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“It’s sad.”
“No, no it’s not, I’m so over it,” he says. He plucks the Christmas ornaments out of sturdy, real-life pine stems as I watch. My gut churns, making space for a surge of emotions attached to memories, all but black and unending, carrying a blood-stained trail behind, an imprint to the skin.
It’s an acquired taste, choosing to see ends rather than beginnings. There was a time, from the early 1990s to the late 2000s, in which I felt held during Christmas, protected around the twinkles of ornaments floating around Opa’s and Oma’s side of the house, first carried around mine and Iggy’s little fingers as we sprinkled the place with wide-mouthed welcome‘s.
People everywhere had picked up on that gruesome plastic tree trend (an idea that I hate to admit, I still really don’t like). Whenever we had an acquaintance in the house, they would gasp and shower our natural, freshly cut Christmas tree with compliments that we bobbed our heads at with pride. “That’s why the Christkind comes to my house and not yours,” I remember thinking.
It was all, always orchestrated to the last detail, a progressive illusion that recovered other memories such as early Decembers in Saarbrucken. Warm Decembers, enveloped in the smell of winter spices, safe from slippery snow. Holding bubbly hot drinks that held bubbly laughter. Now, years later, walking down the Southbank on a winter evening amongst stands of hot cider and mulled wine, the memory fills me above all with a sense of lost and unrecovered real magic.
Up until I was 12, every winter holiday followed the same patterns. Up for discussion were the color scheme, the decision on how many types and batches of Christmas cookies to bake (and how many times we could tolerate the power of the oven tripping the main electricity), and what presents we chose to add to The List. Change wasn’t even a thought. Things were done the Oberhauser way.
My grand-parents kitchen (aside from said oven) was a sweet, warm heaven. White from top to bottom but for small details like handles that we’re coated in yellow, it was the home to every cooking machine in fashion, like an exhibition introducing modern kitchenware. It held the first Thermomix ever made, automatic bread slicers, juice makers, waffle toasters – your best of the 90s.
Christmas was a time of pressing hold. In between my sly sucking of dough off spatulas the first batch would go in, and the second made. Butter, eggs, sugar, seeded flour – all the basics, all battered, turned into a doughy mixture that had to be rolled out with precision and care. Time stood still whilst I learned to and about cooking and baking. It was my Oma and me as it hadn’t been for many people, she didn’t make a habit out of allowing anyone to stand in the kitchen whilst she cooked. But I was made of her, Oma had decided, and as such, I had to be educated amongst fine cooking, chess playing and countless Hesse’s and Kahlo’s. “Picasso said…” she mouthed when a warning had to follow, touching the tip of my nose.
Adulthood and Christmas don’t work in the same way. Once I got to grips with what life entailed, that shadow, blurry but delineable, followed my every thought. Like a wave that had been carving out its way to me, picking up materials that I was washed with all at once.
Really, Oma’s favorite part of the holidays wasn’t baking, but free flowing mulled wine that she could drink in a mug from the early hours of the morning. My father’s was the sound of Opa’s guitar, but not because of the festive songs it played. It brought him back to a time in which he’d been loved by them his parents, a memory almost too far away to think about it without questioning it. My mother suddenly hated Christmas, and she worded that hate. It reminded her of everything she’d lost along the way. Endings, rather than beginnings.
Now, Christmas is a time slipping through my fingers, a reminder that pretending to be happy and being happy sometimes look like one and the same thing. A reminder that nothing ever lasts. Perhaps there is a beauty in that.
“Finally, I needed this” he repeats.
We even talk in endings now. I hear conversations, small periods of time dissolved in statements like things didn’t count after they’re over. Other times, I listen to voices cornered in a loop of memories, out of new beginnings. When I don’t want to help it, I feel trapped in a constant end, like things aren’t real until they’re over. Like right now. As the past chases, engulfs and shatters… Christmas is over once again, and I can’t help but think that I’ll feel very similarly when he, too, leaves.
And I shiver.