About Christmas

Christmas care package from mom and dad!

          

            Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time opens with Marcel biting into a madeleine soaked in tea. This act conjures a forgotten memory of childhood. The taste of the cookie, like a magic potion, brings clearly into focus the very last time in which that combination of tastes had mingled on his tongue. Suddenly Marcel is a twelve-year-old boy downstairs in his aunt’s apartment. He’d rather stay inside and read books; his family is always sending him outside to play. He’d rather his mother coaxed him to sleep each night; instead he falls asleep alone.

             The novel takes place in and out of Paris: the metropolis is the center while th countryside is the periphery. Perhaps many identify with the moment of the madeleine because of its clear, original telling. While moments in which the past comes rushing over us unannounced are pleasantly overwhelming and even somewhat grounding, Proust has nothing on homesickness. The partial or fragmentary memories conjured by less obvious triggers can be even more surprising and moving.

            I was invited to a luncheon celebrating the end of the year. My host was a woman in her 60s who approaches her belief system in a flexible way. Racially Korean but born in Japan, she was raised Christian but later devoted herself to Buddhism. Each year she collects her best friends at her home for a lunch party that stretches on through the afternoon toward dinner. The living area, where we gathered, was made of two adjoining rooms connected by an opened sliding door. Of equal size, one room was “western style” with hard wood floors, table and chairs, a mahogany armoire, a small Christmas tree. The other room was “Japanese style” with tatami mats, a small table that was assembled just for the party. A shrine to the woman’s ancestors took up about a third of this small room. Seated on the floor, I was careful not to swing around too quickly for fear of knocking the decorations. 

            I met Bae-san at a weekend English workshop that I helped with, the weekend before Christmas. She sat in the front row, and she was the strongest student in the class, and very friendly. On the second day of the workshop she invited me to eat lunch with her and a few other students, and she told me about the process of making pickled plums. Seeing that I was a Christmas orphan, she invited me to her party as a gesture of goodwill.

            At her apartment, she skillfull entertained her guests by arranging a series of charades, moving the little group between the two rooms, now standing, now sitting on chairs, now kneeling on the floor. We began by chatting and eating while standing around a lady’s potluck featuring cold salads of various persuasions (from potato salad to sushi salad to a salad of tiny deep fried fish). Then we moved to the floor and played a traditional Korean game, when I had to make sure not to knock over the shrine. Next came tea and cakes on fancy English china, and finally caroling. Since I and my host were the only ones of the seven who spoke English, most of the carols were sung with their Japanese lyrics. We interspersed a song or two from the post war Japanese golden age of crooning, I think.

            At a certain point, between Deck the Halls and The First Noel, a song began that was sung in Japanese. I tried to recognize it but I hadn’t heard it before. Yet there was a little transition—neither a chorus nor a verse—that drew me in. It was only three notes together that formed the coincidence: it sounded for an instant just like “The Holly and the Ivy,” my favorite Christmas song. Suddenly I was sitting at the table in my parent’s house between my mom and dad and across from my sister, a little bored, listening to my dad talk about a patient’s heart trouble or skin trouble or earwax trouble. Christmas time, the 6-disc CD player randomly pulling from Christmas themed CDs. A green plate full of Kraft mac and cheese, frozen spinach, sausage with ketchup. I almost burst into tears. I didn’t want to cry for homesickness in front of these sweet ladies singing carols, maybe just for my benefit. Although I haven’t felt a persistent longing or depression, I was closer to tears during the holiday season. Its those little surprises that force and interior chain reaction of memory that pull me into nostalgia.

            After caroling, one of the ladies showed me how to make a crane out of origami. She explained the tradition: when someone is very sick, their friends get together and make 1000 cranes for his or her recovery. It isn’t enough to pray, she said, you have to do something: it is your actions that are important, not your thoughts. When I left, she made me take the cranes and the rest of the paper.

            Nostalgia is a mixture of pleasure and pain that tugs at me and Marcel. Living far away fro hom, it’s easy to look for familiarity. The broad face of my new friend and her extremely ladylike vivaciousness remind me of my grandmother. The intensely methodical style of a student at the school where I teach English makes me want to buy him a vocabulary calender, like the ones my Dad used to buy me every Christmas. Every night before I went to bed we would read a word or uncover a new fact together, until I was in high school and my schedule and adolescent spite terminated his ritual.

            I guess it’s nice to be so far away from home and from familiar things that I can really appreciate what I miss. 

Christmas dinner a few days after the party