The holiday season to me, and I’m assuming many people, is a time of year when the past, present and future swirl together in a hazy concoction of lights and songs and cheer that smells like pine needles and tastes like peppermint.
It’s a brief, joyous window in the calendar in which time itself seems to stop, or at least slow to a manageable pace, under the collective agreement that perhaps all of us should work a little less, for chrissake, and spend some time with the people we love.
I’m talking specifically about moments like the one I experienced the other night, when I lifted my three-year-old son, Conley, to the top of our humble little Christmas tree so he could place the big white star on top, just so. When I lowered him to the ground and turned on the lights, his tiny face glowed with the same sense of wonder I remember experiencing as a kid, and instantly I felt like an eight-year-old boy in my childhood home on Christmas Eve, staring down at the living room from the steps at midnight, entranced by a tree that shone with an almost holy sense of silence and brightness.
In honor of Christmas’ ability to dissolve the linear nature of time, I present the “12 Vignettes of Christmas,” a small collection of memories past, present and future, spanning from the mid-90s to 2059. I can be a real Grinch during much of the year, but Christmas tends to obliterate my innate cynicism and replace it with a sense of simple joy, especially since I’ve become a parent. Bemoan rampant consumerism all you want: I’m no fan of it either, but I’ve come to learn, just as the Grinch did in Seuss’ legendary poem, that “maybe Christmas doesn’t come from a store. Maybe Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more.”
I’ve discovered, through years of struggle, how to embrace the fundamental warmth of the holiday season, while also safe-guarding my soul from the corporations trying to sell me stuff every second of every day, in the name of manufactured love. Anyway, I hope you’re able to see some of yourself and your family in the following Yuletide snapshots. Most of them have absolutely nothing to do with presents, anyway.
1. 1998(ish).
I think back to my childhood, in Powhatan County, when my dad would tie a plastic dollar-store sled to the four-wheeler and pull my brother and I around the snow-covered front yard at ever-increasing speeds. He’d take a turn too fast and we’d tumble, face-first, into the snow, which would melt against the warmth of our red cheeks, as our fingers started to chill under the limited protection of thin snow gloves.
2. 2023.
I think about Conley experiencing his first snowfall at our new home in Staunton, when maybe a half-inch stuck in our small front yard in the West End. We dressed him in a full-body suit, complete with a couple of tiny bear ears on top, and ventured out into the cold. My wife, Caitlin, watched from the door as Conley laid on his stomach, licked the icy accumulation and shouted “dirty snow!” Caitlin hollered that our dog had peed somewhere in the vicinity, to which Conley replied “I eat it,” lifting himself onto his arm like he was doing a yoga pose, “I eat the snow-ground!” (He was not, in fact, licking urine-soaked snow).
3. 1994(ish).
I think about how, when I was maybe five or six, I retreated onto the back porch in the freezing cold while watching “Rudolph” because I was shaken to my core by the sight of the abominable snowman. My dad still brings this up to this day, just to ensure I’m not getting too full of myself. Yet I stand by my childhood fear: the herky-jerky stop-motion of that furry white beast is objectively creepy, the hair eerily wild, the teeth unnaturally sharp.
4. 2024.
I think about driving the bus for Anna’s House, where Conley attends preschool, in the Staunton Christmas parade at the beginning of December. We had a blow-up Snoopy sticking through the emergency hatch in the roof, and the six or so children who’d gathered in the back lowered the windows, despite temperatures in the 20s, and started singing Christmas carols a full 30 minutes before the parade began. Their favorite refrain was “Jingle bells, Wyatt smells, Robin laid an egg.” I don’t know who Wyatt is, if he was even on the bus, but one of the parents told them to knock it off, to leave poor Wyatt alone. The kids stuck mostly to “Feliz Navidad” and “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” after that.
5. 2000(ish).
I think about my dad driving us from Powhatan to the Pittsburgh area, where my parents were born-and-raised. The four of us would wake up well before dawn and pile into the truck, my brother and I jammed into the small back seat with our chocolate lab, who would slobber and maintain consistent agonal breaths for the full six-hour trip. I think about how my dad would howl with laughter while listening to “John Boy and Billy,” how my mother would sigh and shoot him critical glances that seemed to say: “Should you really be listening to this in front of the kids?” I think about how we’d only make one stop, at the McDonalds in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, because that was the half-way point. We’d eat egg McMuffins, relieve our bladders then get back on the road. If anyone had to use the bathroom before or after that, they quickly learned how to hold it.
6. 2022.
I think about our old house in an isolated Western North Carolina holler, about how that part of Haywood County seemed to have its own weather pattern, how we’d always usually get four-to-eight inches more snow than the closest town, at least twice per winter. We’d gaze out of our picture window and watch the white fluff accumulate on the bushes, then step outside with the flakes still floating down, awestruck by the utter silence of the world, the empty peacefulness of everything, the elegant way the smooth snow covered the rolling hills like a down comforter, absorbing every sound, the barks and the moos, that usually echoed through the valley.
7. 2024.
I think about taking off work from Christmas Eve through the New Year, which is something I try to do every year so I don’t have to spend a single moment worrying about the inherent stresses of work. I give myself permission to be lazy and gluttonous (my version of lazy and gluttonous, at least), because it’s the one time of year when such sins cease to be sins and morph into something resembling virtues. It was much easier to lie around and do nothing before we brought into the world a toddler who doesn’t stop talking or moving from the moment he wakes up, but I still try to fit in my laziness when I can.
8. 2001(ish).
I think about the not-so-secret sledding spot kids would flock to after a snowstorm. It was on the campus of the only private school in Powhatan County, and I remember kids building fairly sizable snow ramps about halfway down the hill, how the cautious part of me wanted to avoid them at all costs, but how a more curious part of me wanted to drill one at full speed and launch my body into the air like some sort of prepubescent Evil Knievel. I remember how my thighs would burn after walking back to the top of the hill, how the heat from my body would turn the shell of my snowsuit into a furnace while my cheeks and nose remained frosty and red.
9. 1997(ish).
I think about going to church on the night of Christmas Eve and how the whole congregation seemed aglow with anticipation for Santa’s impending arrival. The scene is sepia-toned in my mind, and kind of grainy, too, like an old VHS tape. I mostly remember wanting the service to hurry up and end so I could get home and jump into bed, because the sooner I fell asleep (no small task on Christmas Eve), the sooner I could wake up with my brother at some ungodly hour, like 4:30 a.m., and the two of us could run downstairs, shake my sleep-deprived parents awake and shout IS IT TIME YET, IS IT TIME YET, IS IT TIME YET until they groggily rolled out of their waterbed. The one thing from those Christmas Eve services that has stuck in my mind is how the last song was always “Silent Night,” my late grandma’s favorite Christmas song, or so I’ve been told, because she died before I was old enough to make firm memories. We’d stand there holding our little Christ candles, or whatever you want to call them, as the organ player dropped out for the final verse, leaving only the hushed voices of the congregation to carry the melody through to the end.
10. 2016.
I think about that one Christmas I spent alone in Austin, which is where I lived at the time. Caitlin was getting her masters degree out of the country and the rest of my family was back in Virginia. I don’t remember why I didn’t fly home, probably because I was a broke 20-something, so I basked in the heavy lonesomeness that comes with spending the most communal time of year all by yourself. On Christmas Eve I went to this basement jazz club called the Elephant Room. You had to walk down a set of tight dark steps to reach the front door. There was a baby-faced teenager sitting by himself at the front of the crowd, and I wondered what’s he doing here all by himself, on Christmas Eve? About halfway through the show, the bandleader invited the kid onstage, and he played a version of “My Favorite Things” on the saxophone that would’ve made John Coltrane weep.
11. 1999(ish).
I think about how my parents would create a scavenger hunt for the biggest gift each year, how I’d open a box that had a handwritten note in it saying “You thought this would be a gift, didn’t you? Go look in the bathroom sink.” And we’d go to the bathroom sink and there’d be another box with another note inside saying something to the effect of “Gotcha, kid. Now check under the kitchen table.” On and on like this until we finally reached the actual present at the end of the procession of notes. One year, it was dirt bikes. I must’ve been 11 or 12, perhaps younger. My dad loved motorcycles as a child and even rode a Harley until he got into a couple of accidents, one in which he flipped over the hood of a car. I’m assuming he thought his kids would share his love of motorcycles, but we didn’t embrace them like I think he hoped we would. We rode them from time-to-time, sure, but they mostly sat in our basement and collected dust until eventually they were sold.
12. 2059.
I think about what Christmas will be like when Caitlin and I are in our 70s, when Conley will be around the same age we are now, hopefully with children of his own so Caitlin and I can spoil the heck out of them. On this future Christmas Day, my male-pattern baldness has finally colonized my head, and grotesquely long nose hairs are shooting out of my nostrils like weeds.
I’m sitting on a couch in some house I don’t yet know, with my liver-spotted arm around Caitlin, whose hair is now blindingly white but whose face retains the youthful glow I fell in love with all those decades ago. We’re listening to Frank Sinatra, who at this point will’ve been dead for 61 years, sing “Jingle Bells,” and when I look at our fully grown son, I picture him as that three-year-old kid doing a yoga pose in the snow at our old house in the West End, shouting “I eat the snow-ground!” I must be staring at this adult version of Conley for too long, because he looks at me with a furrowed brow and says “Papa, are you having a stroke? What are you looking at?” His words break my nostalgic spell, and I reply nothing, son, I’m fine, and maybe wipe a tear from my eye just to make it really cliche. I pull Caitlin a little closer, and in a deep baritone voice reminiscent of my long-dead grandfather’s, harmonize with ol’ Frankie as he runs through the final refrain of “Jingle Bells.”
All at once this Christmas in 2059 ceases to be Christmas in 2059, and somehow becomes all of the Christmases I’ve ever experienced all at once: in a snap, I’m an 8-year-old on a sled behind a four-wheeler, a 14-year-old singing “Silent Night” on Christmas Eve, a 35-year-old hoisting my toddler in the air so he can place the star on top of the Christmas tree. Frankie’s voice is so clear and close that I swear his ghost is seated next to me, and suddenly so are the ghosts of everyone I’ve ever spent a Christmas with. For a split second they’re there with me, but in the next instant they’re gone. I close my eyes and feel a sharp pang of darkness alongside an overwhelming sense of joy and gratitude…for all of the moments I’ve already experienced, and for all of the moments hopefully still to come.
Happy holidays to everyone.
Michael Schoeffel is a writer, firefighter, husband and father based in Staunton. You check out more of his work on his Substack and Ourland Mag.
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