November 5, 2007
Monday

Middletown, Pennsylvania is a former Revolutionary War supply depot and trading post that has lost most of the small town charm it might have had in centuries past. It has a few elegant restaurants in the old brownstones along Union Street and two historic places of worship (a Lutheran church and a synagogue). Mostly, though, it’s not a very picturesque town, just a conduit to get you to the local Penn State campus or the airport or, in my case last week, out to Route 441 for a nice drive along the river to Bainbridge, the place where I could buy the season’s first 12-bottle case of Holiday White (the wine of the gods). As I drove through the business district of the borough I noticed the Christmas decorations — a lone lantern with a red bow — strung across the streets at each intersection. It was a clear fall day, with mostly golds and oranges in the light and the air fragrant with fall leaves, and the Christmas decorations looked out of place.

On Saturday I stopped at Barnes and Noble. Fully one third of the store was filled with displays of books and other items that were created solely to be Christmas gifts. Some of them are holiday titles, but a lot of them are sentimental gift books popular this time of year, puzzle books, coffee table picture books. They looked like the kinds of things people might buy for someone they think they should give a gift to, but whom they don’t know well enough (or don’t care enough about) to choose something exactly right. The displays made me feel tired and anxious. I walked through the store all the way to the back, used the bathroom (where three ballerinas were getting ready for a program to be given in the children’s section), and then left, having bought nothing, having even forgotten what I’d gone in there for.

I’m going to be missing the holiday season here at home. I knew when I applied to Jentel that one can maximize one’s chances of being selected by being available for the less popular time slots. Everyone wants high summer (and some people can’t get away at any other time). Fewer people want the dead of winter, especially in a remote location known for its isolation and its unpredictable weather. When Jentel’s offer came through for the period that would include Thanksgiving, I hesitated, but only for an instant. Then I thought that if this were Lynn being offered such an opportunity, I’d push her out the door, already missing her but threatening not to set a place at the table if she didn’t take the offer.

In recent years I’ve developed a routine, a set of activities that get me ready for Christmas, both spiritually and socially. It starts with a grand, meticulous kitchen redd-out of not only the refrigerator, but the pantry, the dish cabinets, the linen and the junk drawers in preparation for Thanksgiving. We put up the tree and the other decorations on the first Sunday of Advent, and then day by day I do something to stage my Holiday Open House. Along the way I go to concerts, write letters to friends, and remember how much grace has come into my life in the past year, how much hope I have for the next.

While I’ll still remember the past with thanks and move into the future with hope, I won’t be doing the rest of it this year. I’m leaving a week before Thanksgiving. Ron says he and Lynn are going to sit on the couch, eat a baked turkey breast with canned cranberry sauce and packaged stuffing, and watch football all day. He’s not interested in putting up the tree, nor the crèche, nor the scene I’ve developed for the fireplace cavity with Fontanini figures that recreates the story of Amahl and the Night Visitors. I’ll come back on December 13 (the Feast of Saint Lucy, the day I bring out my first batch of traditional Swedish cardamom rolls) to a house that will probably look much the way it does today (better, even, since my orange suitcase won’t, immediately anyway, be sitting in front of the fireplace in my blue and mauve living room). There won’t be my traditional party on December 16 (the third Sunday of Advent), and I’ll probably feel a little like a stranger in a strange land (a theme that runs consistently through my fiction).

I’m prepared for that. I want this opportunity to work without distractions and obligations to other people. My only fear is that in skipping my traditional Christmas this year, I might find it too hard to take it up again next year, when Lynn will be out of school and who knows where. The practical side of me says maybe this is part of the opportunity, a way to change my life in more ways than one. I’m excited about this trip, looking only forward to my next big adventure.

And yet . . .

When I opened the first bottle of Holiday White I couldn’t get the cork back in. Several Christmas parties ago someone gave me a set of replacement corks with snow globe tops — a Santa, an angel, a decorated tree. I really like them, and use them every year. I keep them in the highboy in the living room with all my other Christmas stuff, and when I needed one on Thursday night for the Holiday White I went into the living room and opened the drawer to get one.

And fell into the spirit of Christmas Past. I ran my fingers along the linens that were in the drawer with the bottle toppers,, remembering that some of them were gifts that came with my friends’ homemade expressions of joy and love, clear toys and fudge and a Sculpey object a neighbor’s child made replicating a drawing of a poinsettia Lynn had done. I opened the other drawers then and touched the boxes of ornaments, the quilted banner I made the year Lynn was born, the strips of paper I put out every year so my friends can make folded paper stars, the stars they’ve made and signed and left as tokens of themselves.

If I’m glad that I won’t have to enter a Barnes & Noble again until the new year, I’m equally sad that I won’t be pulling everything out of that cabinet this year, that I probably won’t ever do it again in the same way.

Unless . . .

I mounted my very first Holiday Open House Extravaganza in ten days’ time, after picking up the magazine with the party plan one day after school while standing in line at the supermarket.

Twelfth Night is more than three weeks after I come back. I could have my party then. Oh yes I could.

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