Christmas in October
On October 21, men on tall ladders hung big red balls from the old oaks in front of the house across the street. Given that Halloween decorations were timely, I thought, “What a strange shade of orange.” After all, two doors down, the front yard was full of skeletons, gravestones, and cobwebs. But, silly me, I was indeed seeing red. Yesterday, October 29, the men with tall ladders came back, this time to climb the roof and string Christmas lights. Once that was done, they wrapped the stately oaks in dense nets of smaller clear lights. So last night the house lit up the neighborhood. At least, when the kids trick-or-treat tomorrow night on Halloween, they will not do so in the dark. Will they be confused, thinking they should be looking for Santa Claus and his sleigh packed with gifts, instead of ringing doorbells for candy? Time is indeed out of joint. But then the trick-or-treaters live in the city, in the midst of stores full of Halloween candy and Christmas decorations that appear as soon as the shelves are cleared of back-to-school supplies. It’s as if Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas are all thrown into a big pot of holiday stew, where the flavors don’t really blend. Commercial markers of the seasons I see in the stores just get me confused.
I turn to nature for a little re-orientation, to a favorite tree, the humble hackberry, which reliably marks the changing seasons. It suddenly started turning orange on October 28, a Monday. I had not seen it over the weekend, so my perception of suddenness probably was not accurate. In fact, change had been happening outside my awareness for a long time. Change seems to happen that way: it seems sudden when one day a baby is walking, although she has been working toward it since birth. One day she gets a driver’s license, one day goes off to college, one day gets her first real job. These are markers of what is out of sight. So, maybe it makes a certain weird metaphysical sense for our street to feature Halloween skeletons, Thanksgiving door wreaths, and Christmas lights all within the same block. Time merges in a sort of crazy mash-up.
What is time anyway but a human construct of months, days, years, minutes, and seconds divided by earth’s rotation around the sun? On Venus and Mars, what earthlings call a year is not the same as on earth, so when will the first colonizing humans celebrate their first Christmas? Maybe Christmas can be whenever we, or the neighbors across the street, say it is? If, in this age of the demagogue, we get to choose our own “facts,” maybe we get to choose our own sense of time?
These musings make my head spin, so I will cling to those moments when my brain gets outside myself and out of time: when I am singing in a choral concert; when I am loving Thorpe, or a friend sitting across the dinner table, or a family member opening Christmas packages. The list of moments outside of time can go on: when I am engrossed in a painting, swimming in the pool, looking at my hackberry tree through the pool’s glass doors. And I slip out of time, as well, and enjoy the holiday stew, with its mix of sweet, sour, and savory. Let the clock keep ticking. And let the Christmas lights shine.
