I was looking at old pictures today. It started with homesickness – yesterday Didem brought out Christmas music (why they have Christmas music when they have no Christmas I’m not sure, but I’m not complaining). I hadn’t realized how much emotion, how many memories, were etched between the lines of Little Drummer Boy.
Everyone says the holidays are hard, but I hadn’t felt that yet, because it hadn’t even registered to me that it was that time of year at all. I knew the date, obviously, but the deeper level of me, where all the memories and the emotion reside, still hadn’t caught on. There’s no snow, for one thing. For a girl born and raised in the Rockies, in a town that has seen snow in every month of the year, that automatically omits the possible that it could be Christmas time. I haven’t felt its absence, because I had no sense of its presence. As the old adage goes, you can’t miss what you never had.
But the Christmas carols. When that tiny scrap of home was found, I suddenly felt how much I had lost. And it ached.
Those tunes formed the background for thousand of treasured moments, all bathed in the golden glow that favorite childhood memories take on with time. And now just hearing the introduction to Jingle Bell Rock brings them all rushing back. We sang that song in the school Christmas concert in 2nd grade. I was wearing the little white sweater my grandma had given me the year before, but that was too big then. The one with the snowflakes beaded on the front.
Silent Night comes on. I remember every year, dragging all the boxes from the basement labeled “X-MAS”, my mom’s handwriting, all caps on gray duck-tape. There is the big red box of ornaments, hundreds of them (it seemed). The little wooden jack rabbit that performs jumping jacks when you pull his string, the paint beginning to peel from enduring many a Telluride winter. Rahman’s glass icicles. Santa Claus and Mrs. Claus sitting together on a chair-lift. Plastic candy canes my brother and I made in preschool.
Oh Christmas Tree. Our tree is the same one every year, we don’t cut one but merely decorate the pine in our front yard. Thus ornament day is quite the ordeal, and often involves trekking through several feet of snow to even get to the tree. Mom stretches the cord of the old CD player to its limit to get it outside, so that John Denver can croon moral support for our struggle.
Looking out the window, I see not the swirls and flurries of snow I would see out my window in Telluride, but in their place a positive blizzard of swirling memories flies by. Coming in pink nosed and rosy cheeked from the cold, to the smell of something wonderful that holiday spirit always inspired my mother to make. Peppermint hot chocolate from Telluride Truffle, with giant homemade vanilla marshmallows. Our six (now seven) stockings hanging behind the fire. Mine has an angel on it.
I could go on, but childhood memories tend to be the kind of stories that are absolutely rapturous to the teller, and completely inconsequential to everyone else. I’ll keep the rest swirling in my own imagination, a snow-globe of reminiscences in my head.
But, the pictures. I flick through images, watching my life flash before me in pixels. At first I thought I just wanted to see home, and snowy Christmas pasts. But I seem find myself now looking through pictures of old travels, my nine year old self surrounded by my family, globe-trotting over oceans and through deserts. After a while, I realize it’s not really homesickness I’m feeling. Just nostalgia. Southern Africa, that I’m looking at now, is not home to me in any way, yet I derive just as much melancholy pleasure from those photos of elephant watching and sand-dune trekking as I do from the snow-man-building pictures of Telluride.
Had I never left home, I would still feel this ache. Because no matter where I am or what I do, I am always leaving something behind. Such is life. Time passes, things change, that is the way of the world. “Change is the only constant.” Every present moment must pass. It’s the only way to make room for new moments. Memories serve as the bread crumbs to mark where we have been, but we keep moving with treadmill regularity. So I won’t fight it. If I didn’t choose to have one year without Christmas, I would not have had a year with Ramazan, and Kurban Bayram, and more holidays and experiences I can’t even anticipate yet. It’s not a bad trade.
One last note: snow did come to Istanbul. Sure, had it come to Telluride we might not even have bestowed the title of actual ‘snow’ upon it. It didn’t even stick. But when I saw it, I grinned, put my head back, and caught it on my tongue like a 5 year old.
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