Nostalgia, Beliefs, and the Passage of Time
On Christmas memories and other stuff
It was thrilling to wake up early on Christmas day. The kind of thrilling that you open your eyes and in a split second realize the night has passed and Christmas is here and going back to sleep is out of the question because you’ve got things to do and energy flows like water breaking a dam and let’s go check whether he came. The night before, falling asleep wasn’t easy -- but you had to, they said, or else Santa wouldn't materialize. Also, the night had to pass quickly, and the sooner you fell asleep, the quicker it passed. But thoughts and distant voices and suspect rattles and eyes shut forcibly didn’t help. If there’s one thing the universe taught me is that nothing happens when you want it to.
And so I’d wake up first and go wake my siblings and we’d whisper our way to the living room, where we’d find some undisputable clues of Santa’s passage: a coffee-stained empty cup on the table, the little spoon resting on the saucer, some cookie crumbles, a clearly used napkin, a displaced chair, and a number of wrapped boxes underneath the tree. He came -- that’s what I thought counted the most; the rest was secondary. It was like a scientific experiment that continued to work year after year: you write a letter with your wishes, send it to him, he evaluates whether you’ve behaved well, and, if he thinks you have, the night between the twenty-fourth and the twenty-fifth of December he comes and delivers the goods. A magical input-output kind of thing.
Until one year for some reason I woke a couple of hours after falling asleep and went looking for Mom and, through the half open front door, saw her unloading the trunk of the car. And the thrill of waking up early on Christmas day ended right there.
For me, finding out about the fakeness of Santa wasn’t a big disappointment. I must have been eight and I remember I was surprisingly cool about it. It felt as if the scientific experiment stopped working because the rat fled the laboratory, or because the rat was really a stuffed rat, or because the rat never existed and it was all an optical illusion. Things of that sort. No big deal -- science goes on.
Plus, this whole Christmas thing got me confused. I could never quite reconcile the story of Santa with the story of Baby Jesus being born in the manger and the Three Wise Men and the myrrh. Now that Santa was out of the picture, I could finally focus all my beliefs on the Nativity story. Except I’d never been too interested in religion. Mass was a chore I had to attend and hoped to get over with asap, and when my folks sent me to catechism, I flunked it. The priest didn’t tell me explicitly, but at the end of the course I didn’t get the diploma and the little medal. So I deduced that I flunked. But I kind of knew I would. When I’m not interested, I can’t concentrate. And if I can’t concentrate, I can’t learn. And I flunk.
My good memories of Christmas, though, have nothing to do with either Santa or the Nativity. They bring me back to a time of big family reunions, of lightheartedness and laughter and conviviality. A time of delicious homemade food and care and security, when emotions were fearlessly welcomed and the future was different. Seeing our big house filled with relatives I knew I would see again next Christmas made me feel good and protected. I loved that day, I loved the sense of safety and certainty that it gave me, and I loved being in the midst of that benign chaos. As far as I’m concerned, this could have taken place on any other day of the year.
I miss what the future looked like back then. Life went on imperturbable and we were all immortal. It’s funny how we tend to project the state we’re in all the way to infinity. Those Christmases were supposed to repeat themselves forever, with the same thirty people showing up for lunch and filling our house with warmth and weird stories and high-pitch laughs and overlapping voices and all the annoying questions on life updates that felt so cringey then but I cherish so dearly now. If there’s another thing that the universe taught me is that you start to fully appreciate something when it’s no longer there.
It took me a while to realize that those Christmases wouldn’t return, that they were gone forever. That they were indissolubly tethered to the humans I was surrounded with -- the real goodness of those good memories. It was not about what I did or how I did it or what I got; it was about who I was with. And most of those I was with are now gone. They bowed out of the scene little by little, year after year. Life is a device that goes on and never returns.
What would I give to relive some of those Christmases, to hear those voices and touch those people and taste those meals again. What would I give to feel that sense of certainty and security and protection, to reclaim that future. Would I try to play things out differently? Would I try to savor those moments more intensely to make them last longer?
I’ve always thought that time can only be experienced in length -- as a measure of duration, something that passes, moving linearly from left to right on the x axis. But I once heard someone suggest that time can also be experienced in width, as a bidimensional variable.
If we live time only in length, monotonously, following the same routine day after day and year after year, as a straight line, then after sixty years we’ll be exactly sixty years old. But if we live it in width, as a line that, while moving from left to right, fluctuates wildly around the x axis with highs and lows, falling in love, taking risks, perhaps doing something foolish, then after sixty years we’ll only be thirty. The trouble, they continued, is that people study how to lengthen time when they should focus on how to widen it.
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Beautiful Silvio. My parents also left cookie crumbs on our dining room table and a near empty glass of milk and carrot chunks (for the reindeer). It’s funny half a world and decades away, the intimacy of tradition is so familiar.
“The trouble, they continued, is that people study how to lengthen time when they should focus on how to widen it.”
This was one of Tolkien’s criticisms of the modern world. Everyone obsessed with how to live longer, no one obsessed with how to live deeper. People end up spread thin, like too little butter over too much bread.
I love your writing, Silvio. You take me for a quick journey every time. This trip went back to visiting my gramma and grammas house full of great aunts and uncles, cousins, all German immigrants, who celebrated Christmas with gusto. Santa would actually come while we were there. You could hear him arriving on the roof. Stomping around. Then, we would open the parlor doors and the tree would be full with presents. All the kids wildly running around. Then, we would look out the window and catch a glimpse of Santa walking behind the house. He must be going back to his sleigh! Thank you for bringing me back 55 years ago.
I also loved thinking of time in Width. Big chunks of y-axis do lengthen our memory. These are the deep feelings we experience when we return to those places. I have never thought of time on the Ordinate. Maybe when describing time it should be called the Extraordinate! What a wonderful way to spend our precious time. Ciao.