Once I got rid of all the pine needles and glitter I turned to the exterior and swapped out the multi-colored lights for white. Denuding the house of Christmas was a solemn but energizing affair. But living in the Northwest with only eight hours of daylight made it hard to go all winter with no lights. If you were to keep them up post-Christmas though you had to be tasteful about it. The happy snowman didn’t make the cut. The icicle lights did.

Closing down Christmas every year had a bittersweet feeling with the mash-up of memories and the crude reminder that life is short. And for that it was a relief to put it all away. For the past couple of years we’d go to Laguna beach in late February, but not this year. We were saving for college and buckling down.

Dawn’s mom was downsizing, and gifted Dawn some old ornaments dated with tags written in pencil, in cursive. She also gave us her unused lights, wound with plastic ties and handwritten tags denoting their placement: “icicle lites (sic) for deck handrail.” The tags were made out of cardboard with a hole punched in the middle for the tie. On the back, a piece of an old Eggo waffle box. I pictured Dawn’s mom, somewhere in the 1980s, getting a pair of scissors to cut the tag out of a used box, the hole punch, the plastic tie, the whole process. A rush of sadness filled me. And I had to use the lights and save the tag.

Life is full of loss but it’s best not to dwell on it. Instead, we keep looking forward to what’s next. Like the late-February getaways or spring break.

I kept trying to offset the loss by refilling the memory bucket while the family unit was still intact, the kids still portable, not married or with kids or commitments of their own. But it was all fleeting, always is, and Christmas reminded me of that every year.

So did the gray January bugs though, that mysterious first wave of new life that emerges in little clouds buzzing by the front window—and the daphne odora blooms out back, so jasmine-like and sweet.

Instead of Laguna beach this year I’d look forward to the tulip blooms, the ones we buried last November. And the Christmas ornaments would lay in the darkness of our attic like those bulbs, sure to return again when the time was right.

Categories: Memoir, writing

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, pacific northwest