It’s Christmas again – almost
November 5, 2006 | 12:00am
Has it really been almost a year already? I am one of seven people gathered around our long wooden dining table. It is raining and we are randomly talking about everything from ghosts to wrong grammar to pinakurat vinegar from Iligan to cell phone cards and the lady who sells them. I am munching on thick slabs of three-year-old fruitcake, from the last box of the last batch Lola Lydia had lovingly made before she passed, lingering in its indulgent, sentimental flavor. All of a sudden I remember Christmas, but maybe only because I am eating food that tastes like Christmas. It is almost here, again, too fast, too soon. Soon as my ghoulish orange and black decor comes down my festive Christmasy ones will have to go up.
The first two days of November are a somber start for what I always hope will not last the whole month through – two days of shepherding painful thoughts and remembrances, in a serenely official way, of loved ones gone, of pain not once but always felt, lingering and numbing. There is a wound that sits in all of us, still and steady, perhaps already allayed and yet still so real. We all wear our pain somehow, as sad eyes will sometimes tell and even sadder hearts will always feel, for all the Novembers our lives have seen. And we become weary old souls traveling the same beaten, weary old paths.
Has one year really come and now, is it really almost gone?
It was November of last year when I optimistically told my husband that come Christmas I wanted to give out homemade presents, perhaps some sweet treat or meat from an old, old family recipe that I could bottle in sterilized heavy jars, with handwritten notes on pretty labels downloaded from marthastewart.com. But it was already November, and there was realistically very little time to tussle bravely yet blindly with pots and pans in the mysterious world of jars and jams, syrup and spoons. This was one task where hope and good intentions simply would not a delicious treat promise and so with gentle coaxing from my realistic spouse I conceded, and put off my holiday kitchen dream to my wish list for January 2006.
But here I am on this rainy evening, it is November again, of 2006, and cookies were about the only sweet treat I was able to make from that time till now. It has been practically a year already and still, nothing. No jars, no labels, no recipe tried and tested, nothing. Just me and my kitchen dreams. This is a strange kind of déjà vu, like some horrid child playing more tricks than treat on me.
My thoughts shift to the basement, the blight of my household woes, a hodgepodge of a spot that every month I vow to tidy up but never get around to doing, at least not as triumphantly as I imagine. Then there is my daughter’s desk, a crude drawing of which she has posted on the shelf above my worktable, with curved legs and flower-shaped drawer pulls, almost a year in the dreaming but still not happening. In the interim, I was able to make her a little desk, a breakfast tray of sorts with collapsible legs that my sister had made by the carpenter in Ormoc, which she uses for both eating and writing. Together we painted it a hazy pink, in a Rachel Ashwell sort of way, and decoupaged the surface with flowers carefully cut from fancy paper as thin, almost, as tissue. It is pretty, yes, but it is also an aide-mémoire of what I still have to do, to make good on my promise of shifting my daughter’s careful illustration from paper to reality.
Then there are all those other little endeavors that don’t always fit conveniently in the grand scheme of things when we want them to… the garden that needs more plants and pretty dogs, relationships that need more phone calls and nurturing, paperwork that needs filing, recipes that need cooking, books that beg reading, letters that need writing… the list does go on and on.
This month always pulls to the surface all loose ends accumulated from the months before that I was not able to bind. Here I sit in November, remembering that December is never too far behind, and I begin to wonder, while eating slabs of three year-old fruitcake at the wooden table on this rainy night, with six other people with me, how this cold and gray month always makes me feel somehow wistful and inadequate, like a shaky leaf or a trembling handshake; how it so murkily reminds me of unfinished projects and unfulfilled wish lists. Wondering thankfully can swing to understanding and the more I wonder the more I come to accept myself, my circumstances, the way things are, the way they probably will always be. We really only have the present moment, the here and the now, and taking that to heart is, more often than not, good enough.
The first two days of November are a somber start for what I always hope will not last the whole month through – two days of shepherding painful thoughts and remembrances, in a serenely official way, of loved ones gone, of pain not once but always felt, lingering and numbing. There is a wound that sits in all of us, still and steady, perhaps already allayed and yet still so real. We all wear our pain somehow, as sad eyes will sometimes tell and even sadder hearts will always feel, for all the Novembers our lives have seen. And we become weary old souls traveling the same beaten, weary old paths.
Has one year really come and now, is it really almost gone?
It was November of last year when I optimistically told my husband that come Christmas I wanted to give out homemade presents, perhaps some sweet treat or meat from an old, old family recipe that I could bottle in sterilized heavy jars, with handwritten notes on pretty labels downloaded from marthastewart.com. But it was already November, and there was realistically very little time to tussle bravely yet blindly with pots and pans in the mysterious world of jars and jams, syrup and spoons. This was one task where hope and good intentions simply would not a delicious treat promise and so with gentle coaxing from my realistic spouse I conceded, and put off my holiday kitchen dream to my wish list for January 2006.
But here I am on this rainy evening, it is November again, of 2006, and cookies were about the only sweet treat I was able to make from that time till now. It has been practically a year already and still, nothing. No jars, no labels, no recipe tried and tested, nothing. Just me and my kitchen dreams. This is a strange kind of déjà vu, like some horrid child playing more tricks than treat on me.
My thoughts shift to the basement, the blight of my household woes, a hodgepodge of a spot that every month I vow to tidy up but never get around to doing, at least not as triumphantly as I imagine. Then there is my daughter’s desk, a crude drawing of which she has posted on the shelf above my worktable, with curved legs and flower-shaped drawer pulls, almost a year in the dreaming but still not happening. In the interim, I was able to make her a little desk, a breakfast tray of sorts with collapsible legs that my sister had made by the carpenter in Ormoc, which she uses for both eating and writing. Together we painted it a hazy pink, in a Rachel Ashwell sort of way, and decoupaged the surface with flowers carefully cut from fancy paper as thin, almost, as tissue. It is pretty, yes, but it is also an aide-mémoire of what I still have to do, to make good on my promise of shifting my daughter’s careful illustration from paper to reality.
Then there are all those other little endeavors that don’t always fit conveniently in the grand scheme of things when we want them to… the garden that needs more plants and pretty dogs, relationships that need more phone calls and nurturing, paperwork that needs filing, recipes that need cooking, books that beg reading, letters that need writing… the list does go on and on.
This month always pulls to the surface all loose ends accumulated from the months before that I was not able to bind. Here I sit in November, remembering that December is never too far behind, and I begin to wonder, while eating slabs of three year-old fruitcake at the wooden table on this rainy night, with six other people with me, how this cold and gray month always makes me feel somehow wistful and inadequate, like a shaky leaf or a trembling handshake; how it so murkily reminds me of unfinished projects and unfulfilled wish lists. Wondering thankfully can swing to understanding and the more I wonder the more I come to accept myself, my circumstances, the way things are, the way they probably will always be. We really only have the present moment, the here and the now, and taking that to heart is, more often than not, good enough.
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