I've been accused of being something of a Grinch in the past. I suppose it's not entirely untrue: I really don't care about Christmas. It's not that I want to ruin everyone's good time - despite my staunch opposition to holiday mandated gift-giving, I'm not trying to take toys from kids or cancel the celebrations. I love toys, and encourage festivities.
I like the lights - the lights are my favorite part - although I do abhor Christmas music. Lately I've been keeping my headphones on in Whole Foods because if I hear Zooey Deschanel's version of 'Baby It's Cold Outside' one more time I am going to straight up throttle the next person who stands in front of the cheese samples for half a second too long. And it's cool that everyone's happy and charitable and shit, but I hate receiving Christmas cards from the whole office. I'm the only person that doesn't send any back, and it's super awkward. I just don't do Christmas cards. Because I don't care about Christmas. I'm sorry! I just don't.
And this isn't a war on the Magic of the Holiday Season. Guys, I love magic. I believe in ghosts for goodness sake. When unexplainable shit happens to me, I usually think 'Irish Voodoo' and that is seriously an explanation I'm satisfied with. When I was four, I swear I heard Santa and the Reindeer on the roof. I have never been so convinced of anything*. So it was a mega goddamn bummer when my parents let me in on the truth about Santa. (It created some trust issues. Most of which I've worked through.) And although I really like Christmas movies (repeated viewings of 'A Charlie Brown Christmas' have convinced me that Charles Schulz shared many of my utopian humanist dreams) most of the real-life celebratory aspects just seem a little...ridiculous, to me.
My parents' interest in the holiday waned around the time we stopped asking for cool toys. As we got older, the whole tree rigamarole became such a hassle**, they downgraded to a small, relatively festive Christmas plant. It totally worked for us. Around then,my brother and I realized we could get each other much better presents if we just waited to buy them with our Christmas money. And so began the grand tradition of Sibling Christmas. In Amherst, it was held at Goten. In Boston, Chinatown. One year, we didn't even leave the apartment. And it was just so much nicer this way, without stress about gifts and travel, no exorbitant price tags, no one-upping a prior year's performance. Just a day off, man. With festive lighting.
All of this serves to explain why I figured spending Christmas alone would be no big deal.
I moved to DC in October of 2010. My parents made their final trip from PEI to Florida over Thanksgiving, and stopped here along the way. We ate Lebanese takeout in their hotel room, and it was awesome. When Christmas rolled around...I don't know. It didn't make sense to go to Florida. My brother was still in Vermont then, and Sibling Christmas can happen whenever, so that wasn't really a concern. And I thought: 'the city will be empty, just how I like it.'
I took myself to museums. I went to the National Gallery two days in a row. I got my super nerd on. It was awesome. The cold made my hands sting, but I took a walk along the mall, which is blessedly quiet at 4:30pm on December 23rd. The lights started coming on just as I was ready to head home, and I thought: 'I'm really glad I moved here.' It was perfect. Who cares about Christmas?
The next day, I decided on the Natural History Museum. I don't know why, but it seemed like an exceptionally charming thing to do for Christmas Eve. I was really excited about the dinosaurs. Dinosaurs! (Seriously, I love dinosaurs. If you want to hang out and talk about your favorite dinosaur, this is something I'm into.) It was cold again, and the creepy silence of my empty house was gnawing at my edges a little, but I'd bought myself some ill new boots as a Christmas present, so there was plenty to be positive about. I got to the museum around 2:30 - lateish, but enough time for some thorough exploration, followed by happy hour in a part of town I never went out in. Maybe I could even find a fire to read by. And a burnished leather chair to sit in! Visions of hot toddies danced in my head.
I assumed the museum would be mostly empty. I wanted something tomb-like, intimidatingly quiet. Just myself and people like me, nerds alone on Christmas, and totally cool about it. As it turns out? The Natural History Museum on Christmas Eve is pretty much ENTIRELY THE OPPOSITE OF THOSE THINGS. The joint was full of families. All kinds of families. Moms and Dads and kids, Aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews. Grandparents and grandchildren. Foreign students goofing around, tourists unabashedly snapping the most touristy of pictures: ‘One with my arm in the shark’s mouth!’; ‘One where it looks like the mammoth is going to step on me!’; ‘One where it looks like I’m about to do this Neanderthal lady from behind!’. Couples, friends, people all in love, one way or another, with their companions. The museum was bursting with love. I'd made a mistake, coming here.
Back when we were roommates, F and I spent a frigid November afternoon at Harvard’s deliciously vintage Natural History Museum. We spent an hour looking at the gems and stones, at least twice as long in the Great Mammal Hall, browsing the animals behind the 70s-era glass cases, noting the expressions taxidermied onto their faces: alarmed, bemused, stoned. We took pictures of at least a dozen examples of 'stuffed balls' with our phones and sent them to my brother. We laughed all afternoon.
I snapped out of the memory, back to myself: alone, standing in front of a Triceratops. The corners of my eyes and the sides of my throat got a little sore, felt a little full. I got out of there before the tears came.
Outside, I didn't feel like drinking in the company of strangers anymore, so I went home, and tortured myself with the Ghosts of Christmases Past: watched 'A Muppet Christmas Carol' and thought of the one present we'd been allowed to open on Christmas Eve as kids, the one we fretted over for a week beforehand, poking the wrapped packages and weighing them in our hands. Thought about my Dad grabbing up our discarded wrapping paper and stuffing it in the trashbag before it had a chance to hit the floor. Thought about the year Beetle and I selected 'Avatar' as our Christmas movie, the silent moment when he leaned over and whispered: "How come only the male avatars have nipples?" I laughed so hard I almost had to leave the theater.
You see what I'm getting at here. No, I don't care about Christmas. But it's not about the holiday. It's about love. And maybe it should be just a day off, but it's not. It's not like I was loved any less because I wasn't with my family. But the presence of love is a powerful thing. And it's even more powerful in the remove.
This year, I'm going to Florida. I'm meeting my brother and his lady in Miami on Christmas day, and then we're spending the rest of the week with our parents in their adorably weird little golf course community, places that exist by the hundreds in Florida - and seemingly only in Florida, although I bet Arizona has a bounty of these joints, too. I haven't bought presents for anyone, and I'm sure no one's got presents for me. I'll spend the majority of my holiday flying, I'll be late to meet everyone, I'll annoy at least one person by repeatedly asking where the dive bars are in this town. My dad will have trouble finding the hotel the next day when he comes to pick us up, and someone will yell at me for dawdling/getting us lost/being generally unhelpful. I cannot wait, I could not want anything more.
Merry Christmas, everyone.
*I did hear something that night. My adult explanation? Irish Voodoo. Or raccoons, whatever.
** Putting up the Christmas tree is pretty much the only time I've ever seen my parents really hate each other. They didn't like, say it or anything, but the air was pretty thick with an 'If this tree falls on you, I hope you die' vibe.
