The Holidays to Me

It is Thanksgiving 2020 and I am Home ALone! But I don't mind. Long long ago, in early childhod, I perfected the creation of personal happiness with minimal material rosources. So I am watching tv, drinking coffee, eating pmpkin bread that Holly made as a birthday gift for me. Thanksgiving, to me, was always about paricipating in a family gathering, but when my parents died, getting together lost a lot of its immediacy. We gathered together to visit our parents, my siblings and myself. Once the parents were gone, we became the parents, and our offspring had far far less motivation to visit with us, and so many of us had only one child, the draw of the siblings was also absent. Needless to say, the PANDEMIC has changed all of that anyway. It is a communal duty to STAY HOME this year and to NOT participate in the spread of this deadly disease. Some years, I visited with friends when I was alientated from y sister who lives closest to me. The trip my brother in West Virginia made to New Jersey was a big motivation for reconnectin with that sister because she would have us to her house and I would visit with my brother. But he is adamant about wanting to protect himself from this vius and has stated unequivocally that he will not be coming up for Thanksgiving or for Christmas. I often think about the hours at the kitchen table that we girls would spend chopping and peeling, dicing and chatting while my mother pulled it all together into the meal that took hours to cook and minutes to consume! I miss my mother more than any other part of it. What I don't miss is the hour in front of the sink scouring the baked on gravy out of pots and pans and the piles of dishes and cups and saucesrs after the dinner was over, when the males all retreated to the living room to watch football and the cooks and cleaners settled into phase three of the process, but at least we had one another to talk to during all of that. Christmas has NEVER been a consumer event for me mostly because I never had any money. I have always celebrated Christmas but it irritates me to hear so many of my non-celebrating friends deride it as "too commercial." I feel like saying that it is what we make of it. If you don't make it commercial then it won't be, but just as they don't want to rake leaves, they also don't want to put up trees or lights. They don't want to bother with all of that. Personally, it makes me happy though I have reiced me decorating to a fraction of my pre-old-age level. And I have help. Without the help, it would have to be reduced even further. What I love about it is the light in the time of darkness, the many stories about reemption from gloom and pessimism and selfihness into communal warmth and connection, even as my communal warth and conenction is more with other species than my own these days. My family, still around the number 7 or 8, as it was when it was human, is now multi-species: canine and feline. And they are good companions too! My dog and I just had our morning wawlk and I admired the Christmas decorations newly strung up in my neighborhood where the houses are almost entirely small, quaint bungalows that look remarkably like the little houses on our Christmas tree platform of my childhood. I was born in 1945, and my childhood is almost entirely portrayed in A Cjristmas Story, the wonderful movie based on the work of storyteller Jean Shepherd. He so perfectly encapsulated essential aspects of my childhood and youth in his stories. It is those memories also that I celebrate along with the cultural inheritance that i Christmas. My Great Northern Barbarian ancestors carried these lighted trees and symbols for hundreds of years and there is wisdom in them. I can feel it, and I commune with them each year when i also, light the tree and the the darknss for myself and my little fraction of the world. Happy Thanksgiving and Merry Christmas!!