It was New York City. It was 2003. We were bustling around with friends, shopping, enjoying the Big Apple at Christmastime. The final stop of the day was Nat Sherman’s, the famous tobacconist, and it kept getting pushed back and back – possibly because of how much candy I’d stopped to gorge on at Dylan’s Candy Bar, I don’t know. But there was precipitation, and I was carrying a bunch of stuff, and I remember starting to get frustrated that we weren’t at the damn cigar shop by now, and then across the street I heard something – bells, or chimes, or something electronic, or God only knows what – playing “Silent Night.”
Bear in mind that in 2003, I’d had an MVP year. I had single-handedly crammed a six-month Mac OS X trial and deployment into three days, come up with a security model and a policy to prevent toy-boys locking us out of our own machines, come up with a rapid-deployment scheme using Carbon Copy Cloner and a Firewire cable that made it possible for us to turn out new Macs in an hour or so from box to desktop. I’d also fought in the trenches on three separate mass deployments – the rollout of Lotus Notes ND6, the restoration of domain services on all the Windows systems, and a major antivirus cleanup/deployment, and in two cases managed to use Apple Network Assistant and Apple Remote Desktop to race through the Mac-side fix in record time. And I’d done the whole thing in a blur of rage and fury, fueled by overwhelming esprit de corps and firmly convinced for the first time in over a decade that I was really as good as I thought I was, and that I was right.
And right there in the middle of the street, I choked up, fell out of my own time, and for one moment I was ready to give it all back – the success, the degrees, the friends, the loved ones, the whole damned thing – if it just meant I could wake up on December 1, 1988, and start all over again.
It passed – within about an hour, I was upstairs at Nat Sherman with a Vanderbilt stogie clenched in my teeth, blowing smoke rings at Notre Dame-Syracuse on the big-screen TV in the lounge – but it was the first time I’d grasped that something about Christmas had fundamentally changed for good. It wasn’t depression, not as such – I’d been depressed at Christmas before. 1986 and 1998 I can name right off the jump, and 1997 wasn’t much better after the chaos that year had been – but 2003 was the first time I really felt like I had lost some piece of the holiday that I’d never get back.
It wasn’t until 2010 – with chaos and drama and bad things happening back in the old country – that I finally pieced it together. “Silent Night” is what the Christmas carousel music box on the end table in the den used to play. That 7th-chord in D hits something in the back of my mind and there it all is – fireplace full of wood, ancient console TV on the floor, there’s that same old artificial tree in use since Star Wars was first in theaters, covered with all the old ornaments – the Lucy-from-Peanuts-as-Santa ones that came with a loaf of Millbrook bread back in the dark ages, the square “12 days of Christmas”-themed ones with the gold glitter around the edges, the bead-and-pipe-cleaner candy canes that had long since deformed out of the traditional shape, and of course enough colored lights and gold and silver garland that I’m sure the thing weighed about 400 pounds when it was fully loaded.
There’d be the family gathering on Christmas Eve, with aunts and uncles and cousins and the perpetual tease of “will it flurry snow” and later the snickering drama of who’d brought a significant other this year, and constant smart remarks and laughter to match, and my grandfather’s matter-of-factness adding even more levity to the proceedings. And of course I’d long since outgrown toys, but there would be a few surprises under the tree that December morning, and my brother and I would make a big show of NOT getting up early, and there’d be the Walt Disney World Christmas Parade on TV as we ate strawberries and biscuits before the Blue-Gray Game came on. And by nightfall, we’d’ve stomped around outside all we needed to, and it would probably be time to drive across the city to meet up with my high school friends again – whether it was high school or grad school.
Something changes when you truly grasp that you’ll never have that old Christmas ever again. You can still have plenty good ones – and I have had some awesome and some terrible ones since 1998, or even since 2003 – but as with so many things in my life, the Killers have this one nailed:
i can see my mother in the kitchen, my father on the floor, watching television it’s a wonderful life
family all together, presents piled high, frost on all the windows what a wonderful night
cinnamon candles burning, snowball fights outside, smile below each nose and above each chin
so happy they found me
love was all around me
stomp my boots before I go back in