PRESENTS / PRESENCE AT CHRISTMAS
We Were All Together
When we were kids we always had three traditions during Christmas. We had this box of terrible old ornaments for the tree, so my dad would bring a noble fir home in early December and we'd put the ornaments on, remembering the story of each one. We listened to the Muppets holiday cassette featuring John Denver and then we'd watch a Charlie Brown Christmas.
My mom died when I was in my mid-twenties and I came home for Christmas seeing all the empty spaces, "The ornaments are silhouettes from when nothing bad had happened yet." I was drinking while my sister slept, while my high school friends were in other places. I realized that the holidays are a really symbolic time for a ton of people. It's a symbol of how things are not how we want them to be and how they could be maybe. They are much more like a reminder of how things didn't work out for us.
I think the opposite side of that coin is the idea that Christmas is, itself, a promise of how things could feel when the world reconciles with itself, when there is peace on earth, good will towards men. In loss, in missing pieces, we have the option to discover a greater hidden meaning, that all missing pieces imply the possibility of redemption. In other words, if there is a piece missing, then there is also a missing piece. It's the promise that separation is only a distance, that fractures can be mended, that reconciliation is a universal longing. I wondered what the promise of reconciliation would sound like:
Would it sound like coming down?
Like a quiet voice…
Or a turning page…
Like Linus standing on that stage…
Like where we are is not where we are going…
I have a new song, it's called We Were All Together. It's a Christmas song about the hard side of the holidays for some of us. It's also about the promise of Christmas. Both things at once.
My dad got our family VHS tapes together this fall and sent them to a guy in a garage in Ellensburg, Washington to have them converted from the tapes. I watched through them. It was an odd experience. I saw young me with a new perspective, how smart I was, how much I was trying to curate likeableness with an infinite energy, how irritating the combination was. I had a lot of compassion for that kid, because in some ways I am the only person who really understands him, which is what he wanted the most – and also, I am the only one who knows exactly what that kid is in for.
Written by Tyson Motsenbocker (tyson.motsenbocker@gmail.com)