Just in time for the holidays…
I will be home in time for Christmas.
It’s always a little hard to leave Mexico, and leaving right before the holidays is perhaps the hardest. The giant Christmas tree just went up in front of the church last night. Thousands of handmade tin stars hang over the streets, embedded with colored glass beads and lit from within. The poinsettias (or “nochebuenas”) decorate the windowsills.
There is a concert every night of the week. It is hard to leave, in the middle of all this celebration, to return to our own Christmas up north, where the weather is so very different.
But I don’t really mind because I’ll be home, just in time for Christmas.
There’s a reason there are so many songs about going home for Christmas. Many of them are from decades past, in the heyday of movie musicals. I imagine it must have been a challenge for songwriters, sitting around a swimming pool in Los Angeles, penning lyrics about snow falling and sleigh bells ringing and Christmas trees.
One of my favorite holiday songs is about Christmas in Australia, where going home for Christmas means arriving at the hottest time of year, with family sitting outside drinking “white wine in the sun.” People write about being especially determined to get home at Christmas and especially lonely if they don’t make it home.
I know there are plenty of people who don’t go anywhere at Christmas and have given up the whole idea of what the holiday season is supposed to look like in favor of a more relaxed and peaceful time, with fewer expecta-
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tions and obligations. I can understand that as well.
But I’ll be home in time for Christmas.
I am fortunate because I actually enjoy all the holiday cliches. I love baking cookies every year with my sister and wrapping packages and setting the table for more people than it can comfortably hold. I love the falling snow and the ringing of sleigh bells and— most of all—the Christmas trees.
My first official act of the Christmas season will be to hurry down to the local hardware store to get my Christmas tree from the lot out front. I will walk there with my cart, and I will worry all the way to the store that I am too late. I will imagine the tree lot empty except for a few broken branches lying in the trampled snow.
“Sorry! Just sold our last tree 30 minutes ago,” the man in the insulated overalls will tell me, and I will stand there in the snow with my little cart and my bungee cords and wonder where I will find a Christmas tree at this late date.
But this will not happen.
Instead, I will pick out a tree, all wrapped up in twine, and I won’t even untie it. I will judge by its appearance— all tied up—that it will be the perfect tree.
The man in the lot will help me strap it into my cart, and I’ll wheel it home. A few people will stare at the woman hauling her tree in a cart, but I won’t mind. And when I get home, I’ll put my tree in the stand and cut the twine cords binding it, and ever so slowly, the cold tree will unfurl. In the morning, I’ll get out of bed, and it will be as if a miracle has taken place in my living room.
The perfect Christmas tree will be there, waiting for me, and I’ll be home—just in time for Christmas.
Till next time, Carrie Carrie Classon is the author of Blue Yarn and I’ve Been Waiting all My Life to be Middle-Aged. Learn more at carrieclasson.com
