I have mixed emotions about the holidays — the jam-packed days before and between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve.
My personal history of Christmas rests lightly on a past of Hannukah when I was a child and indifference when I was a young adult. But when I had a child of my own, I embraced a deep nostalgia for a Christmas I had never experienced. Heavily influenced by a taste for Victoriana and an idealized past which never was, I longed for plum pudding and a candle-lit Christmas tree. I liked Christmas carols and loved Christmas Eve church services, the nave bedecked with holly and pine and ivy. Plaid blankets sprouted on my couch and my rolling pin unfurled cookies to be clad with red and green sugar.
Films like The Bishop’s Wife, Miracle on 34th Street and It’s a Wonderful Life — all of which I owned — played each evening and I swam in a sea of sentimentality that seemed to rise from another version of myself.
Forty years on and life is different. There are only whiffs of nostalgia left for me. It seems more important now than ever to celebrate the present moment. I appreciate my friends more each day, particularly those of my own age, as well as my partner, who is willing to create new history. The arc of time which we share knits us together and our memories have built a stage on which we will play out the rest of our lives.
And we are happy to build new traditions. This is the second year we’ve been to see the Christmas lights at LaSalette in Enfield. It’s a Jesus Christ meets Disney World experience — a little incongruous but unexpectedly cheering. “Happy Birthday Jesus” announces a multi-colored light message as seasonal music wafts over a vast hillside festooned with displays in the shape of hearts, crosses and whatnots.
Last year, slightly shell-shocked from this over-the-top holiday experience, at the suggestion of a friend, we visited the Christmas light display at the Joseph Smith Memorial in South Royalton. Although I have a few reservations about the Mormon religion, they can sure put on a light show. Paths and roads wind through the exquisitely designed light displays and classical music to complement these can be accessed through a suggested radio station.
Another new tradition for us: Instead of buying a Christmas tree, I have taken to stringing small white lights on the ceiling-height palm tree that lives with us. I’m not sure where this tree came from, or who thought it was a reasonable idea to raise a palm tree in Vermont, but the tree seems satisfied and makes a nice holiday statement at Christmas. I’ve stopped baking holiday cookies — happy to leave that tedious eighth and ninth roll-out of dough scraps behind, but cranberry walnut bread still emerges from our oven. And Strafford Creamery eggnog is still consumed in ridiculously large amounts because, well, who can resist it?
So what with this, that and the other, there’s enough holiday cheer to piece together a nice time. And perhaps even lay the foundations for years to come.
Joan Jaffe lives in Norwich.