The Aerie
The gifts are all wrapped. That's the big achievement. All the presents were wrapped yesterday, with some final stragglers this afternoon. That means that tonight is a much simpler Christmas than we've had in years. No gritty-eyed tape-strangled 2:00 a.m. wrap-fest punctuated with crabby exhausted bickering. I'm gonna miss it.
Not.
No, it's the end of a very good year despite the hiccoughs along the way (thinking wrily of the five-year-old pristine minivan rusting in a junkyard somewhere). We're all here, all happy, all healthy, and all of us, if we're not exactly swimming in the waters of Sanity, at least have a toe in. And my paternal half-brother's wife is home safe from Kuwait after a year during which he cared for his stepson by himself. Gratefulness abounds.
Since we have our gift-wrapping done, tonight we are headed off to the 11:30 Christmas service at our church. We haven't been in a long time. In recent years we've enjoyed (to varying degrees) the Solstice Service, which includes Calling the Four Directions and 12 minutes of silence in the dark. The first one of those we had to sit through, I had to play a hand-squeezing game with my youngest to keep him entertained. Nowadays that wouldn't be a problem, but we couldn't make it this year.
So we're off to the caroling service, which I hope will feature a lot of candles. And, atheist that I am, the Silent Night always moves me deeply. Sure, it's not my faith - I never dated Juliet, either, and yet Romeo's soliloquiy is no less a moving declaration of love. So I look forward to carols and camaraderie, and driving home with the kids dozing in the back of the car.
We'll tuck them into bed, and sit for a while in the darkened living room, watching the lights blink. Then we'll head upstairs ourselves, and hopefully in the middle of the night Santa Claus will come and bring his own gifts, and fill the stockings. Hopefully he'll also move our gifts underneath the tree as a favor, for I surely wouldn't want to have to carry them all myself.
In the morning our children, now older, may sleep in again, meaning we all get a full night's sleep. Then we'll wake, wrapping paper will be demolished, surprises will be revealed, and candies will be surreptitiously consumed prior to breakfast.
In the afternoon we'll visit both my sisters-in-law - the crazy one and the other crazy one, and I won't say which is which - and try to maintain our equanimity in the face of familial dynamics. Hopefully we'll return home in good cheer, and have a relaxing night exploring all our presents.
Then, Tuesday, it's back to work, where I and maybe one other colleague will show up, sit at our cubes in our empty cubicle field, and try to get some work done to justify our presence.
Hopefully you anticipate as happy a holiday. Hopefully all your loved ones are here, and not off in Iraq, Afghanistan, or elsewhere. Hopefully you're all gainfully employed. Hopefully you're all surrounded by friends and loved ones. Hopefully you all have hope.
And if you don't, here's the thing: a new year starts next week. And just like a new day, a new year offers opportunities, only bigger. It's a chance to turn over a new leaf, a chance for fortune to smile upon us, a chance for popular opinion to shift, for sanity to gain a new foothold in the world, and for greed, fear, and anger to simmer down from the roiling boil they've achieved lately.
Let's hope so, and let's do what we can to bring it about.
Happy holidays.
Posted by Albatross at December 24, 2006 10:05 PM | TrackBack