Quitting Christmas

10:45am                            Writing Practice                              22°/Boise

Here it is, Christmas Day and I've already written in my notebook but this idea compels me to jump in here and write a little more. Christmas has kicked my ass all my life and I'd like to try to track some of them, to remember Christmases I've had and the feelings that came with them. Because no matter where there were, what house, what city, who I was with or what gifts were given, Christmas has never been right, has never felt like the movies we are shown about the true meaning of Christmas. And the stories that came with the holiday, the religious aspects and the fantasy aspects, the trees and ornaments and lights and gifts and decorations have just never fit somehow. What is it really all about and how can I resolve this in my life, in the big picture of who I am after all this time. I'm 63 years old. That means that I've lived through and participated or abstained from 63 Christmases in my life. That's a lot of opportunities to figure out what it's all about, don't you think?

I look out my windows on a day that is so clear and bright, the sun sparkling on the foot of snow that has fallen the last few days, and I can feel a sort of magic, conjured from the habits and beliefs that have formed and informed my life from the beginning. We don't enter life as a clean slate, more like a human sponge soaking up all that is around us. This soaking begins in the womb. As we absorb nutrients from our mother, we also take in her heart beats and temperature, her thoughts and desires and beliefs. A pregnant mother can hide nothing from the child growing within, she shares all that she is on so many levels and most of it is unconscious. When the child enters life and begin the breathe and function and grow on its own, it is already formatted for the life it will enter. The patterns for the life and the structure of the belief system is already in place.

The first Christmas I can remember is when I was 5 years old. My mother had married my step-father in August and she had traveled from Santa Ana, California on the train to collect me from my aunt's ranch in Keating, Oregon, near Baker in Eastern Oregon where I had been living with my little brother, Gerald, for an unknown length of time. She left Gerald there and the trauma of being left behind and abandoned would haunt him for the rest of his life.

There is no holiday from grief.