Every year around this time, twinkling lights begin to appear on every street, lit up trees come into view through apartment windows, and oversized displays cram into pharmacy windows seemingly overnight. It’s all meant to be joyous, and to be sure, it can imbue the city with a cozy excitement. But there’s also an anxiety to it all that I can’t help but slip into. Whether you spend the holidays with family or not, it’s a marking point that subconsciously forces us to measure ourselves against the passage of time. Who were we last Christmas? Five Christmases ago? What were we afraid of? What were our aspirations?
Years ago, a friend recounted a parable to me about a man scaling a mountain on a circular path. Although he often feels that he’s back to a place he’s already been, he’s actually looking down on a previous lap from a slightly higher elevation. I find the same is true of the recurring highs and lows in life — the feeling of proximity to former selves actually comes from the distance between who you are and who you were.
Every Christmas morning, same as every birthday, every New Year’s Eve, I’m confronted with each past iteration of myself that came before at that time of year, as if I’m looking down at all the previous points of this circular path. I see myself at six years old, overjoyed with a Hogwarts Lego set; at nine, annoyed with my parents for not trusting me with a cell phone yet; at 11 feeling under the familial microscope after being kicked out of school yet again.
Ten years ago, my parents moved from my childhood home in Denver to a beautiful A-frame deep in the Rocky Mountains, which is where I go to visit them now. The first year that I spent with my late partner Ed, he drove down from Steamboat Springs to pick me up from my parents’ on the day after Christmas (it was a little too early in our relationship for everyone to spend a holiday together). As he was approaching my parents’ house, his truck slid on the ice and I watched his headlights dive into a snowbank before going out. He was fine, and even at the time the whole thing felt very funny, but we had to wait hours for a tow truck to arrive and pull it out from 10 feet of snow. Ever since then my parents call the corner “Ed’s Turn,” especially when it snows.
This year will be my third Christmas with my husband Mark, and our first as husbands. We’ve gotten in the habit of visiting my family for the holidays. Two years ago, I remember him spending our time there anxious about an upcoming birthday that ended with a zero — something that felt so major when it was still ahead of him and quickly became mundane as soon as it passed. I wonder which of my anxieties will dissipate similarly once I’m actually confronted with them. My upcoming performance review at work? My recent discovery that I have high blood pressure? Trump’s second term?
I’ve always loved celebrating Christmas more than I felt like I should, and I think a big part of that comes from my grandmother’s love of Christmas. She escaped Nazi Germany at 12 years old, and her patriotism for America as the country that welcomed her family often manifested in funny ways, including a belief in Christmas as an American holiday rather than a Christian one. But like any great American tradition, the veil of celebration isn’t always the most effective at covering up a distinct darkness underneath. It’s something deeper than the comparative consumerism at the core of the celebration — it’s the unspoken understanding that however much or little you have to celebrate, there are people in very close proximity who have less. Beyond that, it’s the insistence on celebration in spite of this understanding. I have to imagine that meant more to my grandmother than it could ever mean to me — an insistence on giving and receiving after learning what it meant to lose everything.
A little over a year ago, my grandmother passed away very shortly before my birthday. In accordance with Jewish custom, her memorial service took place almost immediately, which meant that the bulk of my birthday celebration was spent in mourning — fumbling interactions with aunts and uncles and cousins, awkwardly recapping our past few years over bulk-catered lox and bagels, vague promises to get together again soon. But the timing of her death also offered a very direct reflection of the ways she expressed her love and generosity throughout my life — the trip to Disneyland she took me on for my fifth birthday, the year she bought me my first guitar, the times she drove to Denver for my choir performances, the year she gave me my grandfather’s necktie. I also thought about the aspects of her life that I never thought to ask about, and which might now be unknowable.
Arriving home in New York after the funeral, my mind was caught in these loops of time, revisiting every holiday I had spent with her and imagining what they would be like moving forward without her. With the loss of a grandparent also comes the realization that your parents are now the eldest generation, and a new urgency to hold onto that relationship. I wrote my new single “Merry Christmas” that week in some attempt to collate these past and future selves into something unifying.
This year also marks the second Christmas spent under the shadow of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, a stone’s throw from where the original fable of Christmas played out. I ordered my first Christmas present to give my family this week, a new board game for my dad, and the realization struck me that a portion of the tax I paid will inevitably aid, in some small part, the worst atrocities of the 21st century so far. I think again of my grandmother — who gently convinced me not to pursue a Birthright trip in my adolescence — and her insistence to not let one atrocity justify another. But how can we hug our families with the feeling of blood on our hands? Is this what it means to live happily during the war?
I don’t mean to sound overly Scroogesque. There is a real beauty in these traditions, in the intimacy of it all, in the struggle to create light and warmth amidst the darkness and cold. But darkness is what makes us appreciate the light. I hope I can live my life in a way that I will be proud of next Christmas. I hope we all can.
Pleasure Systems’ new single “Merry Christmas” is out now.
(Photo Credit: Rachel Coster)
