Holiday

It was September when we scattered my mom’s ashes. During the spring memorial gathering at her house, the weather was sunny and warm, but the snow in the mountains was still quite deep. We could not get to the place where we’d scattered my stepfather’s ashes a few years before. We waited and it was worth it, the Cascade sky was so blue and the air so warm. The trees were just turning gold and there was the tiniest undercurrent of chill on the wind, a reminder that the seasons would change, soon.

My mom’s house in Oregon had been sort of in the geographic middle for our family. We met most Thanksgivings until one year, after a particularly fraught drive from Seattle, I asked if we could just … postpone a week or two? Could we skip traveling on one of the busiest weekends of the year? To everyone’s surprise, my mom was amenable to this idea and we started Thankgivukkah instead. We created a merged winter holiday of our own design.

Freed of the obligation to travel, I joined friends at their tables for Thanksgiving. I was happy to be the stray, a grateful guest. There was no sadness to it because I knew my family holiday would be a week or two later, with latkes and a turkey and blue and white wrapping paper and those chocolate coins to play dreidel with. Later in the season, after Thanksgivukkah, there’d be Jewish Christmas. Dim sum in a crowded Chinese restaurant with friends who don’t do Christmas for any number of reasons.

Covid squashed Jewish Christmas, and it has again this year, but Thanksgiving—I could have found any number of friends willing to make space for me at their table. I couldn’t be bothered. It was a beautiful, unseasonably warm day so I tended to some delayed garden chores, baked Alsatian onion pie, watched movies, and took a big nap. Today—Christmas Day—I will have my weekly dinner with my best friend, but there will be nothing especially festive or different about it. I was invited to a Christmas Eve gathering but I could not make myself feel social, I could not get excited about crossing town in a driving rain. I went to bed with my book instead.

It did not occur to me until waking up on this quiet Christmas morning that it was the lack of Thanksgivukkah causing the static. No Thanksgivukkah this year has made the bookends, Thanksgiving and Jewish Christmas, feel less relevant. It is strange to wake up to this undiscovered until now loss, months after my mom died, months after we scattered her ashes. Covid continues to gut so many of my social activities. The elders in my immediate family are gone, so those traditions are gone. I am no longer married and the Austrian holiday festivities I so enjoyed are now unreachable.

I find I am not so much mourning the empty spaces where the holidays used to be as puzzled. It’s just me now, so what do I want from my holidays? My birthday is shortly after the year rolls over, another seasonal milestone to do what with, exactly? I am still learning. The first year I baked myself a whole goddamn chocolate cake felt very affirming, but I am a few years in and it is time to try something else.

When I was in my twenties, I had a clear vision of myself as an older person living alone in a home full of objects acquired from all over the globe. I have never wanted kids, never, though I never imagined I would be so very single. On my kitchen table at this very moment, there is a dashboard hula boy, a mason jar full of watercolor brushes, and a stack of photos from a trip to India, dug out as reference for the screenplay based on my memoir. It is surprising to exist today in such an accurate depiction of that past vision. Past me would approve, I think, but she would want someone to kiss at midnight on New Year’s Eve.

We are eyeballs deep in romantic stories at this time of year. Our main character goes back to the small town and marries the guy. The coming out goes so much better than expected and mom has already knitted the matching scarf for the boyfriend, she already knew, she was just waiting for her son to be ready to share. I am casting about for the story where our heroine weathers all the losses and finds that being home alone with a strange little dog is the happiest of all endings. There is no lack, everything is as it should be, and her existence in the life she has chosen is its own holiday.