Christmas 25

A good Christmas morning to reader(s) of Stroock's books across the Christian world. Anybody getting up to anything interesting today? 

We write this from the home in which we grew up. We write this post every Christmas morning. Here we go again.

We got here late afternoon yesterday. Our father wanted Chinese for dinner. He's one of those old people who likes to turn in early, so by 9 PM we had the place to ourselves (this is also a Seinfeld gag). We watched an episode of Star Trek TOS then Star Trek TNG. Then we watched a couple of episodes of Arrested Development, as is our wont. We really need to put that show away for a year or two. 

This house is a rock in the sea of time. Things stopped here about 20 years ago, maybe 15, if reader(s) know what we mean. While nothing here is falling apart, most things here are old. The TV cabinet is a time capsule from the mid-90s. Lying within is Ken Burns' Baseball, and a special commemorative box set of Gettysburg, both in VHS. Our father's bookshelf is similarly filled with books from the mid-90s; Matalin & Carville's All's fair, Don Imus' God's Other Son, Bill Gates' The Road Ahead. As we write this our father is watching FB AI slop on his phone. 

Tiny rocks of our past are scattered about the house. The shelf in our old closet looks about like it did when we moved out in 1995. There's a United States Senate legal pad we brought back from our internship that summer. Our college textbooks are on the bookshelf. Older rocks are on the shelf too. A baseball card album we put together in 1988. A small box containing some Star Wars figures and led miniatures. A few of these Star Wars figures are vintage 1977 editions, when you had to buy the box and mail in the proof of purchase. In a dining room drawer lies our high school graduation cap, a Polaroid of us walking the stage, and curiously, our 5th grade report Maine: the Pinetree State. Amazingly Fischer Price construction toys, first set out under the porch in 1980, remain there. 

Our parents bought this house in 1979. Our father is determined to stay. It's home, he says, why not? We ourselves have lived in our home for 20 years now. This year we've thought about how much longer we'd like to stay. In ten years we suppose it's a conversation. Youngest Daughter will be out of the house by then. That we've no idea where we'd go is not the point. Our grandparents unloaded the house they bought in 1946 in 1995. Almost 40 years. The old bastard was 72 at the time. In another 20 years we'll be 72. This sounds about right, no? 

As with every year the ghosts of Christmas past get us. We recall Christmas mornings here. Why right over there is the spot where we opened the Coleco Vision in 1982. That was the last Christmas we spent at home for a while. Next year, and almost every year till 2003 we went to Kentucky to spend Christmas with our mother's family. We drove, 900 miles in all. Later we flew. A difficult flight involving stop overs in Pittsburgh on the way to Evansville Indiana, about an hour from our ancestral home of Livermore. Here's the US Air safety video we saw, like six times in 1996. After a while we were mesmerized. 

After the last of the close Kentucky relatives were gone, our grandmother's younger sister, she was the family matriarch, we spent Christmas with our grandfather....at the Algonquin. There's a reason why the Algonquin shows up in World War 1990: Operation Arctic Storm. And just you people wait till the second Ireland novel. The Algonquin is MI-6's base of operations against the IRA in NY. 

The Algonquin tradition ended with our grandfather's death in 2018. As is this blog's tradition, here's our grandfather's last Christmas at the Algonquin, a restaurant his grandfather took him to in the 1920s and '30s.* A place he loved. A place where his beloved second wife performed. Won't some kind soul click over? 

The ghosts of Christmas future get us now too. What else will be gone in say, 2035? Who will be gone? Walking around our house in 2035, what will be the rocks in the sea of time? Children's books, high school yearbooks maybe. Children's artwork made by people in their mid to late 20s. They're not rocks. They're needles. Little needles stabbing us in remembrance of things past. 

*We knew it was his last Christmas. We think he knew it too. That's us holding the camera.