It’s December. Juicy. Succulent. Pink.
There is fizz to this day … and anarchy and helium, to borrow a bit from the great Tina Howe.
Traffic is insane; the parking lots resemble a Chris Nolan epic. But the enormous butcher case at Bristol Farms in South Pas looks like what capitalism is all about.
I stand before it in awe, like a boy staring at an elaborate train set. I mean, if only. If only I could afford any of these treasures – the marinated duck, that slab of salmon, that crown roast. I’d finally have to sell the house. But, man-oh-man-oh-man, this butcher case.
Maybe it’d be worth it?
Hello, Compass? What can I get for the house? Three bedrooms. Used to be a drive-thru Wienerschnitzel…”
Do you ever see something a bit out of reach – a sailboat, a mansion, a roast – and think to yourself, “If only I had studied a bit more in college, or doubled-down on Apple stock in 1984, maybe that could’ve been mine?”
I don’t. But some people do.
“Christmas is a baby shower that went totally overboard,” noted wise-guy Andy Borowitz of the New Yorker.
Listen, I don’t aspire to the things I don’t have. I aspire to what I used to have: a house full of noisy kids, turtles, hamsters, laundry on top of laundry – a North Pole of soccer socks and underwear. Those days are gone. But they seem to come back every Christmas.
I love Christmas the way the Viennese love waltzes.
In December, my life is a Sinatra song, full of longing, full of mirth. I am a lucky guy on many levels, despite the loss of my wife and son, despite a career that slammed into a wall, despite the gimpy knee and the yard the dog keeps digging up.
Where would we be without the past?
Remember when the Christmas tree slid off the top of the car in Burbank?
Remember when the decorated tree fainted in the den … fell over in a big jingle-bell whoosh?
Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaad!”
Remember volunteering at that charity tree lot as a young father when a customer – alone and forlorn – seemed to look forever for the right tree. As she prepared to pay, she explained that she and her late husband used to come to this little tree lot by the old library, before he died earlier in the year.
“Here, just take the tree,” I said.
“What?”
“We want you to have this tree.”
Then, as she drove off…
“You just gave her a tree?” the boss asked, shaking his head.
Yep.
Remember the pewter ponds you skated on as a kid? Remember the silvery shimmer of snow and ice right before dusk?
Remember toboggans?
Remember that one Christmas Eve when the yards were all brown, and the trees looked like they’d been nuked?
It was a Midwestern diorama of mud and misery. And then it started to snow and snow and snow some more. Big floppy flakes. The dust of Christmas stars. The dust of Christmas pasts.
By church, the drifts were high as your hips. If the sermon had lasted 2 more minutes, we’d all have been snowed in — holed up in the sanctuary, with baby Jesus and cups of cold hot chocolate.
Faa-la-la-la-laaaaaa…
Christmas is candlelight. Christmas is melted wax on Mom’s best tablecloth. Christmas is the tinsel in your grandma’s eyes.
Christmas is tactile … a hand on your shoulder, a kiss on the cheek.
Christmas is a pleasure within a pleasure. It’s a burst of liqueur inside a piece of chocolate. It’s ice cream aboard warm cherry pie.
Remember when all the dads wore plaid?
Finn still wears plaid. My son-in-law is of another era. He sometimes seems to be me, or my dad, or his dad. An entire division of Ceithearn warriors.
Finn reminds me of all the fathers who wake up early and go to bed very late, after assembling the tricycles and slot-car tracks, maybe a glass of Scotch to keep them company.
“OK, Scotch, where’d I put that damn bushing…”
Really, it’s a miracle Christmas happens at all anymore, isn’t it? The freeways. The malls. The fistfights on airplanes.
It’s a miracle that we still linger over the Bristol Farms butcher case, eyeing that incredible crown roast.
“Yeah, that big one,” I tell the butcher. “The one that look like King Herod’s crown.”
In the end, Christmas is every memory we can muster … plus every hope, every dream, every confidence, every courage.
Bent, broken, overcooked — yeah, it is.
Yet every year, the holidays summon our better angels.
Merry Christmas.
Please tune into our second “Gin-gle Bell Ball, tonight, Dec. 23 on Zoom. Starting at 5 p.m., we’ll trade toasts, recipes and favorite holiday stories. Veteran L.A. newsman Jeff Michael will join us and maybe even some of the kids. For info, please email Letters@ChrisErskineLA.com by noon today. Cheers!
So lovely. Thanks for all of it.
Wonderful, touching column Chris. Thanks for resurrecting a bunch of old memories. Have a blessed Christmas.
Christmas is me at 7 years old putting my finger in the center of the bow so Mom could tie it. Christmas, like life itself, is memories and the unknown future, and the hope that we live to experience more.
Hi Jim, well said. That finger in the bow reflection is amazing. Merry Christmas.
What a beautiful parade of special Christmas memories. Thanks for helping me resurrect some of my own. Can’t wait for your virtual party at 5pm. Bringing my bear book, of course! Thank you and Merriest of Christmases to you and your wonderful clan, Chris.
Merry Christmas to you! Thank you for putting a giant smile into my heart today.
Oh, those ponds and shimmering ice. Trudging through an uncle’s land for our Christmas tree. We always put it up Christmas Eve.
Merry Christmas 🎄
Great memories….Tomorrow night I’ll be putting on a white button-down shirt and add the plaid bow tie and red sweater vest that my Dad wore every Christmas eve (even though it’s 70 here in TX)…it won’t be Christmas without it.
Love that, Pete. What a nice way to honor him.
Well done !!!!!!! great to have fond memories. Have a great holiday season, keep the humor flowing.
Not me crying. That was beautifully touching…Christmas is every hope, every dream…
I love all things Christmas and you have made it even more so. Many thanks and blessings.
Chris….my wife rejected the first draft of the last paragraph of my Christmas letter. Ok…it may not have been appropriate to make reference to the slaughter of the innocents and contemporary tyrants the annual greetihg. So this was the 2nd draft.
“A calamity that touched the world this year had intimate significance to us. The house where we laughed, loved…..lived celebrating our 50th anniversary was in Lahaina. Four months later the fire took it. A brush with disaster like this reminds us how fragile our lives are, how much is beyond our control and reckoning and therefore how precious is our experience at any given moment. Even this moment when, with love and gratitude, we write your name and our name on this note.”
After reading this she said…”Thank you for writing like Chris Erskine.” I thought that was a stirring compliment to both of us. I thought I would pass it along.
Rex
I think that’s a compliment for all involved. I second the thought about how fragile life is. Merry Christmas.
My heart is full. Thank you, Chris. I love Christmas and all that it represents. It changes every year for our family, and being flexible with that is challenging for me. I am learning to go with the flow and appreciate the moments of love and delight. I pray for peace at home and the world over. Merry Christmas, Chris, to you and your precious family who feel like part of our own extended family after all these years!
Merry Christmas, Chris! To you and your family!
Lovely memories. Wishing you and all the Erskine clan a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. All the best in 2024!
As our family has slowly dwindled from 10 to 2 this Christmas, I read your piece with sadness and then with blooms with gratitude and calm. You are the balm that makes each week soothing. Many wishes for a wonderful holiday season to you & your remarkable family. 😊 🎄🍬
“And then it started to snow and snow and snow some more. Big floppy flakes. The dust of Christmas stars. The dust of Christmas pasts.” Brilliant ~ thanks Chris and merry everything ~ KR
Have a sensational Christmas and New Year with your remarkable family!
” I aspire to what I used to have…”
Precious memory
“In the end, Christmas is every memory we can muster…plus every hope, every dream, every confidence, every courage. Bent, broken, overcooked – yeah it is. Yet every year, the holidays summon our better angels.”
So true Chris! What a way to encapsulate Christmas with all the feels into exquisite words. Bravo!
Drove around last night with my girls (the Augie college grad and now 2nd grade teacher and college junior home for break) looking at Christmas lights. Despite the drizzle and dense fog it was so fun! Merry Christmas to you, Suzanne and your entire lovely family!
Aaah! Christmas, with its present glitter, dimensioning from the past, and atmospheric spirituality; what a trifecta, not the least of which are the memories
That haunt and inform the present. What would Christmas be without them? How lonely and lovely, this time of year, is what is not forgotten…
Requeum For Autumn
I loved her so much I could not let go
And remains of the days stayed silent
As a ghost in the dusty days of sun
That ran each Fall down to Winter’s cold:
Denouement of the warmth that once burst
Into the mornings with a blue flair
Igniting the ever green juices of Spring
Burning in Summer’s long nights of fireworks
Glowing in the blazing rouge sunsets
In hot harvests that seemed to reach over
The horizons to hazy spicy nights
In autumn, and deny the dxistence
Each loss of light threatened to turn
Into the icy darkness of Winter;
Many years have passed, the long, deep snows
Of loss were melted as the seasons went
Spinning and tumbling in their heedless run
To the present, time hoary and old
With the weather, frost’s forbidding thirst
For white rain compelling the bare
Earth’s dark dolor, brown Fall muttering
And wandering. A tidal waterworks
Of falling stars floating in a river’s regrets
The cooling air still ghostly, like a lost lover;
Yet, in evenings I see her at twilight
When the rusty reds begin their romance
With the black; like memories that burn
In the setting sun they define her
For though light dies, vision is aflame
And umber lips of clouds mouth her name
As. i once did while Winter slowly came…
Merry, merry Christmas!!!