This Christmas is the first I will ever spend apart from my family. I hadn’t thought much about this until I heard a Bing Crosby song on the radio, which I initially disregarded as another unwelcome sign of the holiday season, until he sang the line “I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams”.
I’m not one to over sentimentalise Christmas. There is much that I dislike: the cabin fever that inevitably sets in, the desire to get back to a routine, the panicked purchasing of gifts, the pressure to be cheery on gloomy Irish winter days that end before they’ve had the chance to start...
Yearning for the past is something I try to avoid, partly because it usually involves speaking and thinking in clichés: the wish to return and the failure to grasp the meaning of the moment. The reality is always more complicated if we are honest with ourselves.
Still I felt an unexplainable sadness when I heard Mr Crosby croon, and it caused me to think hard about all that has happened and what is happening and the awkward marriage between the two that sometimes can cause a feeling like indigestion. For me, the now is the silhouette of a Californian palm tree and majestic sunsets and sushi and kale and the surf of the Pacific Ocean. What was it back then? And when was back then exactly?
A Christmas tradition in my house when we were children involved the book Polar Express. My mother would put the tape into the player. My two brothers and I would sit in the living room and follow the words on the page as the voice of Saint Nicholas read aloud. The set even came with a little bell that we rang when cued.
Around the age of ten or eleven, the tradition went from being a joyous, highly anticipated event, to one that I felt obligated to feign interest in order to appease my mother. Just as the book prophesizes: “At one time, most of my friends could hear the bell, but as years passed, it fell silent for all of them. Even Sarah found one Christmas that she could no longer hear its sweet sound. Though I’ve grown old, the bell still rings for me, as it does for all who truly believe.”
Journeys of self-discovery are popular, whether it’s Siddhartha, Jesus wandering off into the desert, or even the boy in Polar Express. It appeals to us, the idea that we can journey from one place to the other and come to some fundamental realisation about ourselves or the world in the process. I am increasingly skeptical that this is the case. If anything all my own journey has done is thrown up more questions, which may be a realisation in itself, but offers very little fodder for storytelling. Questions like what am I doing thousands of miles from the people I love. No matter how far we’ve travelled, we’ve all come from somewhere.
The truth is that I won’t be able to help it, won’t be able to stop myself from dreaming of the smell of my mother’s baking wafting through the house, dreams of her smiling and laughing and giving out as I cut another slice of the rapidly disappearing ham, dreams of my father and me conspiring to pour another drop of Irish Cream in our coffee, and talking until the light is out in the kitchen and we are left in the darkness, dreams of scrabble games, dreams of long walks down country roads, dreams of fir trees, dreams of sharing Christmas presents with my brothers and the awkward hugs and the urge to say I love you for no other reason than I do, only it’d be impossible to say because the truth can be harder to utter than any lie.
When it comes time I will board the Southwest flight to Austin, Texas on Christmas Eve to visit my friend who is in the same boat as me. The stewardesses will smile at me, wish me a Happy Christmas. I will fasten my seatbelts, sit back into my chair. I won’t let nostalgia overcome me. I won’t get caught in the past like an arroyo suddenly filled with storm water.
All that will happen is that my journey will be placed on pause, allowing me to bridge the gap between where I’ve come from and where I’m going, allowing me to take another step, wherever that step may take me.
