My Holiday Wish for You

Well now, readers and subscribers, perched right here on the cusp of 2024, with the Christmas Holiday in the immediate past, I’m in the perfect spot to reveal my Holiday wish for you.  It’s more of a piece of advice, actually.  In either case, though, my heart’s in the right place.

You’ll notice that the main image for this piece (the one at the very top) is a collage which features individual photos of items from my own Christmases Past.  I include them here as a means of making a point.  I’m not going to discuss any intrinsic resonance or metaphysical sentience each pictured object may or may not possess (an interesting discussion for another article), and my own admitted mawkishness with respect to such items in general remains safely removed from this discussion.  These items are here because each is associated with my own memory of a past moment in time.  And from each of these memories arises a specific drawn conclusion.  The conclusions drawn from this tableau of memories coalesce into the form of my Holiday wish for you, or, if you’d prefer, my Holiday piece of advice.

There is a memory I can cite for each of these items.  And subsets of memories.  But for the purposes of today’s piece, I’ll paraphrase and exemplify only a few, and omit associated childhood remembrances.  This one, after all, is mostly about the free advice you’re going to be getting from me. 

 In the collage of individual photos that makes up the featured image, there is one of a manger, along with its little Nativity figures.  There is a painting of five dogs, their backs to the viewer, sitting in the snow and watching Santa Claus and his reindeer ride the Christmas night sky.  Also in the collage, there is a picture of two simply lit Christmas trees.  With each of these photos, there is for me a particularly salient memory.

The manger and its Holy Family, magi, donkey and lamb, and angel, had dutifully, and with more than a little tenderness and reverence, been placed beneath my family’s Christmas tree by my mother every year since the time of my own first Christmas on this Earth.  My memory is of one Christmastime evening in 2021, when I visited my mom and we talked about, among many other things, the little manger and its figures.  We talked of its history with our family, and we talked of its theme.  And we talked of that theme’s importance to my mom.  I remember a slight tremble of my mom’s lip, and a quavering of her voice, and finally, a little furrowing of her brow, as she related what mattered so dearly to her in the glow of a thousand little Christmas tree lights, and to the accompaniment of the subdued strains of offerings from an FM radio station’s Christmas song Holiday format.  Pete Townshend wrote ” …Your brow reveals the glory that’s hidden in your heart… ”  I’d known this lady for nearly sixty years by this time.  Enough said.

The painting of the five dogs watching Santa and his team of reindeer ride through the sparkling night was a surprise gift for me from Dee Dee, and featured battery powered twinkling lights as stars in its Christmas Eve sky.  I remember the evening of its unveiling, and the little crystalline lights of its sky reflected in Dee Dee’s eyes.  Like me, she was an inveterate dog lover and her presentation of this gift to me meant a great deal to her.  A little vein at her temple always pulsed when something pleased her.  Dee Dee’s heart was glad, and the little vein betrayed this fact as it waltzed to the twinkling of the painting’s stars while they shined in her eyes on the night she surprised me with that painting.

The pic of the twin, lighted Christmas trees reminds me of one particular Christmas morning when my dogs, Tony and Clarabelle, in their repective efforts to gain access to the wrapped presents that waited for them under the two trees, toppled them.  Their tails never stopped wagging.  I can still hear the “swish-swish” of those two tails whipping across the felled boughs, and the snuffling of two wet noses as my pups opened their gifts.

And here we are.

My Holiday wish for you is this: I wish that you will never, ever – not even for a second – look past that trembling lip and quavering voice and furrowed brow, or that pair of twinkling eyes and excitedly beating heart and dancing little vein, or those swishing, wagging tails and wet noses.  Those exact moments in time, when miracles like these are experienced, are to be seized and held.  And whichever of the ones you love is responsible for delivering to you such a moment of sublimity is also to be seized and held.  And hugged and kissed.  That particular loved one of yours needs to know that you know.  That you saw.  That you see.  Right then.  As it happens.  Sound schmaltzy to you?  Too bad.  Your old Dutch Uncle John is telling you right now that you’ll be sorry as hell if you don’t hang on to these moments and make the absolute most of them.  And you’ll be even more sorry if you don’t hold on to your loved ones even tighter.  Don’t be looking ahead to your big deadline at the office next week, or your golf foursome tomorrow morning, or what you’re having for goddamned breakfast a half hour from now.  The things that make up the ones you love – the things that comprise them, and the moments when those things present themselves to you in the crystal clarity of your own heart and mind’s freeze-frame are what you need to grab on to and hold with all your might.  When they happen.  If you put as much energy into savoring moments like these – and those resonsible for their manifestations – as you do into your career, or your golf game, or your whatever, you’ll move through each stage of your life -in whatever form it’s presented to you – with no regrets.  You’ll know that those you love, or loved, knew.  You’ll know that they know.  And there’s just nothing better than that.  Period. 

And that’s my Holiday wish for you.