Our Christmas tree slumped next to the trash can, waiting to be mulched, feels like a little victory. That used up evergreen screams, “It’s done, I made it!”

I’m a believer that when Christmas is over, it’s over. I want everything pulled down, put away and dragged to the curb by December 28th.  Any later and I get panicky and claustrophobic in the same way I feel when stuck in a too small shirt, arms trapped over head, in the dressing room at Nordstrom Rack.

My family’s holiday season is a three months long event gauntlet that includes six birthdays, Halloween, our anniversary, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s.

I promised myself I would be more celebratory this year. I lightheartedly blew through the three October birthdays, one including a team sleepover and another a weekend trip to Miami. I even sailed through hosting Thanksgiving for twenty-seven.

But as the girls opened the first day on their advent calendars, the bah humbugs took hold. I do not have a history of tortured childhood Christmases. My mom had Christmas down. The beauty she created for us was nurturing and serene.

When the kids arrived, Christmas became the vehicle for the mean girl in my head. She speaks in oughts and shoulds, through a perfectly lip-glossed mouth. Her cheerfully condescending tone swirls doubt around my resolve for a simple celebration.

I stayed the course with my holiday convictions, but it wasn’t comfortable nor relaxing. The 26th felt like one long, lovely, liberating exhale. With the tree to the street and the mean girl silenced, I can finally plan for my favorite day of the year, January 1st.

To Love January  by Davi Walders

I clasp January to me giddy
with hope for its newborn
cry that clears away the worn
out year like so much tinsel

carted off to storage. I love
January’s uncluttered room, its
freshly laundered calendar innocent
and white beneath a pure blue sky

grazed by bone-clean trees. To love
January is an acquired taste,
like learning to let the tongue
curl around the slow, sweet burn

Of Tuaca’s golden fire.
I do not want to wait for April
to fall in love, July to run with
a salty sea, October to be crowned

in color. I want to drink it all
in now when everything is possible
and I and the world are infants again
babbling, listening for birdsong.

Our family’s tradition was to decorate the Christmas tree on my father’s birthday.  As a child, it was always one of my favorite nights.  With perfect recall, my dad would recite Robert Frost’s poem, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.  

My father no longer lives in a reality that marks time by the calendar.  Instead he struggles to find his way, moment to moment.  He loved Christmas.  I use the past tense because he is not able to remember his loves without my mother reminding him of himself.

It’s a gray, bleak morning in Austin as I ready myself to call my dad to wish him a happy birthday.  There is a sadness in how the dead leaves funnel at the backdoor.  I think of the last line in Jay Hopler’s poem, Meditation –

We are oblivious. Then, one morning—there’s a
crack in the water glass—we wake to find ourselves undone.

Happy Birthday Dad and Merry Christmas.

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Meditation on Ruin by Jay Hopler

It’s not the lost lover that brings us to ruin, or the barroom brawl,
or the con game gone bad, or the beating
Taken in the alleyway. But the lost car keys,
The broken shoelace,
The overcharge at the gas pump
Which we broach without comment — these are the things that
eat away at life, these constant vibrations
In the web of the unremarkable.

The death of a father — the death of the mother —
The sudden loss shocks the living flesh alive! But the broken
pair of glasses,
The tear in the trousers,
These begin an ache behind the eyes.
And it’s this ache to which we will ourselves
Oblivious. We are oblivious. Then, one morning—there’s a
crack in the water glass—we wake to find ourselves undone.

Meditation on Ruin by Jay Hopler from Green Squall. © Yale University Press, 2006.

End note:  The picture above, of me and my parents, has sat on each of my bureaus since I was sixteen years old.  July 1966 is written on the back in my grandmother Lila’s handwriting.