Lucian and Mary Brown: Untitled [boy with Easter egg] (c. 1950)

" … celebrations exclusively reserved for nuclear families …"

A myth promotes the idea that anyone far away might successfully return home for holidays. I'd attempted to accomplish this end for most of my adult life before being Exiled. Once Exiled, the underlying truth finally sunk in. Before Exile, I grew up and moved away, dutifully returning almost every Christmas and many Thanksgiving holidays. I considered these excursions high points. I'd reclaim my childhood bedroom and introduce my kids to country Christmas traditions, though I might have noticed I no longer belonged there. It had not been my home for years, and my annual return was more nostalgic than substantial. I'd forgotten how to appropriately dress there, and my interests seemed more distant from theirs every year. I sincerely wanted to be everybody's favorite uncle, but nobody ever gets to be an absentee anything. You're either there or not; if you're not almost always there, you've already gone, your annual appearance more ghostly than actual.

Exiled to the odd other coast, returning home for Christmas was mostly out of the question. Between the airlines jacking up prices in the spirit of the season and weather fronts through Chicago and Denver complicating connections, staying Exiled for the season seemed more reasonable. Nostalgia sunk her teeth in ever more fiercely once we accepted that we would not be returning home, so our preparations bordered on manic. We'd scour the region to locate the relics representing our notions of an authentic Christmas. We searched for weeks before finally locating some citron for The Muse's Stollën making. She insisted upon baking loaves and shipping them off in place of our presence. She also bought, to include in the package, each year's White House ornament from a co-worker's kid who sold them for the Boy Scouts. I would pack the results and haul them to the post office the final week before Christmas before setting out to source the stuff for our supper.

One year, The Muse organized an Exile's Christmas dinner, inviting another lab employee on station to Washington, DC. We roasted a goose, if I remember, and chestnuts and went out after dinner to unsuccessfully find a neighborhood with Christmas lights. We didn't know where we were going. Before being Exiled, we'd developed well-practiced routines for each holiday. Out there, we had to discover where they hid what we'd formerly just grown to expect. We felt like we were speaking a foreign language. Purchasing a Christmas tree required a second mortgage. Free-range turkeys rendered out into jerky. They were more sweet potato people there, rather than yam. We did have access to high-quality Armagnac, though, which helped blunt the more troubling seasonal sensations.

We made it home for a couple of holidays after being Exiled. It seemed as though we'd returned from the dead to complicate a story in which we no longer had a meaningful part to play. Particularly that one year when we stayed in the old home place, by then inhabited by The Muse's son's family. I felt about four years old, cowering in an uncomfortable guest bed in a room I hadn't slept in since I was in the fourth grade. I prayed to return to Exile and cursed myself for thinking I could make any positive difference by showing up in a world where I no longer had a role. We mostly stayed away after that, satisfying ourselves with the typical phone calls and distant best wishes. I'd write my Christmas Poems and enjoy my holidays vicariously, just The Muse and me and the cats kicking back. We'd once dreamed of maintaining a real grandmother's house, which extended family would access via a road over a river and through some woods. We'd roast a goose, bank a fire, and retire with extended family surrounding us, but the Exile disrupted the rhythm and terminally interrupted that trajectory. You see, one has to be there to be there. Absences, especially extended ones, tend to disqualify even the closest relatives from inclusion in celebrations exclusively reserved for nuclear families, not ones that Exile has blown to smithereens.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Exiled, #PureSchmaltz