Merry Christmas. 🤍

Here is a little something of what mine looks like, year after year.

TRADITIONS

My family consists of what you might call traditionalists.

Meaning, year after year, we indulge in the familiarity and comfort of what we have always done. If any little thing changes, it’s not a small deal. You should have seen my mother sweating when she made the (my) decision to put white lights on the tree this year instead of the colored that we have always used. Very big deal. Or considering making one less variation of the gazillion cookies that that woman cranks out come each December. Absolute anarchy.

Yet the older I get, the more I understand the desire to preserve something, anything, in a world that is never twice the same.

See, due to aforementioned traditionalist tendencies, the holidays have always been a a trip for me. It’s weird to find yourself cooking the same meal, staring at the same tree, and listening to the same music year after year. It’s déjà vu. You are filled with the unshakable sensation of having been here before, done this before, lived this before. Everything is the same, except for you.

It’s an experiment where the decorations and traditions are the constant variables and you are the control. You are the one thing that changes amidst the handcrafted, frozen, idyllic scene of another Christmas. I find myself walking around in a daze, suddenly barely able to distinguish events from last December from this one. Was that really last year, or was it yesterday? Weren’t we just doing this?

THE CONTROL VARIABLE

Growing up, it was a way to take inventory of how I changed.

My evolving perspectives, feelings, and tendencies were made all the more obvious by the unchanging nature of everything around me. Presented with the same situation year after year, it is not hard to see how your perspective has changed. It is not hard to see how you have changed.

Yet now, grown, I watch my mother running around in her apron with cookie dough in one hand and a timer in the other, and I get it. I get why she is so infatuated with tradition. It’s her way of preserving a world that has long since gone away. Maybe that’s why any of us do it, the same things, the routines, as little ways of reaching back in time and reliving otherwise intangible moments of love.

My brother and I are grown adults now, yet she still writes our ages down in her recipe book every year. It was endearing when in the margins you saw Makenna: 4, Tyler: 7, yet now it’s just funny. We joke that she will still be writing our ages when we are forty, right there in the margin next to the cranberry sauce recipe that has long since been covered in cranberry stains.

She also still buys all of us matching Christmas pajamas like we’re the family on the cover of an Old Navy catalog. Each year, we open them on Christmas Eve and sit by the fire, eating Pierogi and drinking wine in matching attire. It’s horrendous. It’s amazing. It’s all that I have ever known.

HOLDING ON

I see now, now that I am about to move across the country, that adhering to holiday traditions with religious devotion has never been about the food or the pajamas or the movies. It’s been about holding on.

Holding on to what we can for some semblance of security in a life that is more akin to being on a rocking boat in the middle of the sea. My brother and I have grown up and changed and become these functioning beings who make their own decisions, like moving to New York City, an entire continent away. My mother cannot control the things we do anymore, but she can sure as hell shove us into matching pajamas and make us bake cookies together once a year as Frank Sinatra and Michael Bublé blast throughout the house, cam corder still in hand.

So Christmas, I see now, is just a means of kissing the shore once a year, of pressing our palms to solid ground and knowing that the bottom will not fall through.

It is a little island, divorced from the real world, that grants us comfort and surety and maybe even the illusion that nothing ever has to change. Like the Bermuda Triangle, we enter the 25th to simply disappear from our normal lives for just one moment in an act so swift and so seamless that no one can ever quite account for it. Everything else just falls away.

Unless you’re an editorial intern, then you’re still working.

Happy holidays.

Love, m.

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