““On the one side is your happiness and on the other is your past — the self you were used to, going through life alone, heir to your own experience….You take one timid step forward, but then you realize you are not alone. You take someone’s hand … and strain through the darkness to see ahead.””
Even without Covid, even without the lockdowns and the quarantines and the loss, there is something about the grayness this time of year that has always made me turn inward. I long for days that arrive quietly, lightly dusting the yard and the garden with snow. I work at my desk or in the kitchen in silence, with the dog sleeping soundly in the next room. I leave the radio off and I jump when the phone rings. It’s always at this time of year when I consider cutting off our television service; we get our news from NPR and the paper, and everything else can be had on demand, making the constant drone of a thousand digital channels of nothing feel like an assault. Maybe it’s just the impending end of the year, with its run-up to the holidays and its psychic noise of must-haves and must-dos and must-cooks, its expectations and attending promises of warmth and cheer, its sentiments and happy childhood memories that many of us try and recreate with a grievous, almost panicked fury. None of us knows what this year will look like: who will be at our tables and who will not, who we will feed, and who we won’t. Sustenance will have to come in different ways; the past will be firmly in the past.
Once, when I was twelve, my best friend gave me a Victorian charm, which she’d purchased in an antique store while shopping with her mother for Christmas. She had a set allowance for me and her little brother, and when Lucy handed me the tiny box on Christmas morning — I always spent Christmas with her family since my parents didn’t celebrate — I opened it and gasped. Fashioned from rose gold, the charm was a simple rendering of a reindeer. I loved it not only because it was deeply personal — somehow, Lucy knew instinctively that I would love something that had been cherished by someone else many years earlier; even now, I prefer, and dote on, much older things from cookware to guitars — but because it was enveloped in all the meaning of the season, so far as my pubescent brain could understand it: here was something mundane that had been quietly chosen for and entrusted to me, without suggestion of screeching advertisements or newspaper circulars. It meant thought and care. It was quiet gift-giving.
“This year, it’s enough to feed ourselves. ”
Years later, when we were in college — I, in Boston, and Lucy, in Manhattan — it became obvious that we were going to lead very different kinds of lives; we tried to cling to the friendship that we’d had as children, but it hadn’t grown with us. It was sad when we both realized it, and we just stopped trying. I removed the reindeer charm — which I’d taken to wearing all year as a kind of anchor — from my gold chain, and wrapped it up in blue tissue paper. It sat in my jewelry box for almost two decades, dragged through the early days of my adulthood in New York, from apartment to apartment, out to Brooklyn, back to Manhattan, and finally, up to married life in Connecticut. I never wore it again, but the first time Susan and I decorated a tree together with the antique striped glass balls and cut-out paper ornaments of her youth — each ascribed a special memory and meaning — I slipped a small metal hook through the charm’s loop and hung it discreetly and almost imperceptibly amidst my partner’s connection to her Christmas past; I’ve done it ever since. Lucy — who we were as children — is still very much a part of my holiday, frozen in time.
And this is what most of us do during big holidays like Christmas. We haul out memories and connections to who we once were, we acknowledge them, and then we tuck them away again when the holiday is over. On the first night of Hanukah, I make my Grandma Clara’s potato latkes and call my mother, who says “you’re making Grandma’s lockets?” (She says this every single time.) I can see my grandmother in our galley kitchen in Forest Hills; I can smell her — a combination of Jungle Gardenia and Aqua Net and Wesson oil — and I feel her standing beside me. We try, every holiday, to recreate the Swedish meatballs that Susan’s beloved (non-Swedish) grandmother made, and which the entire family adored; every year we fail, but it’s in the making of them — the remembering how they tasted and what their consistency and color of the sauce was; it borders on meditation — that brings her back to Susan, if only for that moment. It doesn’t matter if they don’t come out right; that’s not what cooking to remember is about.
“The fact of tradition has changed this year; we simply do not know, and we have to settle in to that not-knowing like the first moments in a hot bathtub. ”
For many years, my cousins and I tried, sometimes subconsciously and sometimes not, to recreate our most important fall holiday of years ago, when we were all together, when the “children” — all of us adults ranging in age today from our thirties to our seventies — were happy and safe, and aunts and fathers and uncles and grandparents and brothers were all still alive, and the house rocked with the roots music that my late cousin Harris and I played for hours on end before my aunt rang a trio of tiny Swiss cowbells to let us know that dinner was ready. We work very hard at recreating this event, squinting back into the past to remember and feel and smell and taste exactly what it was like. Sometimes, we succeeded. Sometimes, the striving to recreate something that doesn’t really exist anymore stressed us into a psycho-culinary hysteria. Sometimes, our attempts at producing this meal which my aunt prepared with apparent effortlessness, went awry, and we were all over each other like a bad suit. And sometimes, as was once put to me plainly, the family circle simply gets re-drawn when we’re not looking. We’re Scrooge, blowing the snow off the windows of time so that we can peer in from outside for a sharper look at Fezziwig dancing in front of the fires of the past, as the wind howls around us.
The fact of tradition has changed this year; we simply do not know, and we have to settle in to that not-knowing like the first moments in a hot bathtub. There may be your grandmother’s famous roast on Christmas Day, or —- when you realize that it will just be you and your partner —- there may be a small bowl of soup. We will all remember this holiday season, I suspect, the way the grandparents of my English friends remembered the holidays during the Blitz. No one knew what was next. No one knew how to celebrate. No one knew what to do about tradition, so new traditions had to be made. And they were.
Our circles have been re-drawn; we have no where to go but forward.
