Every Christmas is the same and every one a little bit different.
Behind me on the treadmill stands a procession of gifts that we will be taking away with us to Ottawa. Downstairs, other gifts sit wrapped, ready to be delivered on Christmas Eve. Still others hide in the closet (oh oh...), waiting to be unleashed on Christmas morning.
From here on my cushioned chair I can hear Rita MacNeil and the Men of the Deeps singing out from the old Panasonic TV, and I wait for the song about Cape Breton, and think of my mother. I love the seasonal chorus, but I lament the dearth of Christmas classic movies, and wonder why I don't just up and buy them and keep them for this holiday occasion.
I hear Mary sneezing as she wipes away the dust and cat hair from five colourful little beds, beds they hardly ever use but that are theirs all the same. They must be tired holed up in the bedrooms, waiting for the grout to dry.
I wish I could get into the kitchen and make myself a cup of tea, or, better still, pour some wine. I almost never drink, but because I know that I am going to want more than my share of wine over the next four nights, I want some now. I'm funny that way.
Tomorrow, I have a lot of work to do around the house. I have to get the kitchen back in order, and dust away the chalky residue that has risen, and fallen, everywhere, coating everything. That is the nature of new tiles.
I have never had new tiles at Christmas before. Come to think of it, I have never had new tiles ever.
And I have never shared Christmas Eve dinner with Mike and Stephan, but I am looking forward to the evening with great pleasure. Mike is making green lasagna, and undoubtedly I am going to eat too much of it and too much bread. Afterward, we will go to Eva and David's for dessert, and then to the downtown late-night Christmas concert.
Add to this that I have never had Christmas dinner with Sarah's other family, but I look forward to that, too -- especially because I do not have to cook (shame on me) and, if I am lucky, will not have to do a lot of dishes because I am a gracious and most dignified guest. (Ha!) Mind you, doing dishes can be a lot of fun, especially if I'm washing.
I think back now to Christmas Day in Ottawa, when Don was alive and the boys were at home, and how they, the boys, would push themselves away from that table faster than you could say, "I'm not doing dishes!" And they never did. (They left that to their sister and to me.) They did other things -- played Christmas music, ate cookies, cast shadow puppets on the kitchen walls. We laughed a lot, always, and I thought -- I hoped -- that Christmas Day would always be the same.
But that is not the way that real life is, at least not for the majority of people that I know, and certainly not for me.
For people I know, as for me (and as I said), every Christmas is the same and every one a little bit different. I think that's because the people that I know and admire tend to live life in harder ways...taking risks, loving broadly, stepping up or down accordingly, sometimes unwittingly, making room for letting go and urging in.
Whenever I have lonely moments at Christmas -- whenever I lament what might have been -- I think of all the Christmas cards and letters, the family and the friends, the dinners and the concerts, the gifts that sit waiting on the treadmill, the sweet lisping sounds of Rita MacNeil leading the harmony of Cape Breton voices (their esses held too long, their tees too hard), and I know that nothing, and that no one I have loved, is far behind me, and that through every change the steady sameness sweetly follows me.
