Mastery Year 2: Part 8: Post 2: Christmas and New Years

Merry Christmas and happy New Year.


Why don't we say merry New Year? Or, really, merry anything other than Christmas? I've always wondered. Anyway, I've been merrying along at June's parents' place, and while I'm glad we went, I'm even more glad to be back.

As I think I've said, we usually go to my parents' house for holidays and other visits because it's closer--this has been especially true since we've been on campus together, and it had been bothering June. In fact, I don't think we'd both visited her parents since before we were married, though they have visited us, and June spent a good long visit a home last February.

And it's not like I dislike her family. In fact, I rather like her parents. It's just that they're not my family. I don't know them very well, and when I'm at their house I have that uncomfortable feeling that comes with being the house-guest of near-strangers. As though one might do the wrong thing, be a burden somehow, and ruin it. That's not a great way to spend Christmas.

Also, June's family is Quaker, and they don't exactly celebrate Christmas. The idea is every day is supposed to be holy, so how can there be special holy days? It's not that the family ignores the day, but it's low-key, reflecting the virtue of simplicity, I gather, and not religious. Her parents put a small, hand-made tree-like object on the kitchen table Christmas Eve, and in the morning we had a large and unusually delicious breakfast and opened "stockings."

The "stockings" were actually large paper bags, each with a name on it, into which we'd all been dropping small, fun gifts (candy, jars of specialty pickles, wind-up toys, brain teasers, weird socks) over the previous days. The tradition is that each person gets something for everyone else and nobody looks in the bags until Christmas morning. I think it started out with the adults making up stockings for the kids, and then became more general when June and her brother grew up.

Anyway, Christmas night, June's aunt came over for dinner and we ate by candle-light, but it wasn't an unusual dinner otherwise.

It was nice, Christmas with my in-laws, but it was kind of minimal.

I missed real Christmas. I missed going to church and singing Christmas carols by candle light, I missed the hustle and bustle and glare of the holiday, and I missed both the giving and the receiving of real (and sometimes expensive) Christmas presents. Yes, the giving, too. I'll get presents from my parents and my brother's family, of course, and give them, too, everything's already bought and wrapped and waiting in my room, but it's not the same thing.

And as much as I missed my family of origin, I missed my friends on campus, too.

I wanted to know what Andy got for Christmas and to listen to his touching, almost childlike, theological soliloquies. I wanted to hear Ollie preach, which I still haven't done. I wanted to go tracking with Rick or run into Charlie unexpectedly, him no doubt barefoot and sarcastic in the snow. I wanted to sit in the Great Hall alone or nearly so and watch the afternoon sunlight glint off the silver embroidery on the ivory ribbons on the tree, and off the gold embroidery on the tangerine-colored ribbons, and the glass balls, orange, red, and yellow, like fruit, and the fantastic flock of blown-glass birds perched on the branches among strings of beads and popped corn and the little white LED lights, unlit, now quiescent, but reflective still. I wanted to go home.

I think June is a bit miffed at me for not liking being at her family home as much as she does. She takes it as a rejection of herself and her family, and it isn't that at all. She knows it's irrational, but she can't help it. And neither can I.

Tonight is New Years Eve, and a bit more traditional. We'll stay up and toast in the New Year with Champagne, maybe after watching a movie. Not a big deal, but similar to what my parents usually do. They'll be a party on campus tonight, and I wish I could attend, but the ache is a little easier, the day less emotional.

June found me a few minutes ago, looking morose, I suppose.

"Missing campus?" she asked me.

I made a non-committal, morose noise.

"You don't like coming out here to the real world, do you?" she asked.

I turned to look at her.

"Mine is the real world," I said. "It's this one that isn't."

"I know," she told me. "And that's a difference between us."