C is for Christmas

I feel as though I blinked and the holiday season fell on top of me. It's a little bit like that every year, really. I wait and wait and wait for my birthday at the end of November, and then before I know it, it's Christmas again. This was ideal when I was a little kid and always on the receiving end of the gift-giving, but as an adult, the process of finding and procuring presents is more than a little bit stressful.

In general, though, I love the trappings of the holiday season, Christmas carols (C is for Christmas carols), great food, tree-trimming... My mom has the best tree, always strung with red and white lights and decorated with sand dollars and red plastic apples. The red and white stand out against the green tree and look lovely and elegant. My grandmother's tree has multi-colored lights on it, but it's decorated with an angel for every member of the family. Every year, I look through all the angels and remind myself which is which. I think it's an awesome tradition.

I think that I fall victim to that common holiday failing, expecting Christmas to be perfect. I'm very set in my routine, in that regard: Christmas trees should be natural; they should be decorated the way we always decorate them; the angel ornaments should be lined up just so. Christmas dinner should involve Turkey and brocolli-cheese casserole. It just should. Why? Because it always has. The loss of my great-grandmother -- it's been almost nine years ago, now, which is hard enough in itself for me to believe -- was the biggest blow to our holiday traditions, and for the first few Christmases after she died, I had a really hard time reconciling the Christmas we had with "our" Christmas. Eventually, I imagine I'll be starting my own Christmas traditions, which should ameliorate my dislike of changing traditions, and then all should be fine.

C is also for Claudia, who is my best friend and roommate. She's finishing up her PhD in anthropology this year (we hope). She's a little nutty and kind of eccentric at times, but we generally get along pretty well. We met my second year of grad school, and the first year of her PhD program. I took her home for Thanksgiving that first year, and she quickly became assimilated into my big crazy family. A couple of years ago, she even got her very own angel on my grandmother's tree.

Claudia was away for over a year, doing field research for her dissertation in Romania. It's been a bit of a challenge to get used to having a roommate again, but I think that overall, it's better for my mental health. When she came back to the U.S., one of the first things we did was travel down to Corpus Christi to see my family.

C is also for Corpus Christi, the place I grew up. When my mom was a kid, her dad was in the Navy and they moved around quite a lot. She wanted more stability for me, and sure enough, I went to school with a lot of the same kids from first grade all the way through high school. I love Corpus Christi a lot, in the way that one loves a hometown. When I'm home for the weekend, there's never enough time for me to see all the things I want to see, or to eat the foods I want to eat, but occassionally, it occurs to me how very boring it seemed to me growing up. It's a lovely city to visit, and I'm especially looking forward to taking Scott there and showing him everything I love about it.

Last year, while Claudia was away, it snowed in Corpus Christi on Christmas Eve. A white Christmas in Corpus Christi -- we didn't know what to do with ourselves! Such a thing hadn't happened before in anyone's memory. It was crazy and magical, but I'm hoping it doesn't happen again this year, because I need to drive back to Austin that day. Maybe Corpus Christi could settle for a white New Years Eve instead.