The morning of the kids’ last day off from school over Christmas break, I was roused at six a.m. by a moaning sound that mixed with the whir of the box fan in Danyelle’s and my bedroom. It was so constant and steady that I thought the spinning blades must have randomly achieved some resonant frequency, like when a strong offshore wind set all the windows singing in my childhood home on Sullivan’s Island. That, or there was a ghost in the hallway just outside the door. Surely, I thought, the sound couldn’t be coming from my younger son. It had been so long since I woke to the sound of crying, and that crying was never anything like this woeful moan. It was always more violent and panicked, the product of a terrible dream or an uncomfortable squishy diaper. This was the pitiful boohooing of a mourner who recently lost a pet, or, as I later learned was actually the case, the freedom that comes with Christmas break.
“You know the problem with putting up lights at Christmas,” the father of a friend once told me, “You have to take them down.”
This year, that man’s son boasted about taking down his family’s tree and putting away the various and sundry seasonal decorations: “I killed Christmas yesterday,” Matt said as we walked down his parents’ narrow drive on the last day of his visit home. His time here in the Southland had been a reunion of sorts, one that saw us consume vast quantities of happy hour oysters and Guinness pints over the course of two nights out. We tromped all over Charleston’s downtown peninsula, went for lunches, and discussed a variety of topics including books, family, and women, the conversation between us like a fast-moving stream with an infinitude of smaller tributaries, narrow passages we were forever finding and exploring, occasionally getting lost in them for a while before returning to our broader initial course. The visit harkened back to a simpler time when life seemed to stretch endlessly out in front of me, and as the two of us turned down Broad Street for one last talk, I was sad it was ending. Likewise, I was sad about having just recently killed Christmas myself.
It was the day prior when, after taking down the Christmas lights strung along the roofline in the front of the house, I sat at the piano as the yellow afternoon light filled the den, and played Christmas Time is Here. I played it softly once through, and then over and over again in a gradual crescendo of improvisation, ultimately exploding the harmony inside out into a reverie of discordant banging. Then, I quietly put the song back to bed. One last indulgence, I thought. One last unabashed celebration of the Charlie Brown Christmas music that was so alive in my fingers begging to be played after the last month-and-a-half of practice. Danyelle was in the room listening, and when I turned to face her, I saw that I’d reached her. Looking around at the kid art hung on the walls, the soft winter light slanting in through the west-facing windows, I was stricken with a pang of sadness. “This is all gonna be over so soon,” I said.
Such a well-defined marker of time’s endless procession is Christmas that in its passing one is left with the memory of memories. Walking the streets downtown with Matt, I remembered the remarkable sense of freedom I had as a 13-year-old loosed on those same streets with him on the nights I slept over; walking the two miles through the Old Village to Pitt Street Bridge with Danyelle and the kids, I remembered getting married to Danyelle under the Live Oak looking out across the harbor at Al Hambra Hall; walking the beach with the boys and watching them brave the cold water alongside all the drunken revelers on New Year’s Day, I remembered pushing them in strollers and laughing admiringly when they only dared to get their feet wet; and when I realized the moaning sound wafting into my bedroom was the expression of my 6-year-old’s sense of loss, I remembered the way I felt on the last night of Christmas break when I was a teen, when I looked down at the swim bag and backpack in the middle of the floor in my room and didn’t bother to try to stop the tears flowing down my face, surprised they’d come on so forcefully.
A moment of time not lived by the clock, when memories pile upon memories, and we feel the weight of our existence; how could a person not be touched by sadness when the season starts to lift, and we’re faced with the prospect of the return to mind-numbing routine? As the decorations go in boxes, trees line the curb, and the Earth starts to tilt toward the sun again, what happens to that weight? Where does it go? Shouldn’t it be like the physical matter of the universe, impossible to destroy?
Sitting in the den with Danyelle lamenting the finite nature of our days, the silent echo of a Vince Guaraldi classic still hung in the air, and even as I regretted its passing, I knew I’d play Christmas Time is Here throughout the year; even though Scotty claimed that he would cry the morning that followed his episode of moaning, he instead presented himself in the kitchen the next day with his bookbag strapped to his back, apparently excited to get going on his next trip around the sun; and despite my friend Matt’s joke about sending the season to its final resting place, a joke I’ve since adopted as my own, Christmas is exactly that which we cannot kill.
The Raging Elitist 