Home for Christmas

 

In his story “Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor,” John Cheever depicts the loneliness and misery of poor people amidst the festive displays of the affluent. We don’t need to hark back to the world of Dickens’s Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim to realize that joy to the world is not universally shared, even in our own land of plenty. The holidays are actually far from merry and bright for many in our midst. For the homeless among us, the loners, the alienated, the grieving, and all those far from home, Christmas is often a bleak and lonesome time in a season of merriment, a time when countless people have nowhere to go “home” to where joy awaits them. We would do well, those of us who are more fortunate, to spare a thought at this festive season for those who are not so blessed this year.                    

    

    For most of us, “I’ll be home for Christmas” takes on altered meanings in our lives as the years proceed. In childhood it means celebrating the holiday with all the familiar traditions in the warmth of the family home: holly and ivy are draped, mistletoe hung, the tree trimmed, eggnog and gingerbread cookies served, while carols fill the air. Whatever our own family traditions, they are likely the cherished memories that come to mind each Christmas season for those of us who celebrate. But as our circumstances and our notion of family evolve with the years, so does our sense of  “home.”

While our parents are still alive, their home is often still the center of holiday celebrations, time and circumstance permitting. Sometimes that means spending part of the holiday there. Other times it’s merely stopping by for a visit at Christmastime. For still others it means sharing some cherished time on a video call. In our early years of marriage, we often have two parents’ homes to "come home to" for the holidays. Then, as our own families grow our home becomes the center of celebrating with our own children, our blended family traditions of pfeffernusse and rum balls, stollen and Christmas crackers becoming their own, the Christmas customs they’ll one day remember. Anyway we manage it, “coming home” for Christmas is a joy central to the season for most of us.

Amidst the valued traditions our families reenact each Christmas, we are left, as the years slip away, with the absence of loved ones who are no longer with us, the ghosts of Christmas past. No one in my life has ever appreciated the joys of Christmas as much as my late sister Rose Ann had in her time among us. By making her own decorations each year, stringing the lights, baking holiday goodies, and visiting with family, she embodied the joys of the season and passed on that legacy to her own three children. In her exhilaration my Sis showed us all how to keep Christmas well. 

     Last year my nephew Edmond died well before his time. And just before Thanksgiving this year, we lost another one of our family anchors when my cousin Catherine died in Florida. As with the death of her brother Al many years earlier, it was one of those losses that rocks you to the core, but—as with Sis and Edmond and Al—we found solace in having had Cat in our lives. While the passing of someone dear can sometimes overshadow the celebrations in a season of loss, we may find it comforting to enjoy the holiday in their name, observing the festivities for them as they themselves had done when they were among us. Perhaps we might, in that sense, “bring them home for Christmas” once again. 

The Way We Were

I’m struck these days by the notion that in our memories we become what we remember and not what we forget. Memory is so notoriously unreliable, and yet it’s all we have at times. We recall with great certainty and clarity a moment from the past, for instance. And yet, in fact, that impression may not be what had actually occurred. Memory is always at best just that—an “impression,” an imprint, and like a fading photograph, a mere approximation of what once was. 

I remember with great certitude, for instance, the floral pattern of our living room linoleum when I was a child. Great boisterous roses of mostly pink pastel shades, they were. My siblings, however, may recall other patterns on the flooring entirely, and each of those may differ from each other again. We have multiple impressions, then, each a bona fide recollection in the memory of the beholder. So which is real? Which an authentic recall? Which, ultimately, true?

Perhaps they all are, to each of us in turn, or perhaps, in fact, none is quite accurate. Yet the memory is no less “real” for each of us. 

If indeed, our pasts become what we remember and not what we forget, then, the same may be so of our younger (or even more recent) selves. If we recall ourselves at any earlier time in our lives to have been more pleasant, considerable, patient, diligent, tactful—or less so—that is what we “were” in the past as we recall it, the “me” that we remember. It is what we have “become,” in a sense, to ourselves at least. How close that may actually be to the reality of our earlier selves we need leave to others to affirm. It would be comforting if what we have become in our memories is not too far from the way we truly were. 

A Sense of Place

Wherever we may roam, from the familiar surroundings of home to the alluring paths of foreign shores, a sense of place always accompanies us. Whether it's a place we occupy at any given moment, or one we long ago left behind, we're mindful of our surroundings and their impact on us. When we find ourselves in an agreeable place, we often exalt in the here and now, enjoying the visual and other sensory impressions. If a locale imperils us, though, we may shudder at its sights and sounds and smells. Sometimes we may experience both at once. 

        In a city, for instance, we often relish the exhilarating sights—the bold buildings and dynamic scale of the place, the ambition, the vitality, the style. The sheer sense of being in a place that pulses with the rhythm of possibility excites us. And yet, a city can also besiege us with its dangers, heightening our survival instincts.

        One October some years ago when my brother Chris was still living in the Bronx, he joined my wife and me, along with our two young sons, on a haunted hayride near our home in the suburbs north of New York City. Masked figures jumped screaming from behind trees, some wielding "bloodied" knives in menacing poses, as our hay wagon passed. "Gee, this is great," Chris said rather wryly, "we don't have anything like this in the Bronx." His irony reminded me that, as a native of the Bronx who had been away from the City for far longer than I had ever lived there, my innate "street smarts" kick in whenever I return. Many others though, are quite at ease in the City, at home in their most familiar place. Whether sitting on the stoop enjoying the vibe of the neighborhood, going about their daily lives, or lazing in a park nearby, the din of the nearby traffic is the soundtrack of the place. For them, autumn in New York with its fall foliage, food carts, ice rinks, street fairs, and festive anticipation of the coming holidays is the place to be. 

        

        My awareness of my surroundings when I'm at home in the suburbs is different, of course, from when I'm in the city. At home, I know no greater serenity than sitting on the grampa bench in our flower garden amid abundant blooms and chittering birds, a new growth woods at my back. By mid-autumn, the  astilbe and coneflowers, the yarrow and salvia, coral bells and bee balm and phlox have all gone dormant, while a host of hardy zinnias, dahlias, and marigolds wave their colors defiantly in the air. Soon what leaves are left will be blazing, a palette of reds and orange and yellow. It's a place where my soul is at peace, even if all is not right with the world beyond.

              Wondrously, even on this late October afternoon the temperature climbs near 80° and a balmy breeze drifts by. I sit and watch tired leaves tumble to the ground while the birds who will winter over fatten on the seed and suet on offer at the feeders. As I walk back to the house, the leaves crunch and swoosh underfoot. It's autumn here, in this place, after all. 

 

                                        Of Time and Books

Margaret Renkl in a recent op-ed in the New York Times writes that “a bookcase will always represent time itself,” noting how the bookshelves in her home reveal much of who she, her husband, and their children were at various stages of their lives. I look around at the bookshelves in the home I’ve shared with my wife for forty-seven years and realize just how true that is of us as well.

On shelves in one of our sons’ childhood bedroom are countless books I used to read to David and Liam when they were little boys. Tales of Mother Goose, The Velveteen Rabbit, Winnie the Pooh, Clifford the Big Red Dog and Ramona the Brave still populate that space, along with the worlds of Narnia, James and the Giant Peach, The Indian in the Cupboard, and The Cricket in Times Square. The Berenstain Bears and Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing are still there, and so are Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein. Our sons have sometimes read those same books in that same room to their own children in recent years. 

On the top shelf of a bookcase just inside our den is a 10-volume set of The Junior Classics, Popular Edition Illustrated, published in 1938 by P.F. Collier & Son, N.Y. Some years ago, long after our own boys were grown, I bought that set on eBay, a tangible relic of the innumerable hours I’d spent sprawled upon the floor in my childhood adrift in the captivating worlds of fairy tales and fables, myths and legends, animal tales, stories from history, and the alluring cadences of poems for children. I hope to read them to my youngest grandchildren, Alex and Lily, in the years to come.

In the random order of my library, on the shelf below are my books on American history and biography, and below that, books on nature, religion, meditation, and the search for meaning, an ongoing journey in my life. The top shelf of the bookcase to the right of my desk houses my collection of the Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose One Hundred Years of Solitude is, I think, the greatest novel of our time. My Everyman’s Library edition and Folio Society boxed volume of that work are there. Below that is my shelf of books by and about the American master William Faulkner. The next shelf and adjacent ones teem with the many volumes of my Irish collection, books on various periods and aspects of the history, culture, and folkways of Ireland. Prominent among them is my James Joyce collection with its well-thumbed copy of Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated. Perched open on the dictionary stand nearby is my copy of The Atlas of the Great Irish Famine, published by the University of Cork. 

On a bottom shelf near my desk is an assortment of books on the craft of writing that continue to challenge and inspire me. A book shelf to the right holds my Harry Potter boxed set, a nod to our granddaughter Chloé so we could talk about Harry’s adventures when we facetimed her in California. Next to that are my books on the life and lyrics of Paul McCartney and my volume of the lyrics of Bob Dylan, 1961-2012. The Autobiography of Mark Twain is another tome alongside. Two shelves are devoted to my Shakespeare collection and to the right of my computer is my two-volume boxed set of The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, which offers the various definitions of words down the centuries. Four pages of the 

thirteen-volume original are photographically reproduced on each page of the two-volume set, which is why it came with a Bausch & Lomb magnifying glass in the tidy draw above the books. I recall hours of eyestrain during my graduate school days when I’d hastily peruse the meaning of a word in Shakespeare’s time without using the magnifier. 

            Interspersed throughout my library are various books and anthologies from my forty years as a high school English teacher, many replete with teaching notes and commentaries in the margins. More are boxed in the cabinets below the bookshelves and in the attic. The numerous novels and works of non-fiction I have enjoyed throughout the years crowd the shelves to the left of my desk, along with volumes of poetry I value, especially those by Seamus Heaney and Robert Frost. My Thomas Hardy collection, with its leather-bound Easton Press edition of The Return of the Native sits prominently on a top shelf nearby. I spent a year of my life in the mid-1970s studying Hardy’s novels for my master’s thesis, and they are still among my favorites.

Other books on my shelves are very special to me as well. A 1960 paperback of Moss Hart’s memoir  Act One (a mere 75¢ at the time) enthralled me as the story of a kid from the Bronx who indulged his love of theater and grew to write some of the greatest hits on Broadway. The Grapes of Wrath encapsulates Tom Joad’s struggle for dignity in the midst of poverty and dislocation, but what stands out for me as a striking image is the aura surrounding Tom at the threshold of his home when his mother does not recognize him against the backlight of the setting sun in the doorway. It is an image that operates on so many levels. A Joseph Campbell Companion and his admonition to “Follow your bliss” haver guided me on several paths in my journey, and his conception of myth has brought much insight along the way. William Gibson’s A Mass for the Dead also continues to inspire me long after I first read it, and it prods me still to explore my own family’s journey down through the generations. One other book that has touched me deeply and repeatedly over the years, a dog-eared paperback on a shelf next to my journals, is Annie Dillard’s A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, with its meditative wonder at the world around her that teaches me over and over again to see and to appreciate Nature in a new light. She has taught me too that in the process, we see ourselves anew. My prized copy of that book, another leather-bound boxed volume by Easton Press given to me by my colleagues at retirement, is on a shelf in my bookcase on Cape Cod. But that’s another story of many more books with their own histories to tell.