Its weird to think back, it doesn’t seem so long ago yet it does, when I was still living at home. When we were all together.
We’d go to church Christmas eve, sing, light the candles during silent night and the church would be all aglow, and feel warm and safe and perfect. We’d go home, make fondue, this is of course was in the years before I stopped eating half the food groups. Mum would read a book with beautiful watercolour illustrations and a happy message. I’d have lit the candles, the tree was decorated with out favourite ornaments. The ones we'd made in preschool. The orange one, ben made, shaped like a ginger bread man, made of baked play dough and the head is a round picture of his head, so cute young smiley. The white half foam snowball with my picture in the centre, with a horrible boy bull haircut and a gappy smile, sequins around the edges and a green pipe cleaner to attach it to the tree.
Christmas morning, I could yell at ben to wake him up and he wouldn't even be grouchy. We’d open the stockings and the presents and eat pastries from rachel’s and drink hot cocoa. We’d load up the car. Usually me last one to get with all my projects for the day together- my knitting, beading, books. At 125 hollywood, the fire would be crackling already when we arrived. Gram and gramps would have a prickly little tree up with doily starched white ornaments and coloured lights. we’d eat and eat and eat- that beautiful cherry round bread from aunt marilyn. and hard cheddar and crackers and nuts and toffees and norie and I would eat a whole box of mandarin oranges just by ourselves. We’d open more presents, we’d play scrabble, do puzzles, call cousin joe. remember how he’d send us those crazy gifts like fake fingernails and farting machines and worms that pop out of tubes? In the afternoon we’d be so warm and full and sleepy in the sun of the huge windows. So happy, so satisfied.
In that moment, I guess I never dreamed that it would or could be any other way. It’s so different now, its not worse, its not that we’re not doing good things, not that we’re not a family anymore. But I do miss it. I miss our family all living on the same continent, in one house. I miss being in goshen.
I'm learning that i can miss all this without wanting anything to be different from how it is, right now.
merry christmas, dear family and friends. my love to you all.