Home for Christmas

I’m dreaming tonight of a place I love / even more than I usually do.

There are tingling pinpricks of ancient memory that wash over me this time of year. The sounds and scents of Christmas bring these memories to the surface as November winds down and we make that intentional shift toward the close of the calendar. Bing Crosby kicks if off, and once I start down that long road back, it’s pretty hard to turn around.

The stringed intro to “The Christmas Song” sends me straight to my grandpa’s living room. I hear the snap of a fireplace that will be used this December by people whose names I don’t know and faces I would never recognize. My aunt’s fingers press keys on a piano that was sold years ago. The golden retriever, now ash and an empty collar, wags its tail beside my grandpa’s chair. This will be the first of many stops this season.

The voice of Burl Ives soon carries me to a hand-me-down couch. Nubby nightgown covering thin legs, I stare into a 16-inch television. I watch with delight and fear as Rudolph sets off to find his rightful place in the world, my Christmas bear clutched tight to my chest as I await the Abominable. That bear later lulls me to sleep as its heart blinks along to “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear,” and I rest inside an apartment that has since been bulldozed. “The world in solemn stillness lay to hear the angels sing.” These notes bring me to that bear and too-small apartment, and I ache for those early years. In the quiet of a winter midnight, angels are so much easier to hear, especially with a child’s ears.

Onward we travel toward my adolescence accompanied by the soundtrack to Home Alone. It tastes like popcorn and peppermint stick ice cream in a plastic bowl. Snorts of laughter and the fizz of Rock-n-Rye fight to be heard as “Carol of the Bells” races forward. I look around and find myself surrounded by family that I rarely see now, family that I assumed would gather forever but, just like the brilliant snow, eventually dissolves.

“Tennessee Christmas” drops and my mom appears on the living room floor surrounded by rolls of wrapping paper and scotch tape. With the tear of tape and sound of scissors curling ribbon, she carefully wraps each gift, the precision holds proof of her love and type A bend. The taste of a peanut butter cup and I am holding a quilted stocking she made just as meticulously. It rests in my lap as I carry the joyful anticipation of my younger self. Will any future morning feel as wholly special as this one?

The smell of Chex Mix in the oven ushers in another vision. Salty fingers and little crumbs on an upholstered armchair. I wipe the crumbs onto the carpet when no one is looking, feeling the soft fabric against my palm. I will set off on my own journey soon to find my rightful place in this world, and I don’t understand that by the time I find my way back, many of the people who sit beside me will be gone. Somewhere in the background, Bing Crosby sings his way home, but I can’t hear him over the noise of early adulthood.

I have called many places “home,” but there are a few that remain grafted in my bones. Through the years, though, these buildings have been sold and resold, some to strangers and some to family. Either way, the magic dissipates with every passing Christmas, the sense of home drifting a little further away.

There exists a longing to touch those days of my beginning, hold them in my hand and revel at their fragility. I want to live for a moment inside that time when I knew nothing of what was to come, when everyone, it seemed, existed to keep my little world running, creating joy in sweet and simple ways. A song on the piano. A bowl of Chex Mix. A peanut butter cup. Rudolph inside a tiny screen. A Christmas bear with carols that, decades later, transport me to the warmth of home. I don’t know where that bear has gone, and that warmth comes only for a second, popping up here and there, throughout this season of memory and reflection.

We have built a new home for our little family. It is cozy and filled with people I love, and yet, there are the people who came before this family of mine, people who shaped, however unknowingly, the woman I would become and the mother I would someday grow into. The holiday traditions that exist inside these walls, even the fresh ones, are born from the love of the ones who made me and the ones who made them.

So, I fill our stockings with peanut butter cups, I bake the Chex Mix, I play the carols, and we snuggle in tight. I will do this for as many Decembers as I’m given. I know I can’t rewind the clock. I can’t buy back those houses or raise our beloveds from the ground. l can’t recreate those visions of Christmas past, but I can find peace in the fleeting waves of home that fall over me this time of year. And I believe that the familiar chords and the smells of a busy kitchen call out to those who came before. I believe that, sometimes, on a day just like this one, they stop by for a moment, and these visits awaken the feelings of home inside my bones – that for one second or two or three, as our loved ones span the continuum of this very place and whatever comes after, they see the light from their lives in all of us and in the small ways we remember.

Christmas Eve will find me where the love light gleams / I’ll be home for Christmas / if only in my dreams.

Ashley, Woman of a Certain Grace