Home for the Holidays

There’s this couple that live in the corner house on my block. The first time I saw them was a couple of weeks before Halloween. They were outside together putting up their decorations, which sadly, blew away the next day.  Thanksgiving rolls around, and there they are, dressing up a scarecrow and sticking fall flowers in their flower pots.  Two days before Thanksgiving I had my house completely decked out. I thought I was the first person to have my Christmas decorations up before Thanksgiving had its turn, but the couple on the corner had their colored lights on Thanksgiving night.  It is my first time decorating my own home, and besides a wreath my mother made me and an ornament I got for Christmas a couple of years ago, I had nothing. My best friend and I spent a day, and a lot of money, roaming the aisles of every convenience store in my area. After losing our mind, okay, after I lost my mind in one store, we had to caravan our carts across the parking lot. There are few times, especially with the stress of life in the past couple of months, that I get to just laugh. Laugh like when I was a kid and would spin in circles until I was dizzy with my sister in the backyard, but this was one of those moments. Every time I walk by that tree I think of Carolyn and me trying to hold onto these carts with the wind blowing us all over the place. Those are the memories Christmas is made of, and thank God we allow ourselves to take a step back from diets, bills, rush-hour traffic, and chores to enjoy life, even if only for the few short weeks of the holiday season. I don’t know when we became a society that is in such a hurry we need the excuse of a holiday to justify not taking life so seriously, but I am glad we at least have that much. I walk by my tree every morning, a little disappointed I am so busy with finals and working to have time to sit on my couch and enjoy the twinkle lights and the candles burning….

That’s why I like this couple so much. I like to make up stories about people I see a lot but don’t know, and I have decided this young couple is living in their first home, enjoying their first set of holidays as co-inhabitants of a home they will look back on one day and say, “remember when we spent all that money on those Halloween decorations and they blew away the next day?” ..Or, “remember how small that house was and how we would bump into each other even standing in the kitchen together?” Thank God for small houses and the love that overflows them. I grew up in a small home, my sister and I shared a room, and there was one bathroom to the four of us. I was the happiest girl in the world when we moved into the big house my senior year, I got my own room!! However, I wouldn’t trade the years laughing in bed with my sister or doing my make up in the bathroom with my mom for anything in this world.

I was getting my usual holiday, red toes, pedicure yesterday, enjoying my coffee and listening to everyone talk about their holiday plans and what they were buying whom. There was an older guy next to me, and his granddaughter was on the other side of him. He was one of those happy- all- the –time people, you know? He was smiling and greeting every customer and worker that walked by his chair. When his pedicure was finished, the nail tech asked him how he felt. He said he felt wonderful and that he mostly came because he wanted to create a memory with his granddaughter, one that they “could look back on later and laugh at”, then he said, “This is a good memory.” I cried, instantly. I would give anything in this world to have my grandfather here to get a pedicure with, purely just to create a memory we could laugh at later. Thank God for family members to make memories with, maybe those family members have left us sooner than we would have liked, maybe time and anger have combined to create a rift so huge it appears irreparable right now, but thank God there are some, for all of us, that we can look back on and say, “that was a good memory.”

These are the things that tie us all together. These are the memories, and the day to day activities, that put the same smile on my face as the girl behind me in line at Starbucks has on her face during this time of year.  She probably didn’t just spend an afternoon scouting Target aisles, caravanning four carts full of ornaments and lighted garland, but something has happened in her days leading up to the holidays that has made her smile. The couple on the corner, in a small house in the middle of Adelanto, the man at the pedicure shop, excited to spend 13 dollars to sit with his granddaughter for forty minutes, just the two of them, Carolyn and I trying to balance wrapping paper rolls in an already full cart, they’re all special, and rare, moments to the people experiencing them.

It might not be much, but its home. Home for the holidays, at least for now, if not the rest of the year, its home.