2000 was my third Christmas without my father. It was the second one spent in Alabama. I was single, and the Christmas season had just begun to make that feel like it might not be a good thing. And it wasn’t like past holidays, because my two closest high school friends had decamped to farther climes – so the old days of coming back and hanging out were done.
It was a tough time to be back home, fraught with memory and the realization that nothing would be the same. My brother was newly divorced and his one kid was less than two years old – not much to relate to. The whole house was awash in a dark cloud, and that was before taking into account the effects of the election. It was a cold, sad, grim week of sitting around waiting and wondering what the new world looked like. And Christmas Day was the worst – you unwrap presents, such as they are, you eat your biscuits and strawberries and watch the Blue-Gray Game, and then it’s 3 PM and there’s precious little to do but sit and be miserable and hope that someone – in a world where cellphones mostly don’t do SMS, wifi is almost nonexistent and social media as we know it IS nonexistent, where you need a laptop and a cable to plug it into when at home – will be online to chat.
But I gutted it out, got on the plane the next day and flew home to Northern Virginia. And remarkably, when I got there, I had communication from my two best friends in DC: we’re going down the pub. And so that night, I was with my friends in the Irish public house of our frequency, knocking down pints and singing along, and we had a grand old time.
It’s a useful reminder: you never know where life is going to go in the month after Christmas, and sometimes you just need to get by with a little help from your friends.