Life after Trauma

Simple, uncomplicated Christmases

To perceive Christmas through its wrapping becomes more difficult every year.

E.B. White 

         Yukon winter (flickr)
          
Good or bad, we've all survived another Christmas. To be honest, this Christmas was pretty good for me. Parts of it were even wonderful.  Other parts, like the hectic last minute preparations and the sadness about not hearing from my daughter, weren't so good. However, as lovely as Christmas in Vancouver can be, it can't compare to Christmas in the Yukon. In the Yukon, you don't have to fight to keep your Christmas simpler and less commercial because, unless you live in Whitehorse, it just is simpler. Outside of Whitehorse, there are few places to go shopping, no traffic jams, no noisy shopping malls. Well, you get the picture. For those of us who delight in the simpler side of Christmas, the Yukon is Christmas paradise and, for me, bring to mind the words of one of my favourite Christmas carols, In the Bleak Midwinter. "In the bleak midwinter . . . Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone/Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow/In the bleak midwinter, long ago."

 

In 1990, I spent a wonderful Christmas in Ross River - a tiny community in the Central Yukon. It was just me and my husband and our two cats and our wood stove. We cut a Christmas tree ourselves, as we always did and put up it in the dining room so that it wasn't too close to the wood stove in the living room and decorated it with the small selection of ornaments we owned in those days. We went to the school's Christmas concert, which everyone in Ross attends, and on Christmas Eve we went to Midnight Mass at the log church nestled amongst trees not far from the river. The priest had a small organ that he played for the hymns and a voice that would have made the sled dogs he kept staked out near his house howl, if they could have heard it. As I remember it, there was something about the out-of-tune enthusiasm of his singing that was truly endearing. 

              Wood stove, Gord McKenna, flickr

Mostly, though, we cocooned at home by our huge old cast iron wood stove. When this stove was stoked, it cranked out heat that penetrated clear to your bones.  We cuddled up to the stove and played game after game of Scrabble. We also took "bedroom" breaks and afterwards lay in bed listening to the the sounds of ravens calling, if it was daytime, or a truck passing far away on one of the village's few roads, if it was night. In my memories, it is just us, the wood stove, Scrabble, and love. It was perfect.

 

                Quebec City, Helene Villeneuve, flickr

Meanwhile, about a decade before my perfect Yukon Christmas, a friend was spending her perfect Christmas in Quebec City where she lived in an adorable little apartment with narrow windows that overlooked the garden of a convent. Sometime before Christmas, she had discovered money in a bank account that she had forgotten about and bought a splendid red wool coat that was both stylish and warm. On Christmas Eve, she and several friends gathered at her apartment where they enjoyed homemade eggnog. Then they put on their coats and walked through the convent's garden in softly falling snow to go to a concert of Christmas music. "Every part of that evening was pure and simple," she told me recently. "It was filled with humble, shared pleasures and the joy of high-spirited youth."  She also told me that, try as she might, she's never been able to duplicate the simple beauty of that Quebec City Christmas. We both agreed that part of the secret was that both Christmases took place when we were younger. Also, because both Christmases were spent far away from our families of origin, there were few expectations. We were free to do what we wanted to do: no one cared what clothes we wore, what we said to our "sibling, mother, father, aunt" (feel free to fill in the blank here) or judged the presents we gave.

I'm not suggesting that Christmases without family are the best. In fact, one of my other favourite Christmas memories is of the first Christmas my son spent at my parents. There was a small "herd" of similarly-aged cousins to run around with and everyone was there: my parents, my three siblings, their significant others and children and my aunt. My childless sister gave noisy presents to the children and my mother wailed in dismay, "And what I want to know is who gave these children kazoos."  Our son - then 18 months old - almost choked on grapes when he snuck back into the dining room and began cramming grapes into his mouth one after the other without chewing them. Thankfully, my husband discovered him in time and made him spit the grapes out. Even though that was a joyful Christmas, it can be healing and wonderful to also have those quiet, low expectation Christmases that many people remember so fondly. 

What is your favourite Christmas?  Why? What was special about it?

 

In a hazelwood - a visit to an old friend

It takes a long time to grow an old friend.

                                   John Leonard 

                                                  hazelnuts  

 N. and I met at university when we were in our 20s and soon became friends. N. and I are about as different as two women can be: I grew up in small-town Michigan and she grew up in Tokyo; she is Japanese and I am American; she loves experimental movies and literature; I love Tolstoy and large sprawling movies with a plot. We both love photography, however, the Sunday New York Times and good bookstores. 

This weekend my husband I drove down from Vancouver to the cabin that N. and her husband A. own in a wooded area near Mt. Baker. We stayed a little over 24 hours - a much-needed break from the stresses of our day-to-day lives. We had a delicious Thanksgiving dinner together, met their beautiful new dog, Morgan, caught up on each other's lives, and watched a documentary, Brasileirinho, about choro, a Brazilian musical genre that is a mix of jazz, overlaid with Afro-Brazilian rhythms, with a touch of melancholy thrown in for good measure. I'd never heard of choro, but I agreed that it is music worth loving. 

 

 

We arrived at N.'s in the afternoon, not long before sunset. On Sunday morning, I had more light to explore the house. I admired the view out the front window of a large hazelnut tree and N. told me that there were several other hazelnut trees on their property. A huge stump - probably of a Douglas fir - could be seen from the window of our bedroom and I imagined what the property must have been like before it was logged. I found the wild turkey feather that N. had found on my father-in-law's land more than 20 years before, sitting in a place of honor on a niche in the living room. I wasn't surprised that she still had it because N. was always a person to be attracted to the flotsam and jetsam of the natural world and to hold onto the treasures she found. A Steller's jay feather and a small hawk feather sat on the same shelf. Together, these ephemeral objects told me that N. was still - at heart - the same woman I met so many years ago. 

 Steller's jay (below)

Later that afternoon, when it was time to go, we stood talking by the front door looking out at the hazelnut tree. I was surprised to see that the tree already had catkins on it. It blooms in February, N. told us, yellow blooms that are a welcome break from winter darkness. Earlier in the fall, N. said, the Steller's jays fly back and forth between the hazelnut trees gathering hazelnuts and the air resounds with their calls. As I write this, I love to think about N. looking out the window at the hazelnut blossoms in the spring and enjoying the color and clamor of the jays in the fall. I also smile about her ambition to learn to speak Brazilian Portuguese well enough to travel to Rio and listen to choro in its native habitat.

I expect we'll be back to the cabin someday, but it's hard to say when. It had been more than five years since our last visit. My husband and I had been busy with our growing son, our dying cat, aging parents, health issues and more. N. and her husband were busy with a dying dog, financial worries, and N.'s own health problems. That's the great thing about old friends, even when time passes, as long as you stay in touch, it isn't difficult to pick up the thread of each other's lives. Such rooted friendships provide solace for the losses that often come with growing older.