You’re 10 years old in your home sewn jammies, tearing down the hall to what you know is there, you just know it: a banana-seat bike in the living room, green with tassels, and Santa’s the greatest! Your mom and dad light cigarettes and beam. The tree’s lit up red and green, and on the turntable John Denver’s singing “Silent Night” all high and nasally again and again and again. Before long, wrapping paper’s strewn around the living room and you’re stuffed with fudge before noon.
Does Christmas ever get better than this?
It does!
You’re 23 years old and renting a cabin
in the mountains, hanging out with
friends, and wielding a splitting maul to
break the ice atop the bucket of apple jack
while your trails boss does a headstand
on a high log beam. The woods sparkle
without electric lights, moonlight on the
crust, and you leap out the window to do
a naked snow angel, and in the morning,
you’re drunk before noon.
Does Christmas ever get better than this?
It does!
One year there’s a progressive dinner,
and you’re heading from cabin to cabin on
skis, on sleds, on snowshoes, hicky-bobbing
behind the pickup on the unplowed
road between the high berms, from cabin
to cabin, from eggs Benedict to Cornish
game hens, from mimosas to brandy and
fondue. Carols on the autoharp. Dogs on
sleds. Another year, you ski eight miles to
a backcountry cabin and heat it sauna hot
so that at midnight you leap naked into
the river then sprint post-holing back up
the bank to bask with brandy.
You never have a tree because there
are plenty of those already — the whole
gorgeous woods-full! — and you never
give gifts since the mountains are gift
enough, and your toys take up half the
house already: skis, packs, kayaks, bikes.
The years pile up like wrapping paper
strewn about the room. Friends come
and go. Your father’s long gone, and
your mother’s diagnosed with cancer. In
October, you camp in the parking lot at the hospital while she has surgery. In
November, you return to splitting firewood
and making cider and listening to
snow thud from the eaves. In December,
you pull out the extension cords, all of
them, nicked and wadded in the woodshed,
and stretch the lights, red and
green, from ski pole to ski pole, through
the woods to reflect back at the moon,
defiant. And you head out.
You’re 40 years old and driving toward
the suburbs, tire chains on the passes
and traffic at the malls, past the garish
plastic Santas. You plant yourself at the
television. You watch “A Christmas Carol.”
You watch “Charlie Brown’s Christmas.”
Football games pile up like snow back
home, one atop the next. You go to
Catholic Mass — baby Jesus in the manger
— and you shave your mother’s head bare
in anticipation of the chemotherapy; soft
white curls landing on the carpet where
your banana-seat bike once sat and where
your baby nieces crawl naked.
You don’t know yet that the cancer will
vanish, that the girls will grow sweet and
strong, that you’ll be skiing soon, again,
happily in the woods, lighting snags for
warmth, setting fireworks and dodging the
sparks. All you know is that John Denver
is singing “Silent Night” all high and nasally
on the CD, again and again, and on
the street outside in the sun, a neighbor
kid wobbles on a brand-new two-wheeler,
and your mother says: “Remember when?”
And you do.
Does Christmas ever get better than this?
It doesn’t.
Frequent contributor Ana Maria Spagna is the author of “Now Go Home: Wilderness, Belonging, and the Crosscut Saw,” which was named a Seattle Times best book of 2004. Her next book, “Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus: A Daughter’s Civil Rights Journey,” was recently named winner of the 2009 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize. It will be published next year by the University of Nebraska Press. Spagna lives in Stehekin, Wash., in a cabin she built with her own two hands.
