A year ago, I was packing to go to London for a visa interview. The following night, I didn’t sleep. The time between receiving my approval notice in November 2013 and landing in the USA on January 11th of this year is honestly kind of a blur, and that’s fine, but it means that it’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to really put an occasion like Christmas in any real context.
If I remember rightly, Christmas last year was quiet, but pleasant enough. Things have faded a little in recent years - my relationship with my parents and my sister are as solid as ever, but the lines fade and fragment as soon as my extended family come up. When my grandmother on my Dad’s side started to forget things, I made a conscious, selfish decision to distance myself emotionally, leaving my parents in the lurch. My grandfather on my Mum’s side died a few years ago, and while we never visited him for Christmas (even though we went up to see him around that time on occasion), there was always something about him that gave off that festive aura. He laughed a lot, and was infinitely generous, and kept his hair until the end. Of all my relatives, he’s the one I regret not getting to know better. We were the only people out of four generations who were left-handed.
There are aunts and uncles and cousins, but over the last few years they were cast adrift - either through familial disputes, or geographic expanse - and so last year, most of the day was the four of us, all legally adults, quietly smiling in a quiet house. It was a good day.
Really, though, all I could think about was moving. And then the year before that, I figured out in late December that there was no feasible way to bring Arden to the UK; it would be early January before we realized that the same problems wouldn’t arise if I moved to America. That was a bad year.
It is eight days until Christmas, and whatever the Christmas spirit is, I am feeling it this year. I have taken on a whole new family, without losing the one I already had. At work, people are putting in their Christmas orders all the time, and the playlist on the in-store radio (which I think is a satellite station, though I can’t be sure) has turned altogether more festive. I’ve had twice as much Christmas shopping to do this year, and for once I’ve had fun thinking of ideas. I am bursting at the seams with love, and it doesn’t feel complicated, or restrained, or awkward. One of the few American things that I am more than happy to embrace is the idea of wearing your heart on your sleeve; there are emotional politics with family and friends in the UK that were always a little perplexing to me.
At some point before midnight on December 31st, I will look back on this ridiculous year, where I suddenly found myself thousands of miles away from the place I grew up, married the person of my dreams, and started to slowly build a new life. Not tonight, but soon. There is so much to take stock of, and nothing resembling a convenient narrative. But I’ll manage something. I’ll debrief, somehow. I just need to get past the idea of not having turkey on Christmas Day, first.