The Nutcracker

December 7, 2015 By Kelle

This one’s for the feelers.

I suppose childhood memories slowly evaporate as we get older–mine have at least, leaving me with fuzzy recollections of the early years except for some weirdly specific things: reading the Weekly Reader in Mrs. Rizzi’s first grade class and discussing the tragedy of the Challenger blowing up; digging through the bag of clothes our rich neighbors gave us to find, like, four Esprit sweatshirts; bringing home a new hamster only to realize after watching it chew threw its cardboard transport box on the way home that it was possessed by a demon.

I wonder sometimes if we subconsciously dull the painful memories, if we piece together what we want to remember, if we store the good ones in a safer place–I mean, I find myself doing it with memories from just two weeks ago. Or maybe there’s a rating system, some algorithm in our brain that calculates the level of goodness or badness in our life’s events and scales how well we will remember an event according to how much we’ll need to remember it. Whatever the case, I remember Christmas–all of them, and maybe the most meaningful memories when things were in the shambliest of shambles.

It makes sense, really. If you map it out on a Venn Diagram, Christmas was the center circle for all the characters in my life to shine: a gay dad who loves to decorate and has strong opinions about spruce vs. fir; a crafty mom who bakes, sews and plays Christmas hymns by heart on the piano; pastor grandpas and uncles all hosting Christmas Eve services and practicing their Advent sermons, and musician cousins whose December calendars were full of Christmas choir practice and Live Nativity rehearsals. We were only short a toy maker, a Christmas tree farmer and a cocoa connoisseur. Other than that, we were straight-up Claus–almost full-bloods, and Christmas was when my family did what we do best. So much so that when things fell apart–when my parents divorced and we were separated from my dad–I remember lying in bed at night, making myself think of Christmas because that was my safest, homiest, happiest place: in the family room on Horseshoe Drive, at night, next to the Christmas tree, listening to Karen Carpenter sing “Mary Christmas, Darling.” The traditions–the cinnamon rolls, the candlelight services, the trips to my grandparents, the oranges in the toes of the stockings, the feeling on the coldest of nights that I was in the warmest of places–they are great gifts, setting a foundation for investing in family ritual and comfort practices.

With all the goodness and magical memories of Christmas comes a certain sadness though–not overshadowing or terribly obvious, just quietly present. I feel it more the older I get–this strange emptiness parasite that attaches to the joy–what is it? Fear that it’s going to be taken away? Awareness that it’s slipping, shifting, evolving–that childhood memories and adulthood reality are two totally different things? An emotional trigger for the buried stuff? Or is it subconscious preparation for the inevitable–the year it really is different because somebody got sick, we lost someone we love, a change we couldn’t control came in and made everything we know different? Even though I find ridiculous delight in clipping triangles into paper snowflakes and pulling my sugar cookies out of the oven at just the right second for perfectly golden edges, I feel it–the other side of the happy holiday coin–the one that, for one tiny second, makes me envious of people who can slip past these last days of December like any other day of the year–book a cruise, skip the decorations, I don’t know–maybe not cry at every other commercial.

To Thine Own Self Be True though…she said as she raised that holiday freak flag one notch higher. It’s that Claus bloodline. So this weekend we celebrated, continuing our tradition of seeing the Nutcracker (me and the girls–Dash will join us when I feel he will a: enjoy it, b: sit through it, c: not put us on the “permanently banned” list at the Philharmonic).

Our Nutcracker day started early in the morning with a Nutcracker breakfast–tiny pancake stacks and egg cups and the Nutcracker music, songs which Lainey’s starting to distinguish. “This one’s the Spanish dancers,” “this is the snowflakes dance,” or my favorite, “here’s that one that makes you cry.”

And then a drawn-out getting ready session, one I’ll look back on as embodying everything about raising two little girls–digging through drawers to find clean tights; pulling dresses over hands held high above their head; brushing through tangled hair, promising to be gentle; pulling too hard and correcting with an “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry;” regaining their trust for a good tight braid, a clip of a barrette, a twist of the curling iron; dabbing puckered lips with gloss; leading them to the mirror to see themselves knowing that no matter how big they smile, how impressed they might seem, no one in the world can possibly see them as beautiful as I do.

I took them to the Ritz Carlton for lunch first, a fancy far from ordinary experience for us and an opportunity to see the famous gingerbread house our Ritz makes every year.

This one-room house is made from homemade gingerbread and decorated with candy and pretzels and shredded wheat squares. Its creators, I’m thinking, are distant Claus cousins.

The girls liked the fancy towels in the bathroom.

And we proved once again that we are not civilized or graceful enough to pull off this Ritz thing. We found a hallway for a twirling session that turned into a giggle fest as they purposely fell to the ground and Nella made toot noises.

The whole thing felt special, this little holiday memory that lights our festive fire.

I bought tickets for three seats, but the two next to me were vacant throughout the entire show while my girls sat in my lap, Nella falling asleep shortly after the second act started. I was totally okay with that.