Merry Christmas!

December 23rd, 2014

Tonight my Santa paid me a visit.  Though he still believes, I think Tristan is beginning to understand the broader concept of Santa Claus.  I hope that in carrying on this tradition with him I've fostered a life-long belief in magic and altruism.  And I hope that that's why he's dressed in his Santa pajamas and filling my stocking this night before Christmas eve.  It's about selflessness and anonymous giving, not just milk and cookies.  And carrots.  I hope.   

We are spending this Christmas in Iowa because I'm not ready to disrupt the intrinsic naivete that I've nurtured in Tristan all these long years.  I feel obliged to protect this inherent hopefulness and blind faith in magic and goodness and infinite youth and a life without loss.   I want to keep him innocent forever.  Or at least for just one more Christmas.

In January we're leaving.  Not forever; the logistics are chaos and explanations too tedious but suffice to say we'll be back to this house, though it will no longer be our home.  We'll be slowly displacing the earth from our deep roots here over the coming year, eventually tucking them into the still foreign soils of the Hudson Valley. 

Tristan is eight years old.  And I can't help but think back to the Christmas when I was eight, when everything was a shambles.  My dad had been killed in a car accident a month before, and my mom still lay broken, in body and in soul, in a hospital bed in his den.  My mom's eldest son (from a previous marriage) had left his family to care for her and play Santa for me.  Why his own family and children didn't deserve the same I'll never know.  And I'll never know how to feel about it.  It was a miserable, muddled, confusing end to a childhood that had been until then idyllic.  Everything was suddenly in such sharp focus, and no child should have to see life and its inevitabilities so clearly. 

I tell myself that it's only a coincidence that I'm about to drag my son away from the only life he's known, just now, when he's eight, but it probably isn't.  Not entirely.  Our traumas mark us for life.  That which we were subjected to becomes instinctive, reflexive, and maybe we're all designed to subject our children to the same.  But this unbelievably clear recollection of Christmas when I was eight also gives me solace and strength, because I know what Tristan can take.  He's not going to break. 

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Also here are some photos from Christmases past!  Be merry!  Think positive!!  TAWNY PORT! 

Merry Christmas!!  HO!