Christmas Vacuum
In the last 20 years, the only time I have celebrated Christmas in this country was 1987. I'm kind of freaking out about it, frankly, my first Christmas both alone and in the US in almost two decades. Until now I was busy enough with school that I could put off really thinking about it, but as things wind down I look around and I see the vacuum.
The most obvious hole is the tree. I haven't seen anyplace selling trees around here, and without a car it's hard to go looking farther afield. Even if I had one, though, there would be issues. For one thing, I don't really have any ornaments. I realize I could buy some cheap tree decorations at the drugstore, but that doesn't really satisfy my sense of aesthetics: I like a jumble of colors and styles, nothing too planned or color-coordinated. I like twinkly colored lights, and strands of puffy garland, and lots of sparkles in general. That's not the kind of effect you can create from a last-minute run to CVS.
And therein, really, lies the rub. To me a tree is like an archeological site, layers of history overlapping one another in a sedimented invitation to nostalgic reflection. A box of identical shiny-but-meaningless balls doesn't quite fit the bill.
My parents, and later my mom, used to give my sister and me at least one new ornament a year. Dario and I didn't always follow through, but we tried to buy a nice new ornament most years. A few glass balls are okay--even welcome--as long as there is plenty of significance to work with.
And significance was there in abundance. There were Avon ceramic ornaments from the late 70s/early 80s. Not gorgeous, but representative of the years after my father died, when my mom did everything she could to maintain a sense of family and continuity. There's the bread-dough ornament of a girl with red and black pom-poms and a uniform just like the ones we wore on our squad, that my mom bought at a school craft fair one year. I can't hang it on the tree anymore, because it's too fragile, but every year it got opened up and looked at, and I remembered. There's the single Swarovski crystal snowflake from 1992, the first Christmas Dario and I were on our own after moving out of his parents' apartment. If you look closely you can see the crack that bisects it. It fell on the marble floor the first year we hung it, possibly in a cat-induced incident. I cried, and Dario got out the Attak (the Italian SuperGlue equivalent). There are the silly ornaments, like the mouse wearing ski goggles, mounting a bird, "Goin' South" scrawled across his backpack. There's the cross-stitch ornament I made for our short-lived movie club. There are ornaments that were gifts from my mom, my sister, Dario's parents, each other.
All of this stuff now lives in a box tucked into a corner of an attic in Italy. Dario's family was never much into the Christmas thing, a fact that horrified me the first year I was married. I insisted things be done properly, and a bunch of new family traditions were born. Now, they're slipping away again, too much trouble to bother with when no one is much feeling the Christmas spirit.
I've thought about buying a strand of lights, at least, to string along the window sill. I might still. I know I have to rebuild my own tree, start accumulating a new set of memories to hang each year. This year, though, I think I just need to acknowledge the vacuum.