December 31, 2001
A little while ago I posted about the month of Christmas in our house, but recently I was explaining our New Year’s Eve party to someone and it occurred to me that the two for me are inextricably linked.
Christmas for me is a very nostalgic thing. And it’s not even just a personal nostalgia, but also a sort of nostalgia for a past that I wasn’t even a part of. There’s a reason why I could sit in front of TNT’s marathon of A Christmas Story all day Christmas, and it’s because, for me, that vision of Christmas is the archetype in my mind. That pre/during/post-war period. I have a thing for the Art Deco stuff to begin with, but the WWII Christmas fetish is something more for me. That movie, in particular, but also a collection of CDs we have of Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, those WWII radio broadcasts, we even have a collection of CDs that a friend was able to find for us of Christmas radio shows from the early fifties. Last year the festivities even included a night out at a place in town called the 57th Fighter Group Squadron restaurant, which is totally done up to resemble a bombed out chateau in France during the war. It sits next to a small airport runway where you can watch the planes take off and land. (we weren’t able to go again this year, because of circumstances, and well, the entire month’s celebrations were pretty limited. But that’s okay.)
It’s a nostalgia that fuels the entire month of Christmas, and I revel in it. And if you asked me to explain why I wallow in this nostalgia for a time period in which I wasn’t even a twinkle in my father’s pants (reference freely stolen from Jellyfish) I couldn’t even begin to guess.
And maybe that is enough weirdness for you. But there’s more. Because, late Christmas day, the melancholy sets in. The holiday is over, the month of anticipation and celebration has paid its dividends and the refuse lays strewn in the house.
And I want it out.
It always bothered me, the post holiday letdown. A few years ago I started taking the tree down within a few days after the holiday. About two years ago I finally started taking it down the next day, first thing. Pulling the ornaments, clearing all the decorations and unceremoniously dragging the tree through the sliding glass doors and over the deck to the driveway. Once it’s over, the nostalgia depresses me, it makes me feel stagnant and immobile. Autumn and Winter seem to draw out the nostalgia in me anyway, and the holidays only push me further into it, so by the time it’s December 26th I’ve had my fill.
When I was trying to describe New Year’s Eve, I realized the part it plays for me in all of this. Because every year, as the party winds down, I feel expectant (and drunk, usually). I can’t shake it. And the next day when we first get up, as we stumble around the wreckage of the house, hungover, struggling to slap together a palatable breakfast, I want the world new. I want everything changed, everything redesigned and fresh.
I am, of course, always disappointed. Except for two years ago when we went out and I bought a Mt. Dew only to discover they had changed their logo. It was a beautiful moment, and just goes to show how little it would take to appease me on this count.
But after a month of celebrating the past, when New Year’s Eve comes I celebrate the future and purge the past. My year is cleared out, the bad is invalidated, and by the time I wake up the next day the world has begun again. Give me a day to recuperate, to clean the house, relax, breathe. New Year’s Night is fondue night (a recent tradition).
And by January 2nd I want it to be spring and I want to get moving.