Content warning, friend: this piece contains descriptions of the experience of a migraine with aura, which includes vision changes that might be unnerving or triggering. If this is not for you, kindly skip the first paragraph of the Future section, or feel free to skip this piece altogether. I want you to feel secure. Have a safe holiday, and I’ll be back for you on the last day of the year.
It is the midpoint of December. As of the time I finish writing this, New York sits hushed under the first true snowstorm of the year. I made gingerbread dough yesterday and it sits chilling in the fridge. For the last two weeks I have been faithfully ticking the boxes on my annual list of Christmas movies.
Somehow, I’ve watched three different adaptations of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol this season. If asked I say I don’t like it, because of the melodrama. In truth, I think I don’t like it because it touches every nerve I tend to avoid. Painful nostalgia, regret, worrying that I’m a bad person, my fear of mortality. It’s no feel-good Hallmark adventure.
But there’s something I’ve always liked about the three spirits who come to visit Scrooge. The number has always seemed a powerful one to me — three Fates, three wishes, triple deities, a beginning, middle, and end. And in Scrooge’s case, a past, present, and future.
Past: The Tree
In the beginning, there was paper.
I grew up in a tiny apartment. I mean, galley-kitchen, back-alley-window, front-door-almost-scraped-the-hall-wall tiny. When my parents had my sister, who liked to grab at things, they were afraid she would pull a Christmas tree down on herself. So my father went to the local art store and came home with sheets of paper, pulpy pine-green and wide as my four-year-old arm span. He laid them out on the greyish carpet end to end, taped them together, and with a pair of scissors, something like a wafer-thin pine emerged. The “tree” went up on the wall, and with the other colors of paper he’d brought, my sister and I made the first few attempts at ornaments.
Soon after some friends came over and, entranced by the tree, asked if they could make something to tape up, too. That first year’s tree was scruffy — one-half the adults’ actually recognizable shapes, one-half blank paper scraps from my sister and I — but it set something in motion. The year after, more friends and family asked to join in. A couple years after that, my parents decided to make a proper party of it. The best part was always the trip to the art store, where my sister and I were allowed to pick out the beautiful papers and prints that would cover our tables and eventually get cut, arranged, and glued into that year’s ornaments.
The tree has been a gathering point ever since: for extended family; for farther-living friends we don’t see much otherwise; for my own friends, first transient and then a solid crowd, growing or shrinking now and then. The one year I couldn’t make it because of exams, my father invited my hometown friends to the party without me there — a testament to its longevity. Every year’s tree is different, but we keep every ornament that survives de-taping, and the next year we hang them up to inspire new creations. The room changes a little, we change a little, but there is a steadiness in it I wouldn’t trade for a real pine-needle tree.
“There was never a real plan,” my father wrote me when I asked him about the early years. “It just kept evolving out of joy, love, and good luck.”
Present: The Trial
It might not surprise you to know, more than two decades later, that I love the holiday season unabashedly. I’ve been known to drag friends across the street to a Christmas tree stand just to walk among the netted pines and inhale, beaming. I burn a fir candle from late November until March. I make the same cake, chocolate and orange, each Christmas Eve. Some December evening, I always end up at the center of a pile of wrapping scraps, tired but satisfied. I worry that trying to put words to why I love this season so much would cheapen it. If I had to, I’d say it has something to do with safety, togetherness, the kind of quiet joy that lies not in belly-shaking laughter but in looking around at warm lights and faces you love. It has to do with ritual: the things and people you wait all year to enjoy.
It would be easy to blame this year, this pandemic, for taking these things away. Cancelling this year’s family celebrations was a no-brainer, the tree party even more so. So yes, this year is the first since I was four that there will be no paper tree, no gorgeous amalgam of the people we love. Honestly, I’m not taking it well. That safety and togetherness I mentioned feels very, very far away. But as much as all this smarts — it is, yes, somehow, the easy answer.
Christmas night, 2019, panicking internally.
The harder answer is that I have a longstanding habit of playing up the good, the bright, the warm. I shove down whichever beasts creep out of hiding as the end of the calendar year rolls around. I don’t want to bother, I don’t want to ruin things. It’s blissful ignorance in the truest sense: I ignore what is pushing me to the edge in favor of the things that shimmer.
I do this despite recent warnings: The worst panic attack of my life two Decembers ago, standing in a train car, which caused me to physically lose my hearing and vision for too many minutes. The fever I developed just over a week later, home for Christmas, accompanied by an exhaustion so intense I couldn’t stay standing. The trip to the ER last year, on Christmas night, my exhausted father staying with me for five hours to get to the bottom of new, terrifying, debilitating pain.
And these are the downright scary things — sometimes it’s just, well, hard. This season has become full of double-edged swords. The coziness of winter can easily turn to bitter isolation. The holiday bustle, which I like on a walk or looking for gifts, makes it hard to reach out to loved ones I know are busy. A time of year linked to anchors and ritual is the hardest time of year to be upset with someone you love.
What has been posited as the giving season turns out to be the season that my whole self sinks to the cold wet ground, and says: I have nothing left to give.
I know I am surviving, I am grateful for surviving. I am tired of surviving.
Future: The Truth
(Reminder here: please skip this next paragraph if descriptions of vision changes will upset you!)
If you’ve never had an aura, it’s hard to describe. Most experiences are different, and it shifts quickly. At first it’s as if you looked at a light too long. Then the spot grows, spins, like looking through a bright kaleidoscope. After that, it becomes a tunnel through a heat wave, reality twisting and pulsing at the edges. Sometimes it’s blindness: waving your fingers in front of your face and not seeing them.
Auras are new to me and honestly, they scare me. Anything that makes me doubt my own senses feels unwelcome. It feels like just one more thing this year being wrested out of my control. Despite the latest aura being the worst one yet, when it came on, I truly, honestly thought of Christmas lights. I was lucky to see a doctor who experiences auras himself, who told me two things.
First: in future, it’s best to head it off (as it were) as soon as the aura makes itself known, rather than wait until it’s so bad I can’t function.
Oh. That was all it took for this year’s holiday breakdown to fall neatly into the timeline of others — a timeline I’d like to break out of. But to do that, I have to start leveling out the precarious year-end pile, the overwhelm. I have to actually pay it attention.
Second: as terrible as auras are, they pass. Part of why we fear them is that they often warn of the pain that’s about to descend.
This one is harder. I can rattle off a laundry list of things this year that have dragged me, kicking and screaming, into something I was afraid of. But the hardest part about it all is that I don’t know when I will stop feeling afraid. I don’t know when it will pass.
Here’s something even harder: it will. Pass, I mean. The first COVID-19 vaccines are being given right now. When I speak to you next, the shortest day of the year will be behind, and the light will start seeping slowly back. There are ends in sight, different for each of us.
These days, every part of my life feels like an aura: a threat growing in the corner of my eye until I can’t escape it. Until I can’t see the very things in front of me. But all too often, I forget that everything I’ve felt defeated by has eventually retreated. Everything I have gotten through, I have gotten through. I am still here.
Each time I watch A Christmas Carol, a cynical slice of me wonders if Scrooge only stayed reformed after his ghostly visits because of the fear, enshrined in that graveyard vision. It played a part, I’m sure. But I often forget what Scrooge says to the spirit of Christmas Future, faced with his own mortality:
“Why show me this, if I am past all hope?"
The answer, of course, being: he isn’t. I’m not. You’re not. We know we have more in ourselves than just being afraid. We can be afraid, and still go on. We can change, and so can the world around us. And both do, often without prompting.
There will be no paper tree this year, but past years’ ornaments will still hang around the room. I will still bake gingerbread and put on the Nat King Cole record — not as distraction, but as devotion. As a reminder that these things, and the feeling behind them, still exist.
Call it blind faith. Call it optimism scratching at the frosty windows. Still, a comfortable weight in my ribcage says it will pass. I choose to believe it will come again, that potent mix my father praised: “joy, love, and good luck.”
Parting notes—
This week I’m listening to my friend Lisa Ritchie’s song Love And Fear, which feels apt for my mindset this week. Consider supporting her by buying, if you enjoy it!
If you’re tense about last-minute shopping, my friend Lian Parsons-Thomason put together a massively helpful, budget-friendly (under $25!) gift guide featuring small businesses.
My first-ever Christmas original, Christmas Will Work It Out, is available on Bandcamp until January 1. Whether you’re an optimist who’s worn out or a cynic who needs a break, this tune might be for you. 20% of proceeds will go to Food Bank NYC so our neighbors in a bind can have a good holiday, too.