Fifty-one Christmases is a lot of Christmases. It's enough to learn the hard lessons, like when you make a double batch of ginger-molasses cookies, the lie that it's "for the family Christmas Eve gathering" is such an obvious one, we don't even bother making it anymore. You smuggle the Ziploc bag of cookies into the party, squirrel them away where they're technically "out" for anyone to eat,* then feign disappointment when you smuggle them again on your way out the door. Gosh, I guess nobody likes them except me, you can say to yourself seven tea-saucer-sized cookies later in the course of 12 hours. It's weird since people specifically asked you to make them and bring them, as they do every year, but I dunno, maybe they got too full at dinner or whatever. Shame.
Honestly at this point, Christmas is on cruise mode. I know at some point there will likely be my kids settled farther away (even out of state, which seems unfathomable but California housing costs being what they are, we fathom) and grandkids complicating things once more, but the days of assembly and secrecy and the fashioning of magic on others' behalves are largely behind me. I don't think I've even done a Christmas tree since 2019 and I have to say, it feels like liberation. Yes, I have more inexplicable knee pain than I used to, but not everything associated with aging is a cost.
This is the time of year when the aging thing really kind of gets me, though, so I have to be vigilant. The letdown time between Xmas and the new year would be when the dread would close in, gray-white and sticky like a Dickensian fog, only more annoying when you think about how many electric cars are out there driving around in it. Being released from both hustle and/or bustle of the season is great, but it's one less distraction from the looming mathematical tyranny of the calendar ticking up one more year. They always make it seem scary that the Ghost of Christmas Future shows Scrooge his own headstone, right before he freaks out enough to turn his whole life around, but all that shows me is that this Scrooge character had no kind of inner life. Like his old ass had never conflated the ideas of Christmas and the inevitability of his own mortality before? Tell me you don't have a therapist without telling me you don't have a therapist.
It's the last post of the year, so I don't want to close on a down note. Except we're about four weeks away from another Trump inauguration, so down notes, well, they're kind of thick on the ground at the moment. There are some things I'm actively thankful for and looking forward to seeing in 2025. My kids are all happy and healthy, thriving and developing as young, independent adults, the last of whom will graduate college in June. My relationship is still young, but holds a lot more promise than I've experienced in a long time. I have a job that has a career track and a promise of crazy things like "raises" and "bonuses" that I couldn't have conceived of in the 17 years with my previous employer. If a mouse gets into my house, I have an undersized-yet-scrappy cat to stalk and murder it for me. So much to live for!
With the giant exception of Nov. 5, it's been a pretty good year. Zero percent of my parents died, which is something I couldn't have said in 2023, for example. Clouds have silver linings, but given how the weather has gone this year, I'm mostly basing that on the vaguest of memories and the axiomatic assurances of others.
Anyway, Happy New Year, everyone!
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*If they didn't want people in the home office down the dark hallway, they wouldn't have left the door mostly unlocked.
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