Every year, Christmas is different. Different weather. Different presents under the tree. Different people at the dinner table. Different dinner tables. Different conversations.
And yet every year, Christmas is the same.
Read MoreYou know those questions that pop up on Facebook? The kind we used to ask at dinner parties, when we had dinner parties. Questions like, if you could spend a day with one person living or dead, who would it be?
For years I chose famous people because of all I could learn from them. Jesus Christ. Mozart. Queen Elizabeth II. Today, though, if asked this question, I would choose my unheralded, very much missed mother.
Read MoreI told her I loved her coat, which was an almost-to-the-floor black and gray wool that seemed to be embracing the woman who was standing before me. That’s the feeling I had, that the coat was hugging her.
We were leaving a Christmas party, my husband and I, saying our goodbyes and there was Harriet, leaving, too. And I said, “Your coat is so pretty,” and she smiled and stroked the soft wool near the collar. “It was my daughter’s,” she said, and there it was, out in the open, something we seldom talk about, something we back away from every day: death.
Read MoreBack when I was child, I watched a Christmas show I have never forgotten. It aired on Dec. 21, 1951 (Thank you, Google), which means I was two months shy of 4 when I sat between my mother and father and learned that all over the world for a few hours every Christmas Eve, animals are given the gift of speech.
Read MoreI can see the Christmas tree from where I sit. It’s in the front hall, and because my office looks out on the hall the tree has been my companion since early December.
It’s artificial, of course.
Right now it is decorated for Easter, festooned with Peeps and chocolate eggs and small, fuzzy bunnies and forsythia plucked from a neighbor’s yard.
Read MoreOur Christmas tree is in the kitchen this year, definitely an odd place for a 6-foot tree. It’s a tight fit. But the kitchen is where we hang out now, the kitchen and the family room right next to it, not the fancier living room where we and past Christmas trees lived.
Read MoreIt made him sad, leaving before the ending. Not just the ending of “Lost,” a television drama he was hooked on. It made him sad to leave us, too, his family.But he knew there was more. “I think they are all in Purgatory,” he said a few weeks after “Lost” premiered. The popular weekly series, which aired on Wednesday nights…
Read MoreThere is no peace on Earth. Never has been. Never will be. Not even now. Not even during this season when we sing about “Peace on Earth,” when the words, “joy” and “peace” and “good will” fill the airwaves, and are engraved on wooden plaques at Home Goods and greeting cards at The Paper Store. Peace on Earth, like the fairy-tale workshop at the North Pole packed with jovial, frolicking elves, simply does not exist. And yet…
Read MoreIt’s something I think of every Christmas and I don’t know why. I am sitting on the couch in my in-laws’ living room. I don’t remember the couch, though I should. I sat on it dozens of times. I am sitting on the end, in the corner, close to the dining room. My sister-in-law, Janet, is sitting on a chair to the left of me.
Read MoreI meant it this time. I told my husband, my kids, my grandkids, I told everyone I’m done with decorating for every occasion. When I’m dead and God says to me, “What did you do with your time on Earth?,” I do not want to have to answer that I spent my limited days on this planet packing and unpacking Easter bunnies and witches…
Read MoreInside my house, it is still Halloween. A giant bat hangs over the sliding glass door. Scary Man, laden with chains, shrieks in the hall. The kitchen witch cackles whenever a dish is clanked or someone bumps into her.
Outside my house, Halloween was over weeks before it arrived. Christmas pushed it aside in the middle of October, wreaths and Santas and holiday deals dwarfing pumpkins and ghouls and candy corn. There was Christmas music…
Read MoreMy favorite holiday isn't a holiday. Yet. But give it time. August is the only month in which there is no national celebration, no reason to pause or give thanks or remember. And shouldn't there be? Isn't August, even by definition, grand and majestic and impressive? Doesn't it deserve to be honored? Plus, don't we love holidays, especially the ones…
Read MoreI miss him most at Christmas. It doesn't matter that I am too old to be missing a father. It doesn't matter that my memory is selective and that time has nipped and tucked events so that they appear perfect. Memory deceives. But Christmas, when I was a child, really was perfect. My father turned into a kid every December…
Read MoreMy friend Anne and I play this game: We're in a fancy store, maybe an art gallery or pricey boutique, and our mission is to pick out the one thing we would buy if we could buy anything — price and need and size (where would we put that?) irrelevant. It's all about wants, and it's a fun game to play because at the end of the day, we have no guilt. No maxed out credit cards, no buyer's remorse, nothing to regret. We go to dinner and toast our restraint.
Read MoreAmazing things have happened in the 2,000 years since Jesus Christ lived. But none compares with what Christianity celebrates today.
Eternal life. That's what Easter is about. Not fancy hats or frilly dresses or Cadbury eggs or lilies or bunnies or patent leather shoes or Easter egg hunts or even family get-togethers.
Easter is about all that cannot be seen.
Read MoreEvery Wednesday night, at 11 o'clock, sometimes a little after, in a little room in a little club on Columbus Avenue in Boston, pianist Michael Kreutz plays his closing number, "What I Did for Love," a song from the hit musical "A Chorus Line."
Wednesday is show-tune night at the Napoleon Room at Club Cafe, and for three hours Kreutz sings and plays and other people get up and sing, so many faces and voices familiar, but always some new ones, too, every week different.
Read MoreEvery Wednesday night, at 11 o'clock, sometimes a little after, in a little room in a little club on Columbus Avenue in Boston, pianist Michael Kreutz plays his closing number, "What I Did for Love," a song from the hit musical "A Chorus Line." Wednesday is show-tune night at the Napoleon Room at Club Cafe, and for three hours…
Read MoreThe manger was my mother's. But I hadn't thought about its history for a long, long time, because the figurines Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus and the wise men and the sheep and the cow and the horse and the angels are mine, bought over decades, all porcelain, all white, the small, wooden manger the sole thing that was hers. It's in the background of a picture I keep on my desk all year long…
Read Moren the beginning, the trees were rag-tag things, missing more limbs than they had. Even Charlie Brown wouldn't have bothered with them.
But my father always did. He'd come home on a December night, a man with a mission, dragging in a long, skinny sapling, branches awry, half its needles frozen, the other half gone. "It's ugly," my mother and I would say. "It's a work in progress," he'd announce, then go get…
Read MoreI don't know when Christmas became all about buying. Black Friday. Hot deals. Doorbusters. Stores opening at 4 a.m. Coupons and discounts, and every day from now until Dec. 25, more ``last chances'' than a 3-year-old gets.
This is the stuff that sucks the cheer out of the holiday season.
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