...because it's Christmas now.

I used to wake up on the morning of Christmas Eve with a feeling of utter and unbridled joy. In our family, Christmas Eve is the real Christmas, the day that encompasses all the emotions and traditions and mystery that my parents built into our celebrations for so many years. I'd wake up on the 24th and feel so incredibly happy, hope springing eternal. Even as I grew up and moved away, I'd always make a point of getting myself home, come hell or high water, by the 23rd at the latest so that I could still wake up in my parents' house on Christmas Eve morning, still wander down the stairs to the smell of my dad baking bread and the sound of Dylan Thomas reading A Child's Christmas In Wales on the radio, still feel completely and beautifully full. The day would pass in a bright blur and before we knew it it was sunset and we were all being herded through the bathroom to get tidied up before everyone came over. As the sun went down on all those December 24ths I could feel that strange and secret magic of tradition and ritual that so explains my experience of Christmas, that feeling of knowing exactly what was coming next. We would eat, and drink, and sing carols, and laugh until our sides hurt, open one present each, and head off to bed. How comforting to know how the night would be, how each moment would pass, how full and how perfect.

There's still a bit of this feeling in my heart, although the shape of it has changed. The past couple of years, I've woken up in my own house on December 24th. Instead of wandering downstairs, I stumble into my own kitchen, plug in my own Christmas lights, make my own coffee, pick up my own copy of Dylan Thomas and read it in the living room. I eat a chunk of fruitcake my mom left here a few days ago and listen to the quiet. There's something comforting about spending part of this day alone. There's something scary about it too, though. As I get older, I get closer and closer to the horrible and unavoidable fact that things are bound to change someday, that the ones I love will not always be able to get back home, that there will be years when the simple familiarity will not be enough to undo the heartache and the hardship that's come and gone in the previous 364 days.  It's gotten me thinking about an article I read awhile ago about the difference between ritual and intention. I'm sure I'll muddle the meaning of it, but what I remember is this: ritual is wonderful, that re-creation of a sacred act, the coming-back, over and over, to a place and a moment that makes you feel whole and happy. But a ritual represents something bigger than the act itself--it's the feeling, the sensation, the larger and more abstract way that these things manifest themselves, that matters more. You don't need to re-create that beautiful moment in its concrete entirety to find in yourself the joy and peace that the moment always brings you; you've already got that joy and peace. You just need to remember where you left it.

All of which is to say, the traditions change. Families change. Those magic nights won't always look the way they look right now. But I will have that deep and quiet joy, that feeling of being surrounded by love, wherever and whoever it may come from. Its shape may change, but the shape of it is the least important part of it.  There's a bit of dialogue at the end of the wonderful television adaptation of A Child's Christmas In Wales that wasn't in the book, but might as well have been. As his grandfather tells gorgeous stories of Christmas past, his grandson muses that those Christmases sound an awful lot like the ones he knows himself. His grandfather tries to explain to him that yes, they were the same, but also, so very different, so much more real. The grandson asks, "Why can't Christmas today be like Christmas was when you were a boy?" and his grandfather replies, "I mustn't tell you, because it's Christmas now." And it is, now. And that's enough. Happy Christmas, everyone.