A Door Marked December 25

            Any door is both an entrance and an exit.   A closed door adds mystery to the equation:  what waits on the other side?   Good luck or bad?   The beginning or the end?   The lady or the tiger?

            And this door, with its Christmas signage and its giant, pulsating red crystal knob – looking as if it would take two hands to move it — seduces and invites, promising festivities, joy, love.    I stand before it, more than a little confused, unwilling to even touch the crystal knob for fear of what might come next.   But surely I don’t fear festivities, joy, love, do I?

            No.   But on this side of the door are the familiar trappings of this holiday:   the winter climate, therefore the predictable way it will feel to walk through it, wrapped against the cold in scarves and hats and boots and gloves.   The absolute death of the ground beneath my feet, foreshadowing my own ending and the ending of all those I know and love, and promising a following spring of rebirth.   The huge Christmas tree, the ornaments polished through the years by my hands as I unpack them, arrange them on that tree, and smile as I kiss a few, then re-pack them lovingly in a slightly different arrangement, every time.   The garland of golden bells I cleverly substituted one year for our family’s traditional tinsel, so expected and old-timey; now those bells look worn and solid.   My treetop angel, which has morphed from a shiny blonde clothed in red aluminum to a more abstracted angel of twisted wire, no discernible facial features but sporting a snarky smile nonetheless.

            Beyond the physical hover the more ephemeral traces of Christmas past.   What time would they all start drinking?   I’d sail the sea of festivity until our ship hit the iceberg, positioned low so that the real damage took place below the water line, but the ship would sink anyway.   And the expectations for fantastical presents, wrapped and glittered so as to promise what was never promised in quite the same way at any other time, not at weddings or graduations or other rites of passage.   Could you top last year?   What DID we get last year anyway?   And the passage of children through parents’ and partners’ homes on the Eve and on the Day, negotiated and ritualized and strongly controlled, balancing payback for old wrongs with “new” traditions that never felt traditional enough.   When did you get too old to have a Christmas list?   How did we dare to prepare such things, blatantly asking for specific gifts, a specific number of gifts, specifically gotten from specific stores with specific labels?