I'll be home for Christmas

You can plan on me. Please have snow and mistletoe and presents under the tree. Christmas Eve will find me where the lovelight gleams. I’ll be home for Christmas...if only in my dreams. 

For now, New Jersey keeps me. I can linger in the exquisite pleasure of picking out our first, our very own, tree — artificial for our carpeted apartment, but still a Christmas tree.

 We sit cross-legged among its many-jumbled bunches of branches and disagree about how it’s supposed to all fit so neatly together. I trail him around and around the tree as he hangs ornaments and discretely re-arrange them. He places the star, a little cockeyed, just about brushing the ceiling, but we leave it.

With its play of twinkling light on tree, it looks like Christmas, it feels like Christmas…but it’s missing something. The sharp-sweet smell of pine, maybe. And the lovelight, a certain shining that comes with the joy your family holds like a secret between them while the hushed world breathes under a blanket of snow.

I’m missing home, my family, my mom. The distance is always there, but with the approach of Christmastime, the miles between us seem to yawn into endlessness. And that’s when the homesickness that I carry like a low-grade fever really sets in.

I’ve always taken for granted that I’ll be home in Chicago for Christmas, but as I grow older and the cost of air travel skyrockets and my PTO days are extinguished early, it’s harder to get there. I have obligations and in-laws to be that tie me here; but my family still calls me home. Plaintively, like a Bing Crosby croon.  

And home is inextricably tied to Christmas. Tradition is not something to be trifled with. Not when it means our gorgeous, oversized decorations, which look more and more every year like Macy’s Christmas windows. An ever-present fire. The carolers with their slow moving candles and plaid caps and scarves — dolls that my mom has had since long before my first Christmas.

And of course, the tree. Magnificent and Tannenbaumed, breathtaking in glowing gold. And under the tree, those packages tied up with string — sheened and glittered, with not a crinkled corner or scrap of tape or even a seam to be seen. My mom is very particular about her presents, especially the bows — giant, plumed and fine.

Christmas Eve is perhaps the most important piece of all this, when we gather at my aunt’s house around a tree so Tinseltown perfect, it looks like it sprang fully formed from White Christmas. There’s too many people for the space, a raucous and very competitive dice game and, always, some sort of dancing. We are a people who love life. For dessert there’s sherbert punch, brownies, pies, peanut butter fudge and platters of cookies.

That’s what this Christmas is missing. The magic. When I come home from work, my fiancé surprises me. There is a red-hatted penguin smiling at me from the front stoop. He knows I’ve been searching for one. Once I’m inside, he gives me a Pomeranian ornament to commemorate our first Christmas with our puppy. The ceramic dog’s smile is big and toothy, just like ours. I know then, unequivocally, that this man gets me.        

 This precarious new life we’re building is like the toy train set he assembled just days ago. It’s midway up the tree, canted to the left and defying gravity. The little choo choo chugs fiercely, and although it seems impossible, it climbs mightily up the incline and swings round again.    

That’s just it, isn’t it? I have a new family here, right in New Jersey, right where I am. I have my ticket back this year, after all, but if there’s ever a Christmas where I don’t make it to Chicago — somehow, I’ll be ok. Because wherever I am, I’ll always be home for Christmas.