Merry Christmas, Bedford Falls!
A holiday five things essay
1. The Christmas music coming from the church next door sounds off-key and demented. The music starts on Christmas Eve and it plays at random intervals all night. 9:15. Then 10:30. I try to figure out if it’s timed to the beginning of the Christmas Eve masses, but none of it makes sense. The music isn’t real bells or an organ. It’s recorded Christmas music, played at volume, out of very bad speakers. It is the perfect soundtrack for this time of year.
2. I read a horror novel written by an ex-Mormon recently. It was all about breaking free from the rules given to us as children, but also about realizing that the idyllic parts of our childhood aren’t as idyllic as we thought they were. I’m not an ex-Mormon. But I get the appeal of that magical, glowing vision of childhood. It’s especially appealing at Christmas. I want to believe there’s some place I could go back to still where Christmases were happy and better. Instead, there’s just the music from the church next door.
3. It’s gray today, which is okay. Christmas can be gray. It’s also going to be 57 degrees. That’s less okay. A reminder that the world just isn’t right and there’s not much I can do to fix that. I’ve also got a cold, so every now and then, I try the massage techniques I saw online to relieve my congestion, running my fingers down either side of my nose over and over again. My husband’s sick, too. He coughs and coughs. It feels on-brand to be diseased on Christmas.
4. I can tell when the Christmas Eve masses are scheduled by the sound of people coming and going through our front windows. The staccato tap of heeled shoes against the pavement. The murmur of voices. A baby crying that sounds so much like the cats that are often battling it out in our backyard. I like the feeling of other people’s joy seeping into our house. Maybe they’re having a merry Christmas. Maybe they’re not. My family wasn’t Catholic, either. We never went to church on Christmas Eve. But on years like this, I’m tempted to walk across the church yard in my pajama pants with Christmas cats and see if there isn’t something to it. I couldn’t take communion, but I wouldn’t be alone.
5. Later, I’ll go for a walk. I haven’t been out of the house much since I came down with this cold. I’ll walk by our local bar, which won’t be open today, though I feel like in the past, maybe it was. Maybe it should be. One of my favorite Christmas memories as an adult is walking by the bar on Christmas Eve. Through the windows I could see people I knew inside. The bartender. The owner. The barber from across the street. I opened the door and wished them all a Merry Christmas. I didn’t stay, but I could have. I could have pulled a stool up to the bar and texted my husband to come join us and settled in for a beer or two. Jimmy Stewart at the bar with Clarence in It’s a Wonderful Life. Merry Christmas, Bedford Falls!