What is it about being home for Christmas that always makes me feel isolated, a stranger among familiar faces.
Unlike most Americans, a lot of DC leaves for well more than the obligatory two days of Christmas cheer our corporate overlords allow.
The city rapidly flickers and fades in to a ghost town. The stately buildings and monuments, brutalist facades, and smiling faces melt away in to a debrided mausoleum of sorts once the holidays appear. The lobbyists, staffers, military folk, consultants, and elected officials all pour out over the American canvas to Rockwellesque alcoves tucked away from the DC hellscape.
The Yuletide season has become a bit of a memento mori for me. More than a bit. It is. December is the month wherein my first long relationship died, my grandmother died, and one of my best friends died far too young. It’s a time where nature unfurls itself in to a vanitas of greyscale, of death, of austerity.
Christmas is about the birth of life in the hopelessness of winter. Rebirth and life in the heart of death. For me, Christmas is when the very environs I surround myself with purge themselves of life. In this purging my mind is flooded with the specters of those who passed beyond, of futures that could have been but would never be. The cold, no matter how non-present it is thanks to climate change, bores itself in to the marrow of my bones.
Returning to close family for the actual day, the day in which we celebrate each other’s lives with gifts and merrymaking, serves as no poultice for this inflammation of the heart. Right around the time my grandmother passed away my family and childhood disintegrated. I moved away from my childhood home to college, my parents moved away from my childhood home to a tense suburb, and the various factions of my family moved away from each other over the specifics of my grandmother’s end-of-life care and burial. They were never reunited, and I return to the place I call home at most once a year when we drive through to a restaurant we like nearby. Restaurants have replaced the large-scale, mass-cooking, raucous affair that Italian holidays usually are and once were for me.
Most people travel home for the holidays to see their family. I travel to an alien, tangent reality bubble for the holidays to see my family utterly changed from the one I knew when I left for school a few years ago.
Perhaps it’s just me getting older. Judging by how everyone I know celebrates (or at least seems to celebrate) the holidays it seems like my traditions have changed a few degrees more than most.
Perhaps that is what bothers me most about the holidays. They lack the soul they once had. Not universally, not in some capitalism-killed-the-charitable-spirit-of-Christmas sense, but for me.
In any case, whether it’s the start reminder that we all return to ash during a time when everyone is beaming, or the eroding of a comfortable social fabric I once had, it is something that is on my mind. Christmas is a time of introspection for me. My mind turns in to a tundra wherein I can reflect and compose myself. I am happy to still be here, and hope I can do the people, traditions, and places that have passed on justice and keep them alive in my heart. The memories we hold are the flame against the internal cold. Although my fire may shrink to coal when others are burning brightest, the warmth of those memories keeps me going.
Skepsi 