For the holidays

Like many other families, my family and I will be celebrating the holidays differently this year. By way of geographic ease and convenience, in a typical year, my family and I are usually able to be together for the holidays. There is so much about the holiday season that is tied to the traditions that we have built for it. My ancestry is Italian, so, by tradition, we typically have a “seven fishes” dinner on Christmas Eve. On the flipside, without any German ancestry, my mother – essentially every year – bakes a Christmas Stollen, which gets sliced up and devoured on Christmas morning. When I was a child, my family and I would join our neighbors and friends at Christmas Eve Mass, where the comfort of community was at least as important as the nature of the service, itself. Christmas morning – which often bled into Christmas afternoon – would be spent in our living room, with apple cider on the stove and the voice of Johnny Mathis enveloping us like a blanket. When I think about Christmas, these are the things I envision. These are the centerpieces of a historical narrative that I, even at the age of 42, can tell about Christmas, the holiday season, and a sense of normality.

It did not need to take a year like 2020 has been to realize how central these anchors are to how we understand our lives and the passage of time. It also did not need to take a year like 2020 to understand how fragile these traditions are. 2020 won’t be the first year in which my family and I have had to re-create some interpretation of normality. When I was a child, having just turned 12 years old – an age when the joy of the holiday season is perhaps among its highest – my family and I spent the holiday season, indeed nearly the entire year, in Children’s Specialized Hospital in New Jersey, as I recovered from my injuries and learned to live my life as a person with a disability. At that point, none of the traditions, none of the ideas of normality continued to apply. Nothing, at that time of my life, seemed reminiscent of anything I had come to recognize in my life before. Christmas was spent in the hospital, away from everything that used to define it. And, I didn’t want it that way. I wanted things as I had known them. I wanted things in my future to resemble that of my past, but I couldn’t reconcile the two. My future, I thought, wasn’t going to be but I wanted to be – a continuation of my past – but, instead, some substandard, remote approximation of it, and the fractures between my visions of tradition and the reality I was facing were devastating, resembling the fracture lines on my heart.

Christmas spent in the hospital was immensely difficult for my family and me. We had to fabricate a sense of joy that was, in many ways, as real and natural as the branches of the synthetic Christmas tree outside of my hospital room door. But, life guarantees neither justice nor consistency, and we do ourselves no benefit by looking for or expecting either one. My family and I had to renegotiate the point at which we would continue to mourn the loss of what we had understood as normal and the point at which we felt strong enough to embrace a new, different, but no less rich normal. That internal negotiation took time. Traversing from the pain of loss to the resolve of acceptance to the hope for the joy, love, and potential of tomorrow took an awareness that our lives were the reflection of all we had known them to be before but also an opportunity to be molded in unexpected but potentially beautiful ways.

So much of what my family and I experienced in 1990 has replicated itself this year, 30 years later. 2020 has brought with it sadness, fear, heartache, and struggle, the likes of which I had not experienced since I was a child. This year, like so many others, I will spend the holidays apart from many members of my family, as we all reinterpret who we are and reconcile how much of our identity is associated with important yet fragile things. This year, the holiday season will be different. For many of us, it will be painful and difficult. For many more of us, it will seem like a violation of everything we have known these days to mean. But, we will find joy again. The way we live our lives will make sense again. Our feelings of loss, of desperation, of frustration, and of confusion will right themselves again. The holiday season, though painfully aberrant now, will feel right again.

I want to wish all of you a peaceful holiday season. I know that, for many, it will be hard to have a happy holiday. For many, it will be just as difficult to have a healthy holiday season. But, I hope for peace for you: a peace of mind and a peace in your heart. Peace is the groundwork for strength, and strength is the basis of hope. May 2021 be much brighter than its predecessor, for all of us, and made that brightness find its way into your heart.