Nostalgia

I’ve long had this wish that it’d be possible to live inside the ground zero of nostalgia.  This is more of a daydream, along the lines of sci-fi and the idea of teleportation.  My more realistic version of trying to embody the bittersweet peter pan root of nostalgia is to imagine training myself to adapt my thinking to nostalgia, the way Buddhists train themselves to be zen or recovering alcoholics train themselves to be sober.  That’s what December is like for me.  I know that Christmas Day is at its most basic a few hours of exchanging gifts, a few hours of cleaning up afterwards, a couple hours of appreciating the gifts and then a festive dish for dinner; that is at least the make-up of my Christmas days.  There is no getting around the fact that Christmas ends.  Nonetheless, every December I plan which Christmas light displays we’re going to drive to and marvel at and which Christmas movies feel the most special to me and will be watched a million times all month.  When I’m looking at the beautiful light display on some house, or hearing those little asshole Peanuts kids finally yell “Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown,” making everything better, I wish to myself that there’d be some way to make the sentimentality last forever.  But there isn’t.  Also, nostalgia is a regressive state, and counter-productive to the present and even the future.  Still, I can’t help but wishing, just illogically, regressively wishing, time would freeze in the month of December, when most offices just let their co-workers fuck around all month, when neighborhoods are lovely with colored lights and animatronic reindeer, when I can still hope that the gifts I give are going to transform a life instead of ending up one more item to find a place for or maybe even to add to someone’s clutter.  I wish I could bring my son and husband with me into a state of matter comprised of childish abandon, that we could somehow comprise the delicate very filament of a Christmas light.