HOLIDAYS

Marquis de Sade: The whole world over, we eat, we shit, we fuck, we kill and we die. 

Coulmer: But we also fall in love, we build cities, we compose symphonies, we (INVENTED CHRISTMAS) and we endure. Why not put that in your books as well.

 - Quills (2000) (tweaked)

Is it too early to start thinking about pumpkin pies and wish lists and cherry pound cake oh my?NO! By my own standards, once November comes it's a free-for-all. I've already started dabbling around my Christmas playlists on Itunes, listening to Judy Garland's "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas". This melancholy classic never fails to pull at my heartstrings. Whenever I listen to it, I always think of this passage from "The Great Gatsby":

"One of my most vivid memories is of coming back west from prep school and later from college at Christmas time. Those who went farther than Chicago would gather in the old dim Union Station at six o'clock of a December evening with a few Chicago friends already caught up into their own holiday gayeties to bid them a hasty goodbye. I remember the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss This or That's and the chatter of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead as we caught sight of old acquaintances and the matchings of invitations: "Are you going to the Ordways'? the Herseys'? the Schultzes'?" and the long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands. When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour before we melted indistinguishably into it again.

That's my middle-west--not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns but the thrilling, returning trains of my youth and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. "

That's why I love Fitzgerald -because he's just ingenious at recreating nostalgia in his books. It's all in the whimsical details. I personally always (for some reason) associated nostalgia with the clear, faraway sound of bells jingling on a snowy night. It's magical, happy-sad, and dimly fading, as the best memories are. Which really, also stems from my Fitzgerald-Ingalls-Garland fantasy. I've always wanted to be decked out in a ball dress,  underneath a velvet coat, riding in a horse-drawn sleigh across the Midwestern prairie on Christmas night, with nothing around but miles of dark snow and glinting lights.

For now, the closest I can get to it is probably rewatching The Polar Express, making hot apple cider, buying white-wool sweater dresses and counting down the days until the Holidays. And more than any other event, Christmas-time really shuffles the memory of your childhood, stirring up these vestiges of innocent caregiving that you thought to be long-lost. Unless of course, your childhood Christmases sucked. Then I apologize. 

Oh, holidays! It's one of the very few things from my childhood that has yet to be corrupted by greedy consumerism and gradual cynicism. It doesn't matter how much things suck around Christmas; it feels like there's always a stranger around the corner with their heart in good Christmas cheer, warming the streets and souls with smiles and foamy mugs of (insert favorite holiday beverage). It's one of the great Human experiences that will never go out of style. When I was little, my heart would actually burst from thinking about the mammals and little critters out in the cold snow that would never experience Christmas or Channukah or any kind of December-fest. I remember on one occasion depositing food in my backyard, whispering to the squirrels that might be listening: "Merry Christmas!"

*Polar Express theme playing in head*