Paradise Sustained

Paradise is unchanging.  Adam and Eve lived on fruit and worked on their tans.  Nothing

much happened until the serpent showed up.  Here in the world things change, and when they do, we’re pretty sure we’re not going to like it. We have a deep-seated fear that life never gets better.  Oh sure, some people are sitting in their living room and the Prize Mobile pulls up with video cameras and a gigantic check.  It just never happens to you and me. 

I started noticing the downhill flow of life somewhere around the second grade. A bunch of us were hanging around the back yard reminiscing about the past.  “Little kids are lucky,” we said.  “They can play all day long and never have to go to school.”    

There we were, seven years old, and we’d figured it out; Eden is the place you’ve been kicked out of.  In former times we were carefree, and now we had to sit in rows and listen to Miss Cassidy go on about subtraction. 

You never know you’re in a Golden Age until it’s over.  When it came to Christmas, we were still there.  We knew there was a Santa the same way we knew, if you went swimming less than an hour after you ate, you’d get a cramp and drown.  It was like being a Christian in the middle ages; if there were any skeptics around, they were keeping their mouths shut. 

There came a time, different for each of us, when the clues surrounding Santa added up to the awful truth. Of course we kept it to ourselves.  The loot was good, and besides a world without magic wasn’t any fun.  But we couldn’t sustain the pretence for long.  The Age of Faith had been supplanted by the Age of Reason, and it was a little like subtraction instead of play. 

From then on Christmas changed.  We became providers, not consumers.  We shopped, we baked, we decorated, we stuffed stockings.  Our children grew up, but they came back for the holiday meal. 

At our house we cooked the turkey in the Italian manner with chestnuts and sausage in the stuffing and wine in the basting liquid.  We had Virginia ham we bought through the mail, soaked in the pantry, simmered in a big pot, and then baked it in the oven..  It was salty, dense, and delicious and kept ’till almost Easter.  There were six or seven kinds of cookies, three or four kinds of pie.  There was pudding. 

Now we can’t sustain the effort and have passed it on to the younger generation.  We help, of course, and bring what we can, but a little of the magic faded away like the faint tinkle of sleigh bells when you’re trying to get to sleep on Christmas Eve. 

We get lists of wanted presents complete with cyber-links.  We sent our daughter a webpage with a shirt we thought might be good for our son-in-law.  We got approval and the suggestion of a color. It’s the easy way, but it’s not like being a hunter-gather at Filene’s and Jordan Marsh.

At home we decorate a tree and make sure we invite people in to see it.  We watch some of our collection of Christmas videos.  Then we set off in the car for the ceremonial hanging and the opening of our grandchildren’s stockings. 

Christmas didn’t diminish: it was we who changed, and as we did, we experienced different aspects of the blessed time.  As we aged, we lost and gained, and the trick was to forget the losses and embrace the gains. Christmas is still there and always will be. Scrooge was a fogy after all, and he learned to keep Christmas better than anyone.