Noticing A Bit Of Christmas

i noticed Christmas for the first time this month. Which is a bit sad to me, because i usually like to begin celebrating Christmas incredibly early, so that by the time it is over i really feel like i have experienced Christmas. This year, the Christmas season all seems to be passing in a blur. It scares me when life moves so fast that it becomes a blur. There is so much that i could have experienced...that i may actually have experienced...but it all went so fast that i didn't have much time to notice any of it. i'm not sure how to react when i can see that i am missing what is happening right in front of me.

i walked around downtown Windsor Ontario tonight with my sister. The trees in one section have all been decorated with Christmas lights and Christmas designs, making a sort of Christmas Light Garden, complete with paths that you can walk on winding their way all through the different trees. Lights strung above, below, and all around. You can get right up close to it all, let yourself become surrounded by the sparkling garden. On the other side of the Christmas Light Garden is a skating rink, also decorated with some Christmas lights, and with speakers that play fuzzy Christmas music into the not-so-silent downtown air. We tried skating on the ice for a little while, but it wasn't very fun after about a minute since we were only wearing our shoes, not skates. Besides, we weren't exactly dressed for the cold air either, seeing as how we had just gone hot-tubing.

Looking around it all seemed very cheap to me, very made up, very created. Kind of like a carnival, all the lights and sounds and whirring rides. It all seemed so glitzy, so fabricated. But it made me smile. Because at the same time it was so classic, so sublimely unmarred in its Christmas-ness that i have become so accustomed to. It is true that i am a person who rarely finds anything a city has to offer spectacular. The man-made formulations that make up the entity of a city usually repel me, and even irritate me. Except at Christmas. For some reason at this time of the year, i embrace the fabricated dream world, for all its cheap glitziness. The streetlights illuminating falling snow, the christmas lights decorating every erected building, the christmas music floating out of sidewalk speakers, people hurrying, busy yet peaceful all at once. And silver bells and sleigh bells, and warm roasted almonds being sold by street vendors, and pine trees and angels and stars and glowing nativity scenes outside every catholic church. It all speaks of what Christmas has become, and even though i often wonder about it all...it still means Christmas, the familiar and safe Christmas that i have grown up becoming used to, and relying on.

Safe, familiar, something i can rely on. These words are slowly becoming meaningless to me. Life is showing me more and more that these words are simply what they are: words. So i guess for all its fakeness, i still cling to Christmas because it is something familiar and something safe and something reliable and something concrete and something faithful. i guess we always cling on to fakeness, all sorts of fakeness, for those very reasons.

it was cold.
the blankets, cloaks, mittens couldn't - wouldn't - keep out the cold.
the snow, frozen, lay in icing sheets of white. they were black.
the snow queen had cast her spell.
winter's finger. jack frost.
ice princess.
angel perched eminently on the tree;
in the snow.