Some stray thoughts on the holidays

I've gathered recent pieces I've written about this time of year

Because of several circumstances, this year’s holidays are proving tough for me. They are no doubt tough for many others. I’ve written during the last several years about Christmas, family, and home and how those have been affected by where I’ve chosen to live, the decisions I’ve made, and the eerie silence of the pandemic. They’re hopefully relevant to others, so I’ve gathered them here. Here’s hoping the coming days and weeks bring you and yours peace, calm, and gratitude.

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Laying low raises some questions about the meaning of home, how it’s defined, and whether it’s a place one visits or a place one carries abound inside. Probably some measure of both, I’d guess. This is the first Christmas/New Years in more than twenty years that we haven’t driven east to visit my parents and siblings. We’re staying put in DeKalb this year, alone yet not at all lonely, and, as much as I’ll miss family and the growing racket of what I used to call home, I won’t miss the three hours it took us to cross Indiana in a horizontal blizzard, the bedraggled hotels, the too-brief human connections, the stress. And the rest.

What I’m trying to pay close attention to this year, quiet with Amy in our small town, are eternal rhythms, from cookie making and tree decorating to the otherworldly quiet of the yard at night and, today, on Christmas morning, of the neighborhood itself where in homes all over, many families are enacting what still feels absurdly joyous and close to me. But during this season it’s especially important to remember that a home packed with family members is no more festive than a home with one or two lonely occupants, fighting against the blues or worse, feeling underwhelmed by the season and so feeling miserably anti-human, and purposeless, because of it. Home is where you live, no matter what shape or noise that living takes.

Unsurprisingly, I’ve been thinking about all of this because of a couple of songs. Last night, we listened to Frank Sinatra’s “I’ll Be Home For Christmas (If Only In My Dreams)” from 1957—a song about home and how we long for it, but often have to settle for it as imagined—and I was again struck by how elementally simple on a technical level is the the arrangement of notes, the movement of harmonics, the rhymes, all of it written out in charts and on sheet music, and yet how mysterious the end result, how endlessly fresh, how in a moment of composition lies the eternity of expression. And yesterday “He’s A Rebel” came up on shuffle at the gym. No one in their right mind would call this a holiday tune, and yet it couldn’t have arrived at a better time for me, surrounded by the lights and spectacle and oppressive materialism of the Christmas season, as I’m trying to keep my ears and ears tuned to what's timeless. There’s something eternal in the changes in this song, as if they’ve always existed, and surprised into hearing them again, and moved, I found myself still catching up to a song I’ve heard, and marveled at, hundreds of times. Written by Gene Pitney and recorded by the Blossoms in 1962, “He’s a Rebel” was credited to the Crystals, who were then obligated to add the song to their repertoire and who became forever identified by it. The inestimable Wrecking Crew, with dependable Hal Blaine on drums, played on the track, laying the sturdy foundation for singer Darlene Love.

The men and women who wrote, recorded, and produced “He’s A Rebel” entered pop myth for me long ago, and may as well be epic characters, some resplendent, some unsavory, most just normal, in a vast story about the Twentieth century. They lived, and live, in the echo of the eternal, something that will always exist just above our heads, practically visible in the ether, even as it pounds in our hearts and chests, moistens our eyes, plugs our throats forever, I’d wager today, this morning.

Anyway, Merry Christmas wherever you are, whatever you believe or don’t, if you’re in the old homestead or a new joint you just moved to and that doesn’t feel like home yet, whether you’re with loved ones or on your own. I wish you all sorts of eternal moments, in whatever form they take: family, friends, quiet reflection, loud songs. Maybe today is a good day to look for them, or better yet, to leave yourself open to the surprise of them. (2018)

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I was raised Catholic, though somewhere during my college years I became an agnostic. Later I fell in love with and married a casual Jew, and we don’t have kids, so late December’s evolved into a pretty secular and occasionally isolated time of the year. Which is fine. For decades we drove east to Maryland to visit my parents and family during this week, but last year and this year we’ve decided to lay low in quiet DeKalb, stoke the virtual fire of Christmas songs, a modest tree, evening drives past the more bedecked local houses, seasonal drinks with our friends.

This is not to say that I don’t feel the pang of absence. Christmas is a strange time of the year, a culturally-authorized period in which you’re meant to be cheery, generous, and grateful for family, when in fact those good intentions often cruelly bounce off of those who don’t fit the mold. What I’m really thinking about here, I guess, is what home is and what home means, and about how many people define it in ways which is in opposition to the mainstream. The pro-family small-town Midwest, where we’ve lived for many years, casts a long (if polite) shadow over those couples, straight or queer, who’ve decided not to have kids, whose home may not feature on the front of Hallmark cards or in pop-up ads. And if you’re alone, by choice or by unhappy circumstance, whether you’re straight or queer, or cis-gender or non-binary, married or shackin’ up or single, your choice of a home—or, let’s face it, where you’ve anyway ended up despite those choices—is entirely yours, and, I hope, is as warm and comfortable and safe and contended as those golden-hued homes of your imagination, and in movies and television ads, that you’ve extolled as ideal. Home is where you make it, bah humbug, what you call and define it.

As I write this, dozens of flights at O’Hare and Midway airports have been delayed or cancelled because of heavy fog; visibility’s at a quarter mile. Not fun for those stranded, or for their loved ones awaiting the arrival, but as a victim of airport delays and crossed-off flights, I’m guessing that more than one of those stranded folk are using the opportunity to reflect about family and home and the ways we strive to meet the standards of both, indulging our better angels and wrestling with our worst, no less human, impulses. Everything slows down right about now. I’m gonna take a deep breath, take walks, call my folks, talk to my sibs, reads books, cranks tunes, get into the city, drink and dine with Amy, ignore the magnetic pull of the calendar, and resolve to plug into home, which after all is a place that we carry around inside of us as much as a place where we open and close doors. Happy Holidays, wherever you are, wherever, and however, you’re home. (2019)

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And here we are again, a second Covid Christmas and New Years, with a new variant promising a dark winter, stealing away our mental and physical well-being and our ability to press re-set, if that button can even be located. And like last year I’m thinking about home, how it’s defined and what it means, for me and my wife, laying low again (by pre-Pandemic choice) in DeKalb, eschewing holiday travels, and for all of us, now that homeward is again a fraught and unhappy notion. Last December I recognized that in 2019 “I was writing that on the cusp of the deadliest year in United States’ history,” and I was grimly aware that what I’d written felt quaint, if not archaic.

In 2020 the very definition of home was radically challenged and reimagined, those with homes—to hunker down in, or to mournfully avoid—and those without were forced to reckon with a new understanding of what behind closed doors means. Because we’d made the decision to eschew Christmas/New Years traveling, staying put was relatively easy for us, but I felt for those for whom flying or driving from home to home is a profound and crucial emotional component of their lives; for many, the occasion is the only time to see family and friends. And I feel for the malcontents, too, and, more seriously, the members of dysfunctional families for whom “the holidays” are torture—even those folk, forced now to stay home, may face a startling renewal of the desire for familial intimacies, even the faking of them. Home’s pull is surprisingly strong; it reaches across miles and through bolted doors.

We’ve all gone through so much the last nineteen months, some of us numb to things, others feeling the wounds fresh still. We’ve passed 800, 000 U.S. deaths, a startling and macabre statistic, a grim reminder, and yet that doesn’t stop us from feeling that in-the-marrow impulse to celebrate the holidays, with friends, family, or on our own. But the revelry is tempered, and I have to ask for how long. Since the answer to that question is as unknowable as the fog was thick this morning, I have to simply plug myself into what gives me pleasure, and hope that you can do the same. I’m struck today by what little insight I have as I reflect on the last year, because it feels that so little has changed even though we’ve experienced a year of joys as well as tragedies. The predictable stuff. All we really can do in the face of a pandemic, aside from the smart, preventative measures that, unacceptably, far too many are still reluctant to take, is to count blessings, assist others when we can, and focus on the small and large pleasures that being alive gives us. I write this in good health, vaccinated and boosted, recognizing my privilege, and luck. I’ll mask up, I’ll limit my socializing, I’ll mourn for the bands I’m not seeing and the venues I’m not seeing them in, and I’ll mourn the toll all of this is taking on us, but I’ll try to keep counting my blessings. Happy Holidays. (2021)