Reflecting Back on Christmas Eve on New Year's Eve

So already, happy New Year's Eve Sunday. I've been reflecting a lot on change since Christmas Eve, which was last Sunday.

How much has to change before someone feeling surprised and betrayed by that change proclaims angrily or despondently, "Everything has changed"? I contend that though lots can change--including the person lamenting that everything has changed--seldom does everything change. That said, enough can change to make the world feel different and disorienting, even indifferent and disorienting--until what's changed becomes the normal and expected. For better or for worse.

I had been thinking about this on Christmas Eve day while I was taking a mid-afternoon stroll around my neighborhood. The afternoon was balmy and gray, and I suddenly realized that there had been many balmy Christmas Eve days in recent memory, a number of them gray, and that at some point along the way, I had ceased to consider them aberrations. 

 

In fact, I'd gone so far as to forget to hope for white Christmases. This even though in early December, a vigorous band of ocean-effect snow had transformed nearby Hingham and Norwell into ideal settings for every kind of holiday cheer, activity, and nostalgia.

Perhaps my failure to hope was a reflection of some of the sadder emotional adjustments I've had to make in recent years. My good friend Donald, who died in 2021, loved everything related to Christmas--holiday music, holiday movies, holiday weather, holiday foods, holiday decorations. We spent an immense amount of phone time detailing what we were cooking, listening to, and watching. I so miss those days and calls. Still, I don't think forgetting to hope for something beautiful, pleasurable, and evocative of happy times is ever a good thing, even if what's hoped for is a long shot.

As I mused on how I'd slipped into accepting the new normal of damp, temperate late December weather and Donald's absence, I recalled several other things I've adjusted to in the last few years: the knowledge that the voice I hear when I pick up my landline phone will never again belong to my father; the understanding that old, good friendships can go through phases when they feel less good and require lots of good faith effort to feel good again; the realization that the person with whom I most often need to spend more time when I'm plagued with feelings of indifference and disorientation is me--though I wouldn't act on that realization nearly so much were Scott not there to encourage me.

I was thinking about all of this while he and I were driving through the Cambridge neighborhood where I had lived for thirteen years in an apartment building next to the Graham and Parks Alternative School (which had been Peabody School when I lived there; schools change, too). We were heading to dinner in that same neighborhood at the home of a really good old friend--she and I have been confidants for more than forty years--at whose house I'd been a Christmas Eve guest at least twenty-five times.

This year, because my friend has had some health issues, her daughter was serving as both cook and hostess. It seemed the natural order of things that Christmas Eve dinner was changing in some ways and remaining the same in others: it had done so many times over the years.

At the earliest Christmas Eve dinners I attended, the only guest in addition to me was the Jewish friend of my friend's oldest daughter who, like me, understandably, didn't have family Christmas Eve plans. In the ensuing years, the group expanded, gradually at first to include a few others, and then in leaps and bounds with the addition of the recently widowed, the recently divorced, the children of both, and several others who didn't have their usual Christmas Eve places to go. Somehow, my friend always managed to make room at the inn and to keep the loaves and fishes multiplying when some invited guest appeared at the door with "someone else." 

Always, a group of teenage girls sequestered themselves in a bedroom, preferring one another's company to that of the old people in the living room. Eventually they became adults with homes of their own, and that, combined with other natural forces, caused the group to contract in size. What remained constant while my friend was the chief cook and baker, whether those assembled numbered ten or thirty, was the flaming plum pudding at dessert time. 

After saying thank you and good night at the conclusion of what had been a happy, festive, delicious, different Christmas Eve, Scott and I headed out into the night. And I thought about my old apartment building, which we'd driven by earlier. 

Most the apartments were dark, but on the top floor, yellow light shone in the windows of the apartment of a former friend of mine--if, in fact, she still even lives there. In the old days, before I moved to Quincy, she often expressed her resentment of the fact that I annually headed off to my other friend's Christmas Eve celebration while she stayed home alone. Eventually, she expressed too many similar resentments, most related to the fact that I had gotten married and then moved to a place that better suited both Scott and me. I couldn't continue a friendship that routinely punished me for the happy changes in my life. And I never looked back, though I still sometimes look up at those fourth-floor windows.

 

Sometimes, though, I wonder if she's changed over time, since people do. Maybe whoever now lives in the apartment with the brightly lit windows was hosting a festive Christmas Eve dinner for friends. And who knows? Maybe she was the person hosting that dinner. 

 

Happy New Year! May 2024 bring only the best changes for you personally and for the whole world, since it's bound to bring changes.