It’s easy to point to the fact that we’ve lived in warm climates for five years now as the reason for why we’ve been bad at celebrating Christmas lately. (And by lately I mean since we got married.) And really, it is hard to get in the Christmas spirit when it’s always warm. It’s even harder when you’re (sometimes) lazy. Add to that that we have been traveling a lot of the Christmases we have been together, and there just hasn’t been much point in putting up a tree.
But sometimes, in a few odd moments, like the few Christmases when we were home, no matter if we made a special breakfast or spiced cider, or how excited we were over presents, it never really FELT like Christmas.
But now Lincoln is old enough to notice those things and even before Thanksgiving he started asking us where our tree was. (Thanks a lot, Macy’s decorating team.)
So this year we tried to get our lives together a little bit. We drove up to the North Shore Christmas tree farm in the pouring rain and then sloshed through the mud to the rows of dark damp trees. (Not exactly a winter wonderland.)
We picked out a Norfolk Pine, the Hawaiian version of the Christmas tree, with a few, symmetrical branches, pine needles that never fall off the tree, but without the evergreen forest-y smell.
And then, a week or two later, we followed the rows of short sleeved shirt people with their lawn chairs down to the Kamehameha for the Kaneohe Christmas parade, the parade that we had ignored for the other years we have lived here. I am NOT a parade person. It is always sunny and hot, and though I try, I just do not care about which car is going to come by carrying which people.
But Lincoln did. “Motorcycles, Mom!!! And dancing people! And songs!!” All those things and Hawaiian dancers, and ukulele filled trolleys besides.
Maybe the point of childhood, and of reliving it through your children again, is to find the joy in the small things that our traveling, busy, always finding better things to do adult selves always forget. We think, sometimes, that we can find the Christmas spirit intellectually, without having the tree or the parades or the prettily wrapped presents in the corner. But it turns out that Christmas in a grotto in the middle of Bali with neither snow nor a tree around us is a hard transition to make.
Sometimes we need the things that we can see and touch, even when we as adults think we can intellectually move our feelings into the right place. It turns out that sometimes the physical stuff can bring us around, showing us something we had forgotten when we only ‘knew’ Christmas was with lights and dancing, instead of actually celebrating it that way.
And maybe that’s the point of Christmas too, coming again to know and to love with new eyes and fingers. Maybe it’s realizing that love works the same way. Maybe it’s resting again in a Love that didn’t keep Himself separate, but manifested itself in the physical things; smell of animals around a mother giving birth, the frantic turbulence of a small fishing boat in a storm, and the sound of nails crunching through flesh and bone.
So I’m remembering this Christmas that intellectual love is nothing without a physical manifestation, and that often, the best way to know things is through smell, touch, and taste. Like a Christmas cookie with colored lights bouncing off of piles of wrapping paper.
And a soft, smooth baby face scratched by manger hay.
Bailey Suzio says
“Maybe it’s resting again in a Love that didn’t keep Himself separate, but manifested itself in the physical things; smell of animals around a mother giving birth, the frantic turbulence of a small fishing boat in a storm, and the sound of nails crunching through flesh and bone.”
Chills. Absolutely beautiful.