Our Christmas Journeys

As gray is the new black so is Minnesota the new Ohio. Brown, warm Christmas with rain in the forecast. There is still a little bit of white on the lawns outside my window, like powdered sugar siftings on a freshly baked bundt. I am more ambivalent than I have ever been on Christmas. A few years back my brother-in-law invited us out West for the holiday week and he was as tense as ever. We opened our presents on Christmas morning, had Honey Baked Ham at noon, and by evening he had taken down the Christmas tree and shoved it outside by the trash cans. "Christmas is over," he said.

I'm certainly not as estranged from the season as that but maybe I understand him a little more now. As Garrison Keillor wrote at the start of the season:

"So it is with Christmas. You can go straight from pure bliss to desperate remorse in less than a minute. There are dead friends that one does not ever quite forget, and there is the great wound of divorce which, even though 30 years in the past, can come open and bleed and almost break your heart. You walk to church and she's waiting for you in the shadows, asking, 'Why did you do that?'"

What is the spirit of the season and how can we be sure to discover it--again and again? What if it doesn't come to us? I realized after a day or so of wallowing that action can be the antidote to many sorrows. I just bought $20 of the fanciest wrapping paper, picked up the last of my presents and a box of Christmas hooch: two bottles of Baltika lager, a bottle of Jim Beam rye whiskey, some Korbel for the hubbie, and some Argentine malbec for the December 25 dinner. I have pumpkin puree and peppermint extract and some dark Ghiradelli chips for an afternoon of baking. I have my favorite Christmas book out for reading tonight: "A Christmas Memory" by Truman Capote. I've plugged the old phone in next to the leather chair so I can have long talks with my relatives in faraway states.

My mom wrote in an e-mail from Texas yesterday, in light of the storms in Denver, " If you haven't already told the story, remind Megan of the time you tried to get home from college during a blizzard. One of my favorite stories."

It was my first year at West Publishing and I was desperate to get home. I lived in a third-floor, sparsely furnished apartment on the corner of Rice and Larpenteur, near the Lamplighter Lounge, "St. Paul's Only Gentleman's Club." My then-boyfriend, now-husband, was trying to make his way up from Chicago, where he'd pick me up and we'd drive the eight hours or so to East Grand Forks, except his truck broke down near Eau Claire in the midst of this huge Midwest Christmas storm. I literally waited at my kitchen table, my two packed bags and Christmas presents by the door, for hours. He didn't show up and didn't call (this was the era before cell phones). Finally he phoned from the St. Paul Holiday Inn, some five hours late. He had hitched a ride with a truck driver who took him as far as the St. Paul freeway exit. You can imagine his weariness when I stoically answered, "I will NOT miss Christmas with my family." We stayed the night in St. Paul and took the Greyhound, the only transportation we could find, to Fargo, where my dad and brother picked us up on Christmas Eve in the old Datsun.

There was such a blizzard raging along I-29 from Fargo to Grand Forks that the roads were eerily empty. In a blizzard across the flat plains like that you're better off having more cars on the road so you can follow each other's tail lights. Like young John Kennedy, Jr., we seemed doomed to fall off course. As the airline reports indicated after Kennedy's fatal airplane crash in a night storm, "In the last few minutes before Kennedy’s little single-engine airplane went into the heavy seas off Martha’s Vineyard, its radar track showed all the evidence of a mind wobbling in the tortured confusion called vertigo."

Only our bafflement was the result not of a blackout, where the dark of the sky melded with the dark of the sea, but rather from whiteout, where the whipping winds all but obliterated the line of horizon on that lonely road. What determination my father held during that four-hour ride. He smoked his Winstons nonstop and gripped that wheel, hunched over the front of it like Radar O'Reilly from the MASH unit, that everyman's hero.

The bafflement young Kennedy likely encountered arose, they say, as his mind struggled with the contradictory signals of what he thought the plane was doing and what gravity was really doing to it--and him. In other words, in a blinding storm, you literally can’t tell up from down, left from right.

That Christmas Eve on I-29, we took turns riding on the passenger side with the door cranked open so we could drag a long stick along the road to feel the pavement and to try to judge if Dad was veering off the side of the highway. It was harrowing and heroic. I never felt better about Christmas than that year when we finally pulled up to my parents' house with the old big-bulb lights stapled along the roofline, a fire crackling in the hearth, and mom standing in anxious relief by the door, all of us laughing from our own released tension and family reunion.

The old adage is that everything seems harder at the holidays: old family disputes, old inadequacies. But I am cheered by my family stories and the ones unfolding right before me. There's nothing too heroic about a plate of cookies and a bottle of Christmas wine, I guess, unless you too struggled with the contradictory signals of this yearly tradition. If laughing over breakfast with the kids and lighting candles in the dark is the best I can discover of the Christmas sparkle, then so be it. There will always be storms. We've pulled ourselves out of bafflement before; we can do it again.

Happy Holidays to all!