On not really remembering

I grew up observing Santa Lucia. What this means is that every year on December 13, my sister and I would get up before the sun had risen, don white robes belted with tinsel, carry candles and sing the Swedish Santa Lucia song to my sleepy but game father who would ooh and aah at all the right spots - one of those spots being when my mother would place on his lap the tray of Swedish saffron rolls we had baked the day before, the ones with a raisin placed very deliberately in each pocket of our carefully crafted infinity sign.

This year, I went to a Lucia concert at a Lutheran church on the Upper West Side. The choral singers poured into the church, candles and tinsel galore, and started singing the Lucia song, only it wasn’t. Not quite. It was the same melody but I didn’t recognize the lyrics. What was happening? Was there a different version of the song? I play the same Swedish Christmas CDs every year. Maybe the version I know went out of style?

Two weeks later I watched “Miracle on 34th Street” while addressing my holiday cards. I hadn’t seen it in years, but with a half an eye on the screen, I waited for the part where the lawyer figures out how to win the case proving that Edmund Gwenn’s Kris Kringle is, in fact, Santa Clause. You know the part: someone gives him a dollar bill and he sees the “In God We Trust” and realizes that’s his argument: we can’t prove there’s a God, yet we believe it so inherently that we print His existence on our country’s currency - wait, what?

Exactly.

That scene never happened. What actually happens is that the post office delivers all the letters addressed to Santa Clause to the courthouse. But... what was I thinking of? Did I make that dollar bill bit up? Had I spliced it from another movie onto the end of this one? (In my worst case scenario, I am now informed that the God scene I just described is from a Jim Carrey movie).

I am constantly reminded that my memory of an instant is just that: my memory. It’s one of the many reasons I’d be a terrible eye witness (I can picture it now. Me: “I know for a fact he had a beard and wore a green sweater vest!” Reality: She’s a blonde in a navy peacoat.)

Of course it’s natural that my version of events morphs with time, but the worrying part is that not so much time needs to pass before I alter reality. Never mind what I forget (which is a lot). I’m talking about the stuff I think I remember.

Not so long ago, my friend whom I’ve known since 8th grade brought over a rediscovered yearbook from our junior year of high school. I’m not in it. I’m on the list of people not pictured. I have no recollection of being a no-show. More to the point, this seems so unlike me. I am nothing if not vain enough to show up for picture day! And why was some other chick in the Class Secretary photo? That was my job! … oh, except it wasn’t. That wasn’t my job until the following year.

Facebook does wonders for shaking my confidence in my own memories. Reconnecting with former classmates can be jarring. “You were always (fill in the blank).” I was? “I’ll never forget when you (insert event here).” I have no recollection of that. “Remember how we always (active verb here)?” No. No, I do not remember that.

And yet, out of the blue, I can conjure up the name of someone’s ex-husband from a story told ten years ago. Oh sure, that guy!

There seems to be no method to what my brain decides to hang on to.

There are moments in my life when I know I thought to myself: “Remember this.” And yet my highlight reel is filled with those everyday non-events that didn’t seem worthy at the time of getting filed away, but for some reason, they’re the ones that passed the memory test. Those are the bits and pieces I return to when I play back my life on those sentimental evenings when I wish to wax nostalgic.

On evenings like tonight, for instance, when I want to think of New Year’s Eves past, and pay tribute to the years I’ve lived, celebrated, mourned and resolved to improve. If I allow myself no more than twenty seconds to contemplate them, I can come up with three memorable December 31sts. Maybe four. And of those, I am quite confident that were I to share my version of that night with those who had been present at the time, there would be a collective “what night are YOU thinking of?”

But these are my memories. That’s the way I remember the song. It might be the wrong version, but it’s mine.

Tonight I am celebrating my fourth New Year’s Eve with my O. I have been repeatedly told that it is an extra special night because it is my first New Year’s Eve as a married woman. That may be true, but I won’t know until I try to remember 2011 in a few years’ time and see if this is the one that sticks. I already have a memory bookmarked with him from an especially fun New Year’s Eve a couple of years ago, so there may not be room in my mental archives for this one. I’ll let you know in a few years. If I remember to keep you posted.

My forward-fold-breathe-in-the-space Christmas.

This is for you. You can hang it on your fridge. I used ALL the golden colors.

- B., 5 years old, as she handed me a picture of colorful scribbles

This is the first Christmas I remember in a long time that I’m spending on my own. In fact, I think it may be the first. H is in New York with O. My other siblings are gathered in Atlanta to be near their mother and each other. And others that are near and dear are, well...not so geographically near.

Later today, I won’t be alone. A couple friends will be gathering for eggs and coffee and pancakes in my kitchen. There will be Christmas Eve under the stars in a little church beside the sea. Christmas Dinner with paper crowns and brightly colored crackers. But each morning this holiday season, I have woken up alone. And so, too, this Christmas Eve morning. There is stillness in this, stillness and a beauty in This Moment where all is quiet, the tree is lit, and I sit in bed writing with a cup of hot tea nearby and Petey curled up beside me.

A dear friend told me recently that I write often and most about memory. And it is true. It comes from a place, I think, of wanting to remember what and who is no longer here; remembering brings them back for just bit. So, no surprise, I’m all about tradition - almost obsessively so. I literally cannot go to New York this time of year and not go see the tree at Rock Center. It pulls me to it like a magnet. And I've paid crazy money to have a bottle of Glogg shipped to Hawaii simply to have the smell fill my kitchen for an evening. But this Christmas has been different. I haven’t had a cup of glogg. Or Swedish meatballs. Or bitten into a saffron bun.

But I have walked on the beach plenty, even in the rain. Especially in the rain. And there have been rainbows. Rainbows everywhere.

This morning I am thinking of and missing the whirlwind that is being with my family in Atlanta for the holidays where someone is always making a new pot of coffee or pies or darting off to the grocery store. There's always a game going on or an animal caught in the Christmas tree. And I dare you to make it from wherever you’ve found a place to sleep to the bathroom without being shot by a foam dart.

But in the end, I think today is just the way it should be.

In yoga, after we’ve done a lot twists, the teacher always brings us back to neutral. We stand still in downward dog or in a forward fold taking in the effects of the work we just did and allowing ourselves time to breathe before moving onto what will come next.

This is that Christmas. My forward-fold-breathe-in-the-space Christmas.

This is the time to wake up on my own, to stand at the kitchen counter in silence drinking coffee and eating buttered gingerbread cookies on a rainy, tropical morning while looking at the picture made for me by B. She used ALL the gold colors, you know. And I feel them all filling me up.

This is that time between what came before and what comes next.