26 XII 2002 - 23:01 - verba42

Alchera again. I've spent most of my time gamboling with my sisters, who are home, and also made occasional family visits. Family is the best part of Christmas (he said, knowing full well that they would be on his nerves by the time they left.)

When I am asked to make a catalogue of what I remember, the process of memory is invariably traumatic as I confront my inability to remember much of anything about my own life. Deadlines coming up for summer programs? I'm on top of that. Treaty that ended the War of 1812? Treaty of Ghent, 1815 -- but when it comes to the girl I'm told gave me flowers through all of preschool (and that's a kick -- the preschool was actually a cover for the developmental psychology department at the local college) or to what happened at last year's Thanksgiving when we tried to serve turkey, I am faced with undifferentiated mush.

Because of this failure of memory, I rely almost completely on what I manage to piece together from my family's favorite stories, until the stories themselves become my memory. But even with the stories, there isn't much that belongs to a particular Christmas -- only the repeated trauma of the first seven years, when I was told that I wasn't really a part of the family and that they'd be sending me back to the cabbage farm now, really stands out.

Some things remain constant. We've been bringing our artificial Christmas tree up from the basement for twenty-seven years now. The family's Atonal Carol Celebration has been going on for about as long as I've been alive. The afternoon is still devoted to board games. I think this is about as much tradition as our family can stand -- everything else gradually changes as we get ideas of how to keep ourselves amused for the day.

Christmas has been about the return of family for as long as I can remember -- my sisters went to a boarding school across the bay for high school, when I was three years old, and they haven't moved back since. As sappy as it sounds, that everyone is home is much more pleasing to me than any of the gifts (any desire of mine to acquire being limited mostly to books). It doesn't hurt that the family goes out to good and surprisingly cheap Chinese restaurants in order to remind those living in the East of what they're missing...

There's not much I hate about Christmas, aside from the process of shopping for people at the last minute. I've never been one for crowds, and when the stores I have to myself for the rest of the year suddenly fill, I seem to get irrationally possessive. I would also be quite happy if I never had to hear another 'Greatest Hits of Christmas' CD collection playing, mostly because I still haven't managed to learn the words to most carols and it drives me nuts when all I can remember is a few words. (How arbitrary the distinction is between what holds fast in memory and what slips past!)

Fragments from this year's Christmas: having a turkey for the first time (cooked by a Chinese charcuterie), the creation of a cheese plate (Manchego, aged Gouda, Cashel [a mild Irish blue cheese], Brie) that got the sisters and me through a game of Pictionary, opening presents by the (empty, cold, windy) fireplace, waking up to the sound of my sister on the telephone (giligulugiligulu as my parents commented at breakfast), watching Lilo and Stitch and sobbing --

from two years ago: visiting relatives in Japan, where we had the best fast-food pork we're ever likely to find (and then visiting our relatives in Taiwan, who decided that we should all spend our time doing nothing but eating) --

which is all I remember. Even looking at photos didn't help -- we put our tree in the same place every year and take our picture with it, so only the ornaments and the clothes changed.

Something about Christmas saps my will to write, and I wonder if it isn't the sense that I'm on vacation and therefore don't need to think. It certainly isn't true -- my mind starts to itch if I'm not using it well -- but for some reason I feel reluctant to do the work of production and reduction. I also wonder if the lack of deadline-bound work isn't another reason I can't remember Christmases -- I've learned so to live to the next deadline, with tasks and subjects as boundaries, that leisure time tends to zip past. Sometimes I think it should concern me that my memory of early childhood is so fuzzy where others' memories are clear, but then I make myself busy again and the concern gets lost along the way.

So here's the question: is this essay about Christmas or about memory? I know what it started out as, and I can't help feeling as if I failed a little bit in my goal because I couldn't remember much of anything to talk about. Yet it feels somewhat odd to consider something like this a failure, even if it doesn't strike the topic directly.

What I don't like about Christmas, then, is the sudden loss of external validation. I'm still quite clumsy at reassuring myself that not everything I touch is worth dirt (and not something like loess, either -- this dirt is more a gravelly sludge unsuitable for farming), and Christmas is really the longest space I have to consider everything of mine a failure. If you will, it's space for me to realize just how much I lack of self-direction, and often it's my family that likes to point this out to me the most.

When I started this, I was quite certain of liking Christmas. Now, I don't think it'll ever be quite healthy for me until I get much better at reassuring myself.

It's always the simple tasks with which it's easiest to charge oneself, but to do them without undue and wrenching pain -- that is the labor.