The ache of nostalgia

By Debra-Lynn B. Hook

Bringing Up Mommy

Special to McClatchy-Tribune News Service

As Christmas moves back into storage bins and my grown children move back into their respective time zones, as people begin to work on New Year’s resolutions and December hubbub becomes January quiet, I find myself remembering a moment of clarity on Christmas Eve.

Gathered with my family in a small darkened church lit only by the candles in our hands, our voices raised in the stark beauty of “Silent Night,” I found myself yet longing — for Christmas past, when my children were young and Santa-crazed, their little fingers wrapped around wobbly candles, their sugarplum bodies close to mine.

I thought of pre-school concerts and rows of excited children singing in their high soprano voices “Jingle Bells” and “Deck the Halls” and always the last song, “Silent Night,” which made the mommies — and sometimes the daddies — cry.

I even wandered into nostalgia for the year just past, when my youngest child was yet in high school, singing beside me at church with his arm around my waist, and I was decidedly still a mother with babes at home.

I found myself aching for these profoundly beautiful moments.

But then I realized: If these moments are so painfully beautiful in retrospect, won’t this moment be one day, too?  Won’t I one day, when the children are off with their own families, long for this moment, too? Which means, isn’t this moment beautiful now? Which means — is it possible what the sages say — that every moment is, and can be, beautiful, not only in the memory, but in the living of it?

This enlightened concept of “living in the moment” has become almost overdone in our time — compressed into words on pillows and calendars, emblazoned on our chaotic brains like branding on cattle. But to discover this concept for oneself is different, I told myself that night.  To experience it in the magic and mystery of Christmas Eve is to grasp what the great wisdom traditions try so desperately to have us hear. 

For the rest of Christmas, and beyond, I determined to stay firmly planted in “this moment.”

Instead of longing for Christmas past when my children played with their toys while I made sticky buns in the kitchen for breakfast — I told myself “This is good, too, right here, right now” as the five of us adults in Santa aprons danced to my husband’s favorite Jimmy Buffett Christmas album while cooking breakfast together.

Instead of recalling years gone by, when I was the self-satisfied queen of Christmas, looking on while my young children opened the dozens of presents I’d chosen and wrapped, I determined to see beauty in our new grown-up traditions, as we five adults opened thoughtful gifts each gave the other this year.

Gathered for our annual Christmas dinner with friends, I looked around the table at our six collective children, all grown now, and, instead of longing for the reindeer sweaters they used to wear, I marveled at the stunning adults they had become.

But of course, there is always a second lesson behind the first. 

Despite my willingness to find ultimate joy in the moments of a more adult Christmas, my mind continued to wander again at times, into wishes of Christmas past when my children were always going to be here, and fears of Christmas future when they might not be here at all.

I was disappointed to realize I had not fully adapted — until, on the Sunday after Christmas, I came across the forgiving words of author Jeffrey Lockwood in his book of meditations, “A Guest of the World.” 

Lockwood, writing about personal peace and the “hard work of life,” says it is both the blessing and the curse of humanity that such work is never done.

“It’s a curse in that there is no utopian culmination of our labors, a blessing in that we will always have meaningful work,” Lockwood writes. “We forget that virtue lies in the doing of good works, not in the completing of our task.”

And so it is, that I learned this Christmas what it means to do the good work of not endlessly reaching for the past, but seeking joy as best I can in every new moment.

I also learned, just as importantly, that I may not always get there. 

I imagine, for example, I will always tear up at the sight of red velvet Christmas dresses, girls’ size 3T.

--Journalist Debra-Lynn B. Hook of Kent, Ohio, has been writing about family life since 1988 when she was pregnant with the first of her three children. Her blog is http://debralynnhook.blogspot.com/.Her web site is www.debralynnhook.com. E-mails are welcome at dlbhook@yahoo.com.

The Christmas I denied my son divine connection

Bringing Up Mommy

McClatchy-Tribune News Service

First published 2008

"Don't play the martyr" and other lessons of Christmas

                                                      
  


Bringing Up Mommy newspaper column
Syndicated by McClatchy-Tribune News Service
First published 2011

Every Christmas, I learn a few lessons the hard way.

There was the year my baby swallowed a poisonous yew berry – which he eventually, blessedly, passed intact, but only after much hysteria from his mother. 

Lesson: Don’t let baby crawl around on the floor while you’re making the holiday wreath. Better yet: Buy a wreath for $10 at the Christmas-tree farm, thus conserving your time and emotional energy for the important have-tos of Christmas, like tending your children.

There was the year I made Christmas pillows for everybody in the family. By the time I got to my pillow, I didn’t have enough stuffing. Now, every year at Christmas, the sight of the pitiful understuffed half-pillow becomes a point of reflection on Mom’s low self-esteem. 

Lesson: Don’t play the martyr at Christmas. It will always backfire on you.

There was the year I told my mother I was cutting back on the many overwhelming traditions of Christmas. This was an announcement she applauded, since she never figured out how to scale back herself. She lauded my decision, that is until I told her that part of my cutback included not making her favorite Christmas candy.  

Lesson: Avoid making your mother cry at Christmas.

Now, here we are at the beginning of a new year. As thoughts turn forward toward the next 12 months, I also look back at the holiday just passed, an intensely meaningful, intensely busy season full of peace and joy, but also regrets, mishaps and mistakes.  Here they are, then, the lessons of Christmas, learned the hard way:

1. Tie the Christmas tree to the wall. No matter how ergonomically correct your tree stand claims to be, trees aren’t really meant for standing unrooted in  houses for long periods of time.

2. After the tree  falls down, check immediately for wet and otherwise damaged presents under the tree. He didn’t say so, but I believe my husband was disappointed that the copy of George Carlin’s memoirs he unwrapped on Christmas morning was soggy with old Christmas-tree water.  

3.       Getting sick a few days before Christmas is not as bad as you might think. You don’t eat as much. You don’t drink as much. And when the Christmas tree falls down, you get a pass on sweeping up broken candy canes, putting the ornaments back on the tree and anchoring the tree to the wall.

4.       Complete not only your gift shopping, but your grocery shopping way in advance. My friend found herself at two different stores Christmas Eve night looking for ingredients for dinner. She eventually gave up and took the family to Arby’s.

5.       Making and decorating cookies  is a lot more fun in theory than in practice. Consider another Christmas tradition, like napping.

6. Before -- not if -- you shop online (worth every penny of shipping and handling), make sure you are computer savvy.  Don’t wait until Christmas morning to discover you were supposed to click “complete order,”  which you only realized when your niece calls to say “Merry Christmas!” and “Oh, by the way, just so you know, I’m the only one in my family who didn’t get a present from you.”

7.      Don’t forget where you hid Baby Jesus. Although not as functionally bad as losing a dyed egg somewhere in the house on Easter, losing Jesus, which your youngest likes to place in the manger first thing Christmas morning, does not send a good message about the meaning of the season.

8.       On Christmas morning, place next to the Christmas tree a large bag or box, ready to fill with return items. Immediately whisking into the return bucket those items that don't fit, work, or register on the face of the recipient will lessen the emotional impact on the giver, usually me. (See above-mentioned lesson on avoiding making mother cry).

9.       Along these lines, do not accept any Christmas shopping lists after Dec. 20, even if the list is coming from your college-student son who says he can’t possibly come up with a list until exams are over. Tell him the only size M clothes left in the store on Dec. 20 will be the kind like Dad wears.

10.    All holiday cookies, candies and cakes placed in front of you will be eaten, despite what Dr. Phil tells you about how you can will yourself into eating only carrots if you imagine yourself standing next to Bradley Cooper in a bikini. You know you will, during the first days of January, have some fairly deep regrets about how much peppermint bark you ate. And you’ll want to diet -- that’s die with a “t” -- as a result. But quit with the conflict. Eat the cookies, for God’s sake, as you remember  dieting  is what the bleak midwinter is for. 

Happy New Year to all, and to all, a good night.