All of the Lights/Requiem for a Grinch

I've been trying to tell a holiday story about the ghosts of seasons past, but it's not cooperating. Like a lumpy box of lights I shoved in a closet last January, every memory I pulled out was tangled into another. And excuse the metaphor, but it’s the lights I keep coming back to. 

I like lights. Blame it on the Celts, but I feel them in my soul this time of year. The aesthetic, the ritual, the skeleton outline of spindly branches across a darked town common; when they’re done right they bring me to a place of real, quiet joy. When they’re done wrong, I take it a little personally.  

December 2006, the last weeks of the sheer-luck three month sublet I'd found across from Boston's Arboretum. All week was the screech of the T grinding into Government Center, the endless ring of the City Hall phones, the anxious buzz reminding me I had absolutely no idea what I was doing in this job and the clanging certainty that the disclosure of my fraud was imminent. The mornings, the weekends in the Arboretum, were a salve. The quiet that burned off with the fog after dawn, the kaleidoscope of autumn in a fall breeze, this place was magic. It was the first time in my life I’d woken up early.

So my discontent was abrupt, the last weeks of that charmed stretch, when I discovered my nightly dog walk took us through the inaugural glare of the Jamaica Plain ‘Christmas Castle’: an historic mansion along the Arborway now so garishly lit you could hear the electric hum across the street.

It offended me to the point I changed our route. When it comes to the holidays, I want Silent Night, not Jingle Bells. 

But like, why? Why is this particular excess so offensive to me, a person whose semi-recent personal brand was spilling out of a cab in a pile of scarves, bangles, hair clips and no real pants to speak of? Who eats dinner at breakfast, who for years celebrated red wine happy hour all day long, who even as a responsible mom-boss-adult has four fucking dogs? I am fine with excess. So why in this area do I demand austerity, and is this going to suck massively for my kid?

December 2008, still working at City Hall and scheduling site visits at 4pm across the city just so I can walk home through the twinkle of Boston before winter shocks it all gray. Also because I am broke broke broke and this is cheaper than watching the lights from the backseat of a cab. My route takes me through the Back Bay, where I choose between walking by restaurants where I can’t afford to eat, or houses where I can’t afford to live.

This is as melancholy as it sounds, but it also calms me down. There is a space between their haves and my not where I can crawl inside and stretch out and by the time I’ve wandered my way back to the North End, I am as tranquil as the harbor. 

I’m like this every December. Or I was, back when I was a more singular unit. A little blue, all month long. But blue is a color I like.

Decembers 2010-2015, I'm in DC now, spending one side or another of the holidays alone, and sometimes I am perfect and sometimes I am close to devastated but it’s fine, because wherever I walk lights are blinking on as the sun sets; see how clear the sky gets all across the city, how white the stars; how the shop lights and the traffic lights blur together and glint off the wet pavement.

I say that I dislike the holidays, but I love that spirit. And here’s where I found my burned out bulb: It’s not the excess I dislike, it’s the artifice. 

Displays like the Christmas Castle are a big song and dance to distract us from the truth that the holidays can be a bummer. They are wonderful, too, but they can make us lonely, or disconnected, or a thousand other things we wish we were or weren’t that don’t really bother us the rest of the year.  

October 1989, a passenger in my parents’ mint green Subaru station wagon and my mom tells me the truth about Santa. Eight seems old to take it as brutally as I did, but as a kid I believed in it all: ghosts and legends, fairies and demons. I dutifully ceded the night to all things that go bump, and in my heart I am still that superstitious child: I have never said ‘Bloody Mary’ in the mirror even once.

When you believe that strongly, removing one brick doesn’t tear the whole house down. It didn’t occur to me that all magic wasn’t real - so I only lost faith in the good team. Everything scary remained legitimate, and everything happy just a loud series of distracting lies.

So the lights were the only part of the celebration that seemed honest. When done well, they illuminate the best of everything. Done poorly, all you see is what’s wrong. 

Getting older makes you pause for breath, becoming a parent makes you examine your traditions through a wider lens. And while I don’t regret my years celebrating the sad part of the season, the dark and the calm, shining lights toward what could be better next year, I think I got some of it wrong. 

When I looked at Christmas I saw a façade, but not the work it took to hold those walls up. I saw tradition as a chore, not a comfort to stave off the impending chill. In stories I saw lies, not a torch passed by generations to light the way for the smallest and sweetest through the darkest part of the year. 

Because the joy in this season is not for me. Not anymore. It's for the sweet little new soul living in my house. I might have fumbled my early tries at the holidays, but I know what to do now: It's my turn to hold the torch.

I don't know what my son will love about the season, and that's not my decision to make. But I have a feeling something like the Christmas Castle might make him laugh.

And if it does, we will drive by that house. We will drive by that stupid house a thousand times, until I believe in the magic, until he giggles himself to sleep, until I only see the best of everything.