyone, most especially at Christmas.

So where is it? See below. Download and enjoy.

Merry Christmas!

With Great Joy,

Rebecca

click here to download

The post A Merry Christmas Gift for You: A Child’s Christmas in Wales appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

Ilya Kaminsky, Dancing in Odessa

At a baby shower in October, I talked with a woman whose younger son had just left home. He graduated from college a few years ago, so this is not that departure. This is a son who has gone and come home and now, finally, has gone away again.

“There just aren’t any opportunities for him in our town,” she explained. So he is off to a larger city to find a job in his field. Off, as we might read from a fairy tale, “to seek his fortune.” He is on his own now, “coming of age” as it were, as he must, as this mother wants him to. What parent doesn’t want to see her child thrive in the world?

Her older son, she explained, moved away years ago. He’s in Chicago and doing very well, she is happy to say. She and her husband are grateful for and proud of both their sons.

They are also trying to become accustomed to this: life with their children grown and gone.

Her throat closed. “Would you please write about this?” she asked, her voice lowered and keen. “There just doesn’t seem to be much about it out there.”

***

I don’t know if there is much written about it or not. I haven’t looked, busy–as I have been–with sending my own children out into the world. Two weddings in two years, and these only two years (give or take) after each of the grooms graduated from high school. Their empty bedroom still holds their furniture; their posters are still on the walls.

I haven’t found time or heart to do anything different with the room yet. But Emma has a bedroom here, albeit an unoccupied one. She graduated from high school in May and in September left home for six months, two and a half of which are spent.

Not that anyone’s counting.

***

“There doesn’t seem to be much about it out there,” she said, but I don’t know if that’s true. Surely there must be books about this transition in life, the whole “empty nest” thing. So many people go through it.

In fact, I have known many people to go through it: nearly everyone who has children. Seems to me my own parents went through it years ago–not that I noticed. I was too busy in those days to wonder if they were sad or missing us. I was married, making a new home with my husband in our apartment, finishing up school and thinking about my life ahead.

If asked, I would have said that my parents were absolutely fine.

I would write about it, I want to say to my friend’s friend, returning to our discussion at the October baby shower. I would write it about it, but what is there to say? One’s children growing up and moving out is the way of things. It’s how they must go. Why comment on it?

Yes, it’s a change. An ending. But it’s not a death. It’s not remotely comparable to those real tragedies abroad or close to home: not a story of horrors in a refugee camp or a school shooting, not a terrible injustice that forever upends all one holds true and good and right.

No, we anticipate the empty nest. We know it’s completely natural. Maybe it makes us sad–but it’s an ordinary sadness.

***

Life with children was an ordinary life. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, just as now. But also on those ordinary days there was school and time for play, sports practices, music lessons, games and concerts and recitals.

We developed routines to make it all run smoothly. During my children’s youngest years, I got up extra early to exercise. When I was teaching full-time, I often stole free class periods to go to the school’s gym. I knew the time with my children was short and, especially in those years, they needed me so much. I wanted to be available.

Routines shifted. We used to tuck them into bed at night. And then came the nights when I lay in bed half awake, listening for the car to pull into the driveway. There’s nothing like the sleep that comes when you know that everyone is home.

Now we have no way of knowing whether or not our children are in bed, because they don’t sleep here. We don’t need to know what they are doing because they don’t need us to know.

Which is not to say that they don’t need us. There are ways in which our children still need us–and one of these is that our children need us to thrive on our own. They need us to be stable and happy and moving along in the world. They need us to be able to proceed without those routines that were built on their needs.

This is difficult, because for twenty or so years, our thriving hinged on their thriving, on meeting their ordinary needs in ordinary ways on ordinary days.

Now we need new ways of being.

On our first night at home after Emma left, Bill and I stood together at the front door before we went up to bed. He locked the door and looked at me. “No one else is coming home,” he said.

If I were to write about the empty nest, I would say all of this. But I can’t write about it–can I?–because I have so much to be grateful for.

All of my children are still alive, of sound mind and body. They are making their way in the world. Not only that, but two out of three of my children currently live right here in my town. If I needed to, I could get to either of their homes within fifteen minutes.

Each of these facts is a gift. For any one of my children, it could have gone some other way. It still could.

In the face of such gifts, is it fair to be sad? To be sure, Bill and I are adjusting, but we are adults. We can handle this. We need to get over it already, move forward in gratitude.

Once I asked my mother how she felt about her children growing up. “Didn’t it make you sad?” I asked her. At this point, I was a mother myself, facing the specter that is now my reality, the empty nest that I can’t bring myself to write about.

My mother’s answer was so wise: she said that she was sad, but that children must grow up; it’s the only way. Any other possibility–a child somehow frozen in her development, stuck perpetually in any phase of childhood–however adorable it is–would be all wrong. “It’s like a record player with the needle stuck in a groove,” she said. Dissonance and static. Loss of (so much) purpose and meaning.

Ask any parent who has had the process interrupted. They know.

***

Yet the truth is that our children in this house framed our days. Nearly all the decisions we made were necessarily tied to them. I took them to the library because they needed books. I took them to the grocery store because they needed food. And people would comment to me as I steered my shopping cart (daughter in the baby seat, two young sons clinging to its sides), “You sure have your hands full!”

And I would answer–every time–“Happily, yes.” Because I loved having them with me in the grocery store. Even when they quarreled (and they did). Even when they asked for things they couldn’t have (and they did). Even when they did not listen to me (and they did not). I loved having them with me in the grocery store because I loved having them.

I knew that their time with me–with us–was fleeting–but it was so ordinary. It was full of frustration and exhaustion and occasional, terrifying doubt. It was full of making meals and cleaning them up again, of doling out snacks and doling out screen time and fighting back fears in the middle of the night because one or another of them had presented with something that might be a symptom of something terrible.

I knew–in this context– that the time was fleeting. But how–again, in this context– does one manage an understanding like that?

And when it all inevitably–even appropriately and beautifully–disappears, how in the world does one write about it?

At the baby shower, we sat in a circle and offered, one by one, a word of advice for the mother-to-be. And so came the perennial encouragement: “Enjoy every moment.”

How many times has a young parent been told this? A parent who hasn’t slept in weeks because of the baby’s teething or newness or stubborn resistance of sleep? A parent whose child’s terrible two’s have extended well into her four’s? A parent who feels themselves on the edge of mental or emotional frenzy because parenting is actually the most difficult thing they’ve ever done?

It is impossible to enjoy every moment of parenting, because not every moment is enjoyable.

Happily, another shower attendee, given her turn to offer advice, gently amended the earlier counsel. “Don’t feel like you have to enjoy every moment,” she said. “That is impossible.”

And yet, there it is: “Enjoy every moment.” I’ll tell you why we say this: to a person, every parent I’ve ever known will tell you that it goes by far too fast. They may very well remember how difficult it was to parent children-at-home, but so many of them nonetheless would wish to have it back.

***

Last week I made Christmas cookies with my mother-in-law, and as we worked side-by-side in the kitchen, she remembered doing this with my children, young teenagers, in this same kitchen a few years ago.

She remembered other times, too: when they were very little and would sometimes go to her house. “I would rent a movie for them and we would make cookies.” She recalled this aloud as she rolled peanut butter dough into perfect balls. “They would spend the evening with me.” And in the next breath: “I want those days back again.”

Christmas is in one week, and this is the first Christmas in twenty-three years that we will wake to a house without children.

I’m not going to write about the empty nest, but I’ll admit that this Advent has been a sad one for me. In truth, I keep forgetting that it’s Advent. I’m taking care of the Christmasy things (gifts, cards, mailing packages), but without any children here it all feels a little half-hearted.

At dusk in previous Decembers, I used to send my children scurrying around the house to turn on the Advent candles in every window. This year I do it myself, making the trek into our sons’ otherwise empty room and saying aloud, every time, as if they were there, “Hello, boys!”

I don’t wish my children home again. I do not wish them little. I’m so grateful for their lives now, for their strength and independence.

But this is how we know the world is broken: the right and natural course of things can also break our hearts.

***

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” John 1: 5

A friend reminded me today that Advent is actually about the broken heart of the world. It’s about everything that’s ever gone wrong: crop failures and mine collapses, and the floods and eruptions that destroy homes and claim lives. It’s about the delusion and wickedness of white supremacy, the terrors of refugee camps, the horror of school shootings, birth defects and infant deaths and terminal diagnoses.

Advent is about every kind of loss, even ordinary sadness.

Because Advent is about the God who knows our need and decided to answer it with himself. The eternal and omnipotent made human and finite: newborn, cold and hungry. He lived in this world knowing perfectly what it was meant to be and how desperately far from perfect it was. Then he paid for the disparity with his life.

And so I think no loss is insignificant to him, no grief too small. He cares more deeply than we do about all of it.

Which means, among other things, that it’s all right to miss one’s children, all grown and gone. It’s fine to be both grateful for their lives and sad that their time at home is over. There is room–during Advent and always–for both gratitude and grief.

That’s what I would say about the empty nest, if I were to write about it.

All photos by Richard Brewster

The post Ordinary Sadness appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

Except for the mall part. (I actually hate going to the mall, due to its uncanny propensity to awaken desires for things I don’t have and didn’t even know existed until I entered the mall.) So I don’t go to the mall unless I absolutely have to–and on this particular Friday, early Christmas shopping compelled me. The quickest of errands. In and then out again. I knew exactly (well, nearly) what I was after. I would only be five minutes. Ten, tops.

I was halfway up the escalator when I heard my name and turned and saw my friend Kyle coming along behind me.

Kyle McManamy.

(Yes. His last name is McManamy, and if you haven’t tried that aloud yet, you should. McMANamy. See? There. And you should also say it again. It is wonderful to say.)

Kyle is a friend from church. He is the minister to our college students and, living where we do, surrounded by universities on every side (pardon the hyperbole), that means his ministry is large and busy. He and his wife are very busy ministering to and serving and enjoying the college-population of our church.

Meanwhile, we Stevensons are very busy in our ways doing our ministering and busy-ness things, which means that most interactions with the McManamys include conversation about how we really ought to get together. These conversations take place in the church foyer or in the parking lot, or once–between Mary McManamy, Emma and me–in the Back-to-School section of the Target.

Once Kyle said of us that we are among their favorite friends that they never spend time with.

To which we answered, Likewise.

But once–that Friday–Kyle and I had a conversation at the top of the escalator in the mall.

***

I was in a hurry. I was in and then out again, remember? I had to get a thing (or a pair of things) and then be on my way.

Kyle, on the other hand, was leisurely. He was waiting to meet someone. On that Friday morning he had that rare commodity: Time.

So he walked with me. We went to the specific store. He helped me pick out the things. He helped me find a good deal and commended me on my selection and waited for me (browsing the sunglasses?) as I paid for them. And he walked with me back to the escalator.

That Friday was a beautiful morning. Sunlight was sliding through the high mall windows; it was glinting off the (early) Christmas decorations. I was happy to see Kyle, happy to be checking items off my list, happy to have taken the edge off my Christmas shopping–a new goal (to get Most of It Done by Thanksgiving) that wise mothers all around me have long since realized and accomplished but which I have only recently awakened to, being slow like that.

I don’t remember what had comprised our conversation (other than the shopping). I don’t know what we did in the way of catching up. But there at the top of the escalator it was time to part ways, for me to be off to the Next Thing. To say farewell to I-Never-Spend-Time-With-You-Kyle.

Then he turned and said he wanted to ask me a question. I wasn’t allowed to give it much thought, he said. He wanted whatever came to mind. I should answer it quickly. I could have fourteen seconds, tops.

Okay.

“What is the essence of friendship?”

***

Fourteen seconds, my eye. The essence of friendship? How to distill such a priceless abstraction within fourteen seconds–in the mall or anywhere else?

***

I thought of my best friendships, of what makes them work, of how long they have worked, and why.

I thought that “love” was both the obvious and the non-answer–because one can love where friendship does not exist. Indeed, one must. But friendship rests on something else, and while love is there, love is not friendship’s substance.

If one does actually “hem and haw,” if hemming and hawing is a thing, then that is what I did.

Meanwhile, Kyle waited.

He waited in that way that Kyle has: fully engaged, patient. He watched me with a smile brimming on the edge of his eyes, pleased and unbothered. Unlike me–remember?–he wasn’t in a hurry that morning. He would take whatever it was I had to say; he was confident I would say something good. He thought absolutely the best of me–that much was clear, is clear, with every interaction I have with him.

***

I wanted to say: Why are you asking me this? This is not a typical question for a shopping mall. It is not, in fact, a typical question at all. Moreover, I have to get to the gym–because sometimes my life is like this.

I thought he might have a reason, but also he might not. This question is actually the sort of profundity one can expect from Kyle: a rather stunning thing of substance that he makes quietly present in the middle of the ordinaries. It is, with Kyle, even in passing, a warm hello and honest interest, and a residual sense that he very much likes you.

It’s a wonderful thing, isn’t it? to be liked. 

***

I thought of something, an answer to his question. I wasn’t sure it was right– but it seemed profoundly true. It was unsettling to say so, lest I was wrong, but I only had fourteen seconds. I said,

“Deep mutual regard.”

Because where love forgives and forbears (and certainly does so in friendship), one can love where one regards little or ill or even not at all.

But a friend is one you heartily like, one you think  very well of. Whose advice or perspective is helpful, valuable, even invaluable. Whose foibles or failings are easy to overlook–or forbear–because you esteem her so highly.

Yes, one can regard another in this way and not have it reciprocated–but that is mere admiration.

In friendship, you like each other very well. Very, very well. Each–to the other–is profoundly valuable, deeply important, uniquely precious.

Deep Mutual Regard. That’s what I told Kyle was the essence of friendship, and I agreed with myself. Yes, I thought. That’s right.

***

Then Kyle explained: the college Sunday school class has been discussing one’s relationship with God. Kyle had saved the thoughts of Thomas Aquinas on the subject for last, and Aquinas held that our best relationship with God was one of friendship.

Which would mean that, if my explanation were right, we are meant to be in a relationship of deep mutual regard with God. 

Standing there at the top of the escalator in the sun-soaked shopping mall, I was stunned to consider that God would have deep personal regard for me.

***

Does He?

***

Everywhere around us, the mall cried, “Christmas!” Shining bells and balls and strings of lights, evergreen-wrapped railings and an enormous and sparkling tree–

All of it, whether we like it or not, regard it or not, know it or not,

coming to us because of the birth of a baby

who became a man who is also God

who sees every living person who has ever lived

–regardless–

with the Deepest Personal Regard.

***

The life of His Son is His invitation that we Try Him Out and see if we can’t deeply, personally (mutually) regard Him, too.

***

I had to go. The escalator beckoned. The required items were ordered, were bagged. The clock ticked. The car waited (somewhere) in the parking lot.

But I thanked Kyle for his companionship and–far better–for that moment of (Yes, it was!) worship at the top of the escalator in the sun-ridden shopping mall.

I returned to my car, and I went to the gym, and I was changed yet again–because God’s friendship does that always in the most beautifully satisfying of ways, even if it only requires fourteen seconds.

***

But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Romans 5:8

Kyle and Mary McManamy

The post Fourteen Seconds appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

The man in his house said that most of the trees were ten dollars, but the blue spruce was going to cost us a little more. I waited with bated breath for what couldn’t have been more than two seconds to find out where my expensive taste was taking us: we didn’t have an abundance of money, certainly not so much to squander on preference in Christmas trees.

The blue spruce was twelve dollars and beautiful, and it lit up the front window of our living room.

November 1992: Newlywed and apparently unfettered by guilt to enjoy the holiday with family, we decided with friends to spend Thanksgiving in Maine. Moreover, we would fly there–but the cheaper tickets had us arriving late Wednesday night. In the remote seaside town where we were staying, would grocery stores be open for necessary supplies?

We lined our suitcases with cans of pumpkin and jellied cranberry sauce. Our frozen turkey breast lay packed between sweaters. A perfect plan.

Except that someone at the baggage carousel in Portland had an identical suitcase– a fact we almost noticed too late. We had to go in pursuit (“Excuse me, sir. I believe you have our suitcase”) to reclaim it, and we laughed at (later) how surprised he would have been to find a turkey in what was clearly the Wrong Luggage.

How do we remember our holidays? My friend has a Christmas book with a four-page spread for every year. Here she records where they were and whom they were with, what they ate, gave, played, received. 

My holiday memories sift through my brain in varied order and at various times, triggered by who knows what? There is, for instance, that very early Christmas, when my baby sister was still a baby. My older sister and I awoke early, of course. Were we three and four? In the gray suffusion of earliest light, weighted by resistible guilt, we made our way to our grandparents’ living room. 

We were greeted by a monstrous eye, lidless, pupil- and iris-free, staring at us from next to the Christmas tree.

In terror, we scurried back to our beds and waited for more light and grown-ups, certain we had received our punishment. It was later, in the fullness of morning and a well-lit living-room, that we discovered the monster was an aluminum sledding saucer, intended only for joy.

December 1980: My Nana came to us in Pittsburgh from Florida and could never seem to get warm. We have photos of her bundled to her neck in the La-Z-Boy, the cat all in a heap on her lap.

Time plays her tricks. While we’re living them, the days feel so much like themselves. See? The dishwasher needs to be loaded again. Now emptied. Once again we’re setting the table. We’re staying up too late and forgetting to go to bed early, but otherwise things are normal enough. Until we’re looking back at them. That was when….

Thanksgiving 1995: They brought the turkey breast to us, once again frozen in the suitcase, because turkey was out of our price range in Switzerland. Our Swiss friends and neighbors thought it strange to have a holiday on a Thursday, but they were happy to withstand the Thanksgiving smells that wafted through the house. That was the year we learned that you really shouldn’t cook potatoes too far in advance–unless you’re going to mash them right away.

Thanksgiving 2011: We put the turkey in its brine in a cooler on my parents’ deck. It would be very cold out there; the turkey would be fine.

I’m not sure the raccoon agreed. He was interested in it at first–interested enough to get it out of the cooler, anyway, and drag it across the deck, and tear it (somewhat) to shreds with his little claws. But he left a sizable portion of the carcass near the steps.

We had to buy another turkey.

Over the years, my children were sometimes confused about *when*, exactly, the holiday was. “Thanksgiving is always on Thursday, but Christmas varies.” So every Thursday marks some weeks’ exact distance from that special feast, but Christmas Day skates over all the weekdays near the end of December. Any given Monday-Wednesday-Saturday marks an exact weeks’ interval from a Christmas Day, but who bothers to remember which?

That was when…

Christmas 1985: We lay on the Sanibel Island beach the day after Christmas, and a seagull pooped on my sister’s leg.

Christmas 1988: I knew I loved the man who would be my husband.

Christmas 2015: My sister and her family arrived Christmas Eve, but one of their suitcases (which held their gifts) didn’t. Of necessity, they took themselves to the Walgreen’s at midnight, there to wait in an hour’s-long line with the true last-minute shoppers to buy presents for their four-year-old boy.

The modest haul they returned with was Truly Impressive, and Theo never knew the difference on Christmas morning. Their suitcase arrived unmolested in the hands of a gracious airline worker at 3 o’clock that afternoon.

That was the year I had a new respect for Walgreens, new compassion for last-minute shoppers, and renewed appreciation for American Airlines.

They come in the standard sets of twenty-four hours, but are marked with special demands: guests, travel, celebrations. Accordingly, they take their toll. We settle into them eagerly enough, and then toward the end feel it might be nice to get up and stretch our legs. We recall the pleasures of routine. We remember that Everyday doesn’t really look like this. 

And then they are over.

Christmas 2015: The day after they left, I found my sister’s tennis shoes in the line-up by the front door. Bill discovered a baking sheet in the oven, a remnant from the Cuban sandwiches Christopher had made for us of leftover pork and ham. And on the floor of my bedroom, our copy of The Borrowers, which Emily had been reading to Theo while they were here. Their place is still marked with a torn-off corner of paper.

New Year’s Eve 2015-16: We watched the ball drop in our living room, surrounded by our kids and a small host of their friends. We toasted one another with champagne artificial and otherwise and with very loud music and dancing. And I tried to peer ahead at the empty grid of days, to see what they might look like.

But someone very wise once said it: “You can’t really see the days. I mean, look at the days with your eyes.” You can only be in them, whether or not you know how. Whether or not your mashed potatoes are lumpy beyond all rescue, whether or not the turkey is dragged across the deck. Whether or not, when you’ve put all the decorations away, you would like to take the days out again, like so many ornaments, and get a good look at them once more.

The post Holidays appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

Now burn, new born to the world,
Double-natured name,
The heaven-flung, heart-fleshed, maiden-furled,
Miracle-in-Mary-of-flame,
Mid-numbered he in three of the thunder-throne!
Not a dooms-day dazzle in his coming nor dark as he came;
Kind, but royally reclaiming his own;
A released shower, let flash to the shire, not a lightning of fire hard-hurled.

-Gerard Manley Hopkins, excerpt from “The Wreck of the Deutschland”

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