December 19th.
I'm not the kind of person who counts down the days to a holiday. Whether Christmas is in a week or a year or a month or tomorrow isn't that exciting. Sparkling lights, ringing bells and carols are more a reminder that another year---once tiptoeing in---has inevitably slipped away. The days after Christmas come easier to me than the days before. The sky is lighter each day starting on the 22nd, and life's easy routines are back by the beginning of January. Miserable drives to work in the freezing rain. Cookie season. Another chance to set New Year's Resolutions that I'll be ignoring within 6 weeks. Improv classes start back up, and usually I get a cold.
In other words, life. Being in another place means that as of yet, my regular routines haven't been interrupted, or disrupted. Lectures are over, but labs and libraries and study rooms are still open. There's more for me to read in the next four weeks than I think anyone is capable of reading in a lifetime. The weather's gotten milder. Sunny every day for the last week. But other than the fact that the in-town parking lot now has the "full" sign lit up every day, and the crowd back in the colleges is looking more and more international as everyone wanders home, not much else has changed.
Here and there you'll find a Christmas tree, and some shop windows have strung up lights. But in comparison to the virtual Christmas Cornucopia of Capitalism that invades every aspect of my life starting in October in the US, this is pretty tame. Almost September-level for what I consider my culturally appropriate Christmas-time-meter at home.
And honestly, I don't at all know that I mind. Holidays are complicated little messes for my family at the best of times, and I would be lying if I said in any way shape or form that this year represented a "best of times" for us as a group. All roosters come home to nest, and the diaspora that hits even easy happy families as adulthood hits the kids, is in full effect. Holidays, a chance to have your loyalties vetted, to see where you stand and they are more complicated than ever. Siblings, parents, my grandmother who probably doesn't know or care that it's Christmas anyway. Siblings partners families meaning we balance when and where and how on top of a rattly cage that can barely hold all our emotions in anyway.
I tend to grit my teeth and bear it. Doing "Christmas" because I have younger siblings who deserve a family at the holidays. Who still haven't spread their wings to fly, and for whom having that picture, that Christmas tree and string of lights, with gifts and a train underneath, still seems to mean something. Who deserve to have a holiday even if I wish I were making time and a half pay washing dishes or playing at data entry or whatever else it is I do to get by with each passing year.
But this year I don't have a choice. The cost of a plane ticket home over the holidays would have been more than my entire cost of living for the next three months. That's what happens when you move half way across the world. And while I miss the chances to sip hot coffee with my friends, to wander through the zoo with families and their kids, marveling at the lights, to write a ridiculous Christmas letter about how I am still single, still happy and forever childless, I think a quiet Cambridge Christmas, spent wrapping my brain around the idea of gendering epistemologies, is exactly what I need.
Merry Christmas ya'll--from Callie, the Grinch.
No comments:
Post a Comment