A time for releasing perfection, rekindling joy
- Melissa Herrera: Not Waiting for Friday
- December 6, 2019
- 966
I read somewhere that Christmas is a feeling, a memory wrapped in the warmth of a moment. Its meaning, of course, is more than a feeling. But if prompted, what does it invoke inside your heart? Or is Christmas painful, bringing memories you’d rather forget? Has it become too commercialized that we strain at the leash of Pinterest-worthy scenes we tip-toe inside of?
I digress to memories from my cortex, where Christmas remains.
I can smell the freshly made cinnamon rolls before I see them: warm, gooey and ready to dip inside Mom’s homemade hot chocolate mix, the white Pfaltzgraff coffee cups accepting the slurpy, sloppy dips of pastry, the frosting melting into the hot liquid. Oranges sliced into quarters awaiting to be eaten afterward, their tart sweet juices a complement to the cinnamon rolls.
Our tree was real, and by Dec. 25 there were always needles peppering the floor, but the smell of each tree remained. It permeated the fireplace that was ever-crackling. Sometimes I could swear I smelled that pine on hot July mornings.
We had homemade stockings stitched by Mom, ones we still use today, stuffed with smallish trinkets: a diary, a Kissing Potion lip gloss, a quad of eyeshadows. Nothing fancy, nothing outlandish. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the moments we were blown away by gifts we desperately hoped for like the Atari game system or the Jordache jeans I never thought I’d get.
Why do these remnants remain?
Today I long for a Christmas free of commercialization. I don’t want to be told when it’s time to shop, time to buy food for Christmas dinner or time to put up my decorations. I want to do it when the spirit strikes me, which years ago when I was newly married, was a couple weeks before the big day.
I remember the old electric candles I had gathered at thrift stores, along with oddly matched bulbs I thought looked nice together. The December winds were cold as I placed them in the drafty windows of our old house, and when I walked out into the yard to survey the scene, I couldn’t have imagined more pleasure than those blue, green and red bulbs glowing cheerily in the windows gave me.
I’ve given up trying to create the perfect Christmas. I wish I’d realized I didn’t have to in the first place. I don’t remember my own mom being stressed out during the lead-up to Christmas; maybe she was, and I didn’t see it.
We made ornaments for the tree sometimes, gluing together Popsicle sticks and pom pom balls or carefully cutting out paper snowflakes. It’s the smell of cinnamon rolls and hot chocolate that remain, the crackling of a fire and the spending of Christmas day in pajamas as I read that new book or listened to the new earphones attached to my portable radio. It was never how the lights were strung or the fireplace mantel was decorated.
Today we reach to take the perfect pictures of the perfect moments with our perfectly matched outfits in perfectly matched poses standing in front of a perfectly decorated tableau. I believe we fear we will miss something if it’s not captured, not frozen in time, swimming in millions of terabytes. I have 7,000 pictures in my phone, and I count myself as guilty.
I want to release the desire I feel for things to seem perfect because they are not. We are humans that sometimes don’t want to clean our houses, go to work or ever cook a meal again. We want Christmas perfection, but that’s an unrealistic dream because it’s not in the things. It’s in the feeling. We want our homes to look professionally decorated for the holidays, but the effort can be too much, so we put up and arrange our adequate artificial trees and watch them in wonder. I know I do.