Bloom where you're planted.

When I first moved to Vancouver in 2004, I lived in a college for grad students on the very edge of the UBC campus. Green College sat so close to the ocean that there were spots on the grounds where you could pretty much fall down a cliff and into the cold waters of the Pacific (a possibility I tested on more than a few tipsy, stumbling nights around the property). To get home from class every day, I would cut through the Rose Garden on my walk, a shortcut that actually took longer than the straight route and involved a descent down steep stone stairs. In my memory, Vancouver is all incredible peaks and valleys--not just off in the distance, but also right in front of me, on every sidewalk I ever travelled. Each block was a strange and treacherous incline, unknown territory. Anyway, I didn't mind the extra steps through the roses. The UBC campus is teeming with horticultural secrets: waterfalls, experimental farms filled with hybrid apples, Japanese tea gardens, nude beaches. I felt lucky to have such a treasure on my daily path. As the fall wore on I watched in amazement as the roses continued to bloom. I came from a place where roses only really appeared in June, around my birthday. My daily walks through that garden made me feel like it was my birthday all autumn long, a feeling that came as a brief daily relief from the overwhelming homesickness that took up so much of my energy in those first few months on the other side of the country.

One morning in mid-December, I was walking through the rose garden under a dark grey sky. There was a cold wind blustering; that particularly Vancouvery, sleet was stinging my face. I was on my way back to my room to work on my last assignment of the semester and then to pack up my life and get ready to move out of Green College. On a tipsy, stumbling night a few weeks earlier, I'd made the decision to move off campus and into an apartment on Arbutus Street with a view of the mountains. All fall, I'd been struggling to find a place in Vancouver to put down my roots, and I nervously hoped that this move would be the right one. (As it turned out, it was, and the friend I moved in with would turn out to be one of my best friends in all of the explored universe, but I didn't know that yet.) As I schlepped my way through the roses that morning, cold and lonely and longing for home, I was feeling a little desperate.

The roses were pretty well finished, I noticed, and I felt even more bummed out than before. It was the winter of my discontent. If there's one thing I know how to do, it's send myself into a spiral of unfounded despair. I was on my way down the existential rabbit hole when I ran into a friend of mine from Green, reaching out to touch a gorgeous, newly formed, yellow rose. She'd found the last few flowers in the garden, and it was blowing her mind.

"Isn't this incredible?" she said. "December and they're finally blooming." Like me, she came from a province where the roses' time is short but sweet. We weren't used to this long, meandering season. We weren't late bloomers, or at least, we'd never admitted it to ourselves if we were. It was one of those moments that made me take a step back and realize that after all these months, all this slow growth, I was suddenly, miraculously, home. It wasn't the home I expected, nor would it be my home forever, but there it was, at once familiar and strange and unexpected.

Bloom where you're planted, someone once told me. I've bloomed in a lot of weird and wonderful places, put down roots only to rip them back up a few years later, haul them with me to the next stop on the road. I've come home a million times, in a million ways. I think we all do. I read a short story by Carol Nelson awhile ago that said something like, "Christmas is a time when you're homesick, even when you're home." That makes sense to me. We're all just trying to get back to the place that means the most to us, even though that place changes a little bit every day. Sometimes we don't even notice it changing. We don't even know we need something different, and then suddenly, there it is, right before our eyes, on our very own doorsteps.

Merry Christmas, all.

Christmas memories.

I found this really, really random playlist on my iPod a couple of weeks ago while scrolling around looking for my Christmas music. It is called "Kridmit" for reasons that some may understand. I must have compiled it somewhere around 2008, because it is comprised of a fine balance of songs that very accurately convey the uncertainty, sadness, and puppy love that characterized the last few months of that year of my life (not to mention my affinity for do-wop Christmas covers). Here's a cross-section.

1. White Christmas--The Drifters



2. End of Empire--Sam Roberts



3. River--Joni Mitchell



4. Don't Do It--The Band



5. The Friendly Beasts--Sufjan Stevens



6. Tomorrow is a Long Time--Bob Dylan



7. Hard Candy Christmas--Dolly Parton



I'm fairly sure I put this playlist together for a drive home from Ottawa to the Hammer, or maybe one of my many existential jaunts from South Frontenac back to the Glebe. In hindsight, it's a Christmas miracle I didn't decide to run my car off the road once and for all. Hallelujah, the times they are a-changin'.

Keep Christmas With You.

It's amazing the power that Christmas specials can have on a person (or perhaps just on this person). This morning I watched Christmas Eve On Sesame Street for the millionth time and thought once again of how ingrained it's become in my psyche. My mom says she can remember the very first time we watched it together, when I was probably two or three, when Sesame Street (we mostly called it just "Ses" in our house, because we were cool like that) was pretty much the only television show that warranted turning on the set. Every few years we watch it as a family on Christmas Eve, even though my baby brother and I are now well beyond the age where this sort of thing is appropriate. It's timeless, and sweet, and both intentionally and unintentionally hilarious.

Proof of Value:

1. I knew the Bert and Ernie version of the Gift of the Magi long before I read the real thing, and the actual, realistic, ambivalent ending of the original has always bummed me out intensely. I much prefer Mr. Hooper Ex Machina, returning their prized possessions to them on Christmas Eve.



(Cut to about the 6 minute mark.)

1a. Does anyone else have vivid memories of watching Sesame Street after Mr. Hooper died, in real life as well as on the show? Talk about a crash-lesson in emotional reaction for kids. I don't think I've fully recovered yet.

2. At one point, while Big Bird is on the roof waiting for Santa to arrive, he worries that he might be lost in a blizzard somewhere, or "stacked over Kennedy." I had no idea what this meant till I was about twenty.

3. THESE KIDS! It's enough to make even the most career-oriented feminist uterus start hurtin'.



4. And while were on the subject of the kids, there's a girl in this scene who totally picks her nose and I always wonder where she is now, thirty years on.



4a. It is also thanks to this scene that I know how to sign Keep Christmas With You. I used to include that skill on my resume.

5. While everyone down on the street is looking around for Big Bird, Susan tells someone that she is on her way to Grover's place to look for him. I love the idea that Grover is able to maintain an apartment in New York City.

6. Oh man, Cookie Monster trying to write to Santa? CLASSIC! JUST CLASSIC.



There's just something so generally innocent and kind about it all. Last weekend, my brother and I were bemoaning the complete lack of sincerity in the world these days; everything has to be soaked in irony and self-referential post-pomo ridiculousness. Fuck that, I say. This Christmas, I'm all about True Blue Miracles.

Come in! And know me better man!

To quote the big red-headed Muppet in The Muppet Christmas Carol (and maybe Dickens?), "my mind is filled with the here and now, and the here and now is Christmas." Yuletide cheer leads to a significant lack of reading time, although I have snuck in one decent book in the last couple of days. Don't worry, though, it's Christmas themed. I had some serious doubts about You Better Not Cry by Augusten Burroughs, mainly because the only other book I'd ever read by him was Running with Scissors, and I had my doubts about how this weird, sad, abused kid could possibly tease a holiday memoir out of his childhood. This book is every bit as strange and dark as I expected, but it is also hilarious. I usually hate Christmas stories that get needlessly twisted, but something about the image of young Augusten subbing cooking sherry for the molasses in his gingerbread recipe is incredibly awesome, as is his inadvertent creation of a gingerbread shanty/slum. It's like David Sedaris' Santaland Diaries on meth.

Other than that title, though (and a handful of back issues of Real Simple and Gourmet), illiteracy abounds at the Charles Street homestead. Last night I spent way too much time thinking about the superiority of the 1994 remake of Miracle on 34th Street versus the original, even though I still have some big issues with the content (Why was Santa living in New York City? Who was at the helm back home? What about his wife? What would have happened if they'd lost the court case?). Seriously, that little girl is adorable, and for any fan of Weeds, it is an absolute trip to watch Elizabeth Perkins in a role other than that of Celia Hoades. I always forget that it was directed by John Hughes, and I really feel like we should all watch it in his honour this year. It's definitely the gem in his non-teen angst crown (Curly Sue notwithstanding).

Before I start thinking too hard, let's all sit back and watch this Muppet Christmas montage.