Christmas: Part 1

Christmas gets me every time. I'm not sure if I always loved Christmas this much, or if it's a result of trying really, really hard to make it feel like it could maybe be snowing if I stepped outside at the end of a day in my office. Whatever the reason, everything about this time of year makes me smile. I love cheesy pop Christmas music with jingle bells in the background. I love legitimately good Christmas music with jingle bells in the background. ("Baby, It's Cold Outside" is my favorite. I'm not sure which category it falls into.(Ooh, that's a lie. I like "River" better.)) I love the movies and the cider and garland. I love cutting paper snowflakes and hanging them everywhere, even though it drives my roommate a little crazy. I love to listen to stories of how everyone here celebrates Christmas back home. People smile when they tell those stories, even though they can be hard to talk about when you're so far away from them.
On that note, I have to say something. I hope the people who get to be with their families and live those stories the same way year and year again understand what they have going for them. I am three thousand miles away from my perfect Christmas.
On December 24th, twenty of the people I love more than anyone else in this world will walk up my grandparents' walkway. The snow beneath their shoes will crunch and someone will probably slip and almost fall. The house will be warm and smell like a roasting turkey or a baking ham. There will be Christmas music playing and my grandfather will be whistling along in his apron as he toasts flour for the gravy. The tree will be ridiculously big and look like it leapt out of a Martha Stewart magazine page and into the living room. It will be decorated in gold. It will be beautiful. There will be a million presents underneath it. They're all supposed to be for the "kids," who are now into their late twenties, but there will also be some for the adults. Each of the adults will grin at each other and say, "Oh, we weren't doing Christmas presents for each other this year!"
The mingling will happen while everyone is cooking and snacking and snacking and cooking. We have to mingle, you see, as there will inevitably be someone there whom only one of us knows. Maybe a new girlfriend or boyfriend, unaware that all past girlfriends and boyfriends are still invited to our family Christmases. Or maybe a Christmas orphan, who doesn't have anywhere else to go, or who might not even celebrate the holiday. This orphan could be my grandmother's acupuncturist or the Vietnamese family who cleans her house. This orphan could speak zero English and have no real desire to be at her house for Christmas Eve. My grandmother does not care. My grandmother is Daddy Warbucks and will be damned if there is a soul in the whole state of Colorado who doesn't have somewhere to go that night.
The mingling will be interrupted by photo-taking time. They will pour onto the front step and try to figure out how to stand so everyone is seen. Someone will have brought santa hats or headbands with reindeer horns and bells, and that someone will insist that they all wear the hats for the picture. This includes the acupuncturist or new girlfriend. No one escapes unadorned. For this reason, we have a multitude of Christmas pictures with one or two people whose names no one can remember. My grandmother will cackle and my dad will roll his eyes.
When the pictures are done, they will eat. Gram will force kids to sit next to adults so everyone talks to everyone. She does not want people in their comfort zones, no sir. Sit beside someone you don't already talk to all the time. I suspect that this is done because she wants to be at the kids table herself. We make her laugh and we don't talk about things that bore her. We have let her believe that she is sneaky for years now, just like we pretend not to know that she puts pimentos in her jello-salad just so no one else will eat it and she can have all the leftovers.
After the food is gone and those twenty loved people pat their tummies and fill their cheeks with air to signal total stuffedness, they will move to the living room, where they will laugh together. They will laugh about my Uncle Patrick's constant quest for the perfect candid photo, which he will surely have been trying to get all day. The will ask about old girlfriends and boyfriends and unwittingly make the new ones slightly uncomfortable. Right about this time, my dad and his dad will disappear into different corners with different newspapers, where they will remain for most of the rest of the night. The kids will get up and do the dishes, complaining that they're not kids anymore and that dish duty should be shared by everyone now, forgetting that they cooked nothing.
My grandfather will start the coffee, and the scent will fill the air. A moment does not exist on December 24th that their house doesn't smell like something delicious.
And then, they will sing. My grandmother will sit down at one of her two pianos and begin to play Christmas songs. She will hand out sheet music. My cousin, who is my best friend, will look around the room searching for me until she remembers that I'm not there. That I haven't been there all that much since 2004. When she remembers, she will be sad. So will I. Some of them, including my spectacular grandmother, will sing beautifully. The ones that will not sing beautifully do not care. It's Christmas, and everyone can sing at Christmas. My Uncle Ted will say that we're flat. My mother will laugh and say something about not being able to carry a tune. My cousin will sing like a pop star and my grandmother will tell her to Stop That, that's not Real Singing. My dad and his dad will remain in their corners, with smiles sneaking into the corners of their lips. People will start to break away from the carolers a bit and dive into apple pie and chocolate torte, grateful that my grandfather made the coffee. He makes better coffee than any of the rest of us.
Rather abruptly, my grandmother will get tired of singing and demand the we all go to the tree and open presents. Present time is a little bittersweet. It's exciting and full of oohs and ahhs, but it's also the end. The last part. After the oohs and ahhs come the goodbyes, and then they will have to wait another year before this all happens again. No one wants to wait another year. No one really wants the night to end at all.
As I'm writing this, I am not sure how to close it. It seems, even when just writing the story of my family's Christmas Eve, that I do not want it to end anymore than they will.
Let's just call this part one. I'll end it with not wanting it to end. And tomorrow, when I am less sad about not being at one home for Christmas, I will write about being at a different one.

Until then, I thank David Bowie and Bing Crosby for singing a Christmas song together.