holidays | matching tracksuits

We have spent most of the weekend getting ready for Christmas. The Boy, for example, has his first Christmas concert as a member of his school's wind ensemble. They don't wear the usual Maudlin Middle band outfits for that performance; the girls wear formal black dresses and the boys wear tuxedos. The Boy's tux pants are too long, so K hemmed them this morning.

Yesterday, I made the farsz for the pierogi and uszki we'll have during our Wigilia meal in a few weeks. Today, K made them. We have every cutting block and baking sheet covered in dumplings of various size in both freezers of the house.

How many times have we had these prep days? Well, truthfully, it's something I could count. It seems timeless and endless, but that's only a trick of the brain. We've been married twenty years now, so that seems to make counting simple. But of course, we spent Wigilia together several years before we were married. Twenty -two times now? Twenty-three?

Elf

Wednesday 04 December 2024

Elf has made his yearly appearance, but this year, he seems just to be hanging out in the living room.

"I know it's you and mom!" the Boy explained last year. And the year before that.

"But still, it's fun, isn't it?"

But this year, there it sits. Not moving. Not hiding.

Another sign that everyone is growing up. The traditions of Christmas slowly fall away. The Girl used to write a letter to Santa and leave out a snack. I can't remember the last time she did that. The Boy searched for Elf. I can remember the last time he did that, but it seems to be just that -- the last time.

Should we resist this? Should we try to cling to these things even after the kids have outgrown them? I think not. It's time to move on, to grow up, to pick up new traditions.

The Elf

Mikołaj 2020

Decorating 2024

Sunday 01 December 2024

And so we enter the Christmas season, which this year promises to be unlike any Christmas we've shared. This is the last Christmas that L will still be living at home. It certainly won't be the last Christmas we spend together, but it will most likely (excluding any unforeseen contingencies) be the last Christmas that she spends with us where the weeks leading up and the weeks trailing off see her still in her lovely room. "I guess I'll head back now," will be the phrase we're dreading next year.

Last year, apparently, was a last for us -- at least for a while. I am no longer in charge of the tree: this year, the Boy insisted on taking care of the tree. He unloaded it yesterday afternoon, suspended it under the deck to allow the branches to relax a bit, and carried into the house by himself -- irritated that I wanted a picture as he did it.

"You're like the paparazzi!" he declared.

This reticence to having his picture taken has been building, and it's positively a thing now. L has gradually disappeared from the majority of the entries because of similar reasons. It's understandable: teens are so very self-conscious of everything they do, of how everyone might look at them. I remember those anxieties myself. I would have felt even more aware of myself during this time of year: nothing stands out like not celebrating Christmas. At least when you're the one not celebrating it. Like so many "distinctives" in our little sect, that one is more wide spread than I would have suspected as a seventh grader.

He did allow me to snap a shot of him putting the first ornament on the tree.

And as we were putting lights on the house, there was not much he could do to protest.

I don't have nearly the number of photos from my own childhood as my children have of theirs. The reason, of course, is simple: digital is cheaper. We currently have 135,184 pictures in our Lightroom library, and that's including scanned pictures back through the sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties -- well before the masses went digital. There was certainly something about the old film days that's lacking now: that wait. You take a shot and you think you have a really great shot, but you're not sure. So you send the pictures off for development (or do it yourself -- I'm fortunate to have had a little darkroom for a few years), and there's that excitement going through the pictures (or watching the developer bring the image out of nothing).

I still get that a little with digital, though. Snap a picture and a series of possible edits in Lightroom start running through my head. I'm no longer wondering if I got the shot, though. And that delayed gratification -- it's gone for good.

Finally, we get everything up and L asks, "Why is are the lights on the tree blue at the top and white at the bottom?" Because, to return to the opening thoughts, this Christmas will not be like others. Nana and Papa have been gone for years now: this will be our sixth Christmas without Nana and our fourth without Papa, true, but it still feels wrong.

It will also be our first Christmas without a long-anticipated Christmas party. Almost everyone we usually spend Christmas with decided to go back to Poland for this Christmas. (That's why we all got together on Thanksgiving: the only difference was the food and the lack of carols, though everyone made up for it singing everything else they could think of.) I can't blame them: Christmas in Poland is magical in a lot of ways. But it means things will be different around here.

Quieter, for one.

That's almost always a good thing.

St. Stephen’s Day 2023

Tuesday 26 December 2023

Christmas 2023

Monday 25 December 2023

Previous Years

Wigilia 2023

Sunday 24 December 2023

First times almost never go unnoticed. When we’re experiencing something novel, we’re rarely not aware that it’s new. Our first kiss -- we all remember that. The first time we saw our first child -- no one could fail to realize the significance of the moment.

Sometimes, those firsts surprise us: my first Christmas was something I never thought I would experience, and while I doubt many people can remember their first Christmas, I clearly remember mine.

But lasts? We often don’t even realize we’re in the midst of some last, and we don’t realize it was a last until so much later. Our last Wigilia with Nana and Papa together in 2018 -- we didn’t realize it was the last. Our final Wigilia with Dziadek in 2007 -- we had no idea it would be our last. Our last Wigilia with Papa in 2020 -- no idea.

W. S. Merwin hints at this in “For the Anniversary of My Death”

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what

We move through these lasts without even thinking about them, without even realizing their presence.

But some lasts approach. They haunt or taunt us from far off: our last day of duty for the year hangs tauntingly in front of us teachers every year. Our last time in a classroom in a given school -- we know it’s coming, and it haunts us. At least it did me both times I left Poland.

We’re approaching a last in our family: L is now seventeen, a junior in high school. Next year will be the last time she’s here for Wigilia for certain. Sure, she’ll be here for most of them in the years in college, maybe even all of them. But there will come a time when she decides to spend Wigilia with the family of someone she’s fallen for.

Then there will be the same situation for E five years later. He’ll move out, probably come to Wigilia with us more regularly than L (but who knows?), and we’ll never be certain like we are now that we’ll be spending the next Wigilia together.

And at some point, K and I will have our final Wigilia together, and we most likely won’t even know it.

So this all raises the obvious question: is it good to know that last has arrived or not? I think it depends on the event itself. In the end, though, it’s a moot point: we often don’t know our lasts when we happen across them.

But what if we tried to live each moment as if it were our last time doing whatever mundane task was at hand? What if we washed dishes as if we’d never get to do it again? Such a simple mundane task that has marked our lives with such regularity that we don’t even think about it. Putting it in the context of a potential last seems to imbue it with some sparkle it lacked before. And I guess that sparkle really comes from us -- and we can dispense them wherever we choose. We can make a conscious choice to live our lives as if ever single event were the last time we do that, or even the last thing we do on earth. It seems like it could be the ultimate life lived in the now.