Sticking with my stated goal, this Second Advent Sunday brings another Christmas memory, from my college years. I have struggled, trying to determine how I should present this. In the end, rather than be retrospectively harsh on my 20-year-old self, I am going to write it from within the perspective of that young man, full of naive optimism, and with little understanding of the world or his place in it. There may come a time to make fun of the person I was, but this isn't it.
There are those fleeting moments in one's life when, despite all sorts of obstacles and in the face of all sorts of evidence to the contrary, one seems to have one's hand securely on the tiller of life. All the different pieces of one's life, once tossed in the air, seem to have landed to form the perfect picture. One can get a gliimpse - all too brief, and maybe even wrong - of the course one's life could take; as long as the course one is taking doesn't veer off too far, it is possible to get to where you want to go from where you are with a minimum of effort. That time in my own life - viewed with a mixture of harsh criticism and a kind of burning nostalgia - runs from the spring of 1985 through the end of the summer, 1986. Situated almost exactly in the middle of this time, Christmas 1985 stands out precisely because, having just emerged from my first straight-A semester, I felt like I was, indeed, sailing with the wind of life.
Four of the five children would be at my parents' that year. I was the first to arrive, on December 20th. The next day, I went with my folks to pick out a Christmas tree (this was pretty typical; some years, the tree wouldn't be finished until Christmas Eve!). My mother told me once, a few years later, that I picked out the best tree we could have found that year. Maybe, but it certainly seemed that way. Like a Saturday Evening Post cover, it started snowing as my parents and I walked through Rosh's Trees.
A couple days later, on the morning of Christmas Eve, my youngest sister, my brother, and I all went last-minute shopping for stocking stuffers for my parents (my youngest sister started that tradition, and it was enjoyable to get Mom and Dad stockings). The snow from the previous couple days was having additional inches added to it by a Christmas Eve snowstorm; I remember, as we drove in to the parking lot at Newberry's Department Store in Sayre, PA that it seemed as if nature was cooperating to provide a memorable, almost classic, Christmas.
As we adult children gathered around the Christmas tree the next day, for the first time the atmosphere was relaxed. We sat and drank coffee or hot chocolate, ate a little breakfast, checked out who had what package, laughed and looked forward to what turned out to be an almost textbook example of The Perfect Christmas.
In retrospect, though, I wonder about that. Does it seem perfect because it was filled with those elements that, as someone just emerging from adolescence, seemed to define what Christmas should be - snow, but not too much; friendliness, even joviality around the Christmas tree; family actually enjoying one another's company - or are those memories tainted by my own retrospective sense that this particular Christmas seemed to come in the midst of a time when my life was firing on all cylinders?
That is a question I cannot answer, not really. Rather than sit and deconstruct those memories, taking this very special Christmas from a very special period of my life and attempting to make it in to something it was not, might satisfy my own sense that I need to be far more critical of my younger self. Yet, the reality is, reading my journal entries from this time - I've kept a journal fitfully for over a quarter century - I get no sense of anything other than a joy at living at this place and this time. I was somewhat dimly aware that I was living in the midst of a very special moment, that I had to hold the wheel carefully, because life has a way of taking over and not just capsizing it, but dragging it to the depths. Rather than sit and write all sorts of things that pointed out my many quite obvious personal flaws at the time, I want to let this moment - this Christmas that was perfect it could almost be used as a template for what Christmas should be - rest in my memory for what it actually was. The six of us gathered that morning of December 25th had a wonderful time together, the run-up to Christmas was something out of a Hallmark television special, and all the moments of my time home between semesters was filled with a sense that life was going to provide even more special moments, as long as I was open to those possibilities. What actually happened, well, that's a story for another time and place.
For now it is enough to say that this Christmas stands out precisely because it was, like so much else during this all-too-brief moment in my life, just about as perfect as can be.
