Christmas Eve, 2014
Your stockings are pretty much empty. The tree is small. There are no presents under it, wrapped in stripey or any other kind of paper. Your nuclear family detonated long ago. Your relatives live in the city or travel from here to there, or have other families to be with. One brother is somewhere in France, you’re not sure. The other lives across the pond. Maybe you have a few memories of ham dinners and stockings bursting with oranges and pistachios and a hundred chotchkes you can’t recall now. That’s cool.
Your daughter is far away. Complicated. Your girl is skiing, probably taking a lesson from someone named Chad, who won a Bronze medal in Freestyle something, but he’s like, “not a big deal, I was just stoked to be there.”
None of this really matters. It’s raining. You are loved and in love. Your son’s coming over to eat steak and watch Diner. (and he’s getting so handsome!) It’ your movie. Christmas, Baltimore, 1959.
The older I get the more it seems there are two ways to look at life, and pretty much only two:
a) Why does everything go wrong and suck?
b) This isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty fuckin’ awesome.
Every day you choose to be sad or happy or nervous or whatever. You wake up and wonder, “where does all this anxiety come from?”. It’s pretty silly really, life is good if you’re living it. And any Christmas you’re around to experience is the best one ever. There’s an old saying, “angst is lame.”
Happy One to You. -jw
great zamboni 