Down the Rabbit Hole

The First of the Season

I shrugged into my bathrobe and slipped my feet in my bedroom slippers, almost as an afterthought. I could feel the chill of the outside as I stumbled down the stairs behind the dogs. When I opened the door to let them out, I was startled to see that an inch of heavy wet snow had fallen. Thankful for the slippers, I trudged out down the pathway to urge Turk and Ricky to "get on with their business" and contemplated the slushy whiteness barely covering the blacktop and the cars. I thought, "and so it begans", another New England winter arrives and with it, the typical anxiety of keeping the old house warm and the oil tank half full. I realized, it also meant the holidays were just around the corner and I was suddenly charged with images of Jaden's first ever Christmas.
I thought about my own childhood Christmas mornings, that wonderful time of year when you believed in many magical things. Even as I matured enough to learn that there in fact, was no Santa, I became part of an alliance and together with my parents and grandparents, we managed to keep the dream alive a few more years for my younger siblings. But nothing could compare to the sheer joy of those innocent Christmases when I was a child and would lie awake, straining to hear the reindeer on the roof and then waking hours later and rushing down the stairs with my brother and sister to find presents stacked like glistening towers around a glowing tree. We'd tear into them with abandon, slowing only to savor the last few gifts in an attempt to be the last one with something to open. My mother and father, sleepy-eyed but smiling, would lament that "we had gotten up at least an hour earlier this year" and then would wander off the start the coffee. My grandparents would always arrive a hour or so later for breakfast. That was the way it was for years, until my grandfather's suicide and my parent's divorce permanently altered the family unit and the holiday landscape. But the Christmases of my youth occupy far more of my memories than the ones that came after those events. I remember the year my sister and I got our cabbage patch dolls and the year we found a full-size toboggan under the tree on which my father nearly broke his back on a few shorts weeks later sledding with us at the local golf course. I remember the time my father took down a gold-plated ornament from the tree and handed it to me. The ornament cracked open and nestled inside was the thing I most wanted that year, a gold onyx ring. It was beautiful, shiny and black, an oblong inlaid stone that I wore every day until I replaced it with my engagement ring twenty years later.
Those times were never just about the gifts though. It was our time, the tender and intimate moments of a growing family, building our own traditions and finding the opportunity to enjoy each other across generations. For my parents, it was about constructing something good and secure from their own past of pain and poverty. For us, it was about being kids, the wonder and the simplicity of it. The feelings, the way I would wake up with a chest nearly bursting with anticipation and excitment, the warm and comforted feeling of sitting over muffins and cups of steaming hot chocolate with my grandparents, the way the house would settle into a mellow and contented hum after all the gifts had been opened...all those feelings I want my daughter to experience. I want her to know those feelings and enjoy her family in the same way, for as long as she can. And one day, when she walks outside years from now and sees the first snow, I want her to remember them with the same kind of sweetness and appreciation.