SAME TIME NEXT YEAR

kasie

By Kasie Whitener

Writing during the holidays is hard. It may be that we have less time at home because there are more parties and special events to attend, or road trips to take. It may be because we have less time to ourselves when children and spouses are on vacation and relatives are in town.

Maybe it’s difficult to write during the holidays because we feel that end-of-year drawing near and start looking back at what we’ve been able to accomplish. There may be a sense of urgency toward finishing something that’s been lingering. Maybe the weight of unmet goals. Sometimes the end of the year brings with it a kind of momentum, a rush and hurry that can rob us of the quiet reflection we need for creation.

The holidays also carry the weight of memory. Like a scent we’ve forgotten until it wafts into our nostrils, the holidays can force us to recall traditions, images, sounds, and lights. The carols and the performances are heady experiences, thick with prior years’ joy. It can be difficult to feel original when everything seems soaked in ritual.

For me, writing over the holidays is challenging for all of these reasons. The days are filled with task lists I don’t usually have, errands I don’t normally run, people I don’t often see. The plans we make dominate the season, and I’m on an adjusted schedule consisting of kid-home-from-school, visiting relatives, and special-occasion meals.

I often reflect at the end of the year on what I’ve been able to accomplish and start making plans for the next year’s efforts. This process puts creation of new stories in a kind of limbo where they don’t count toward last year’s tally but they aren’t quite next year’s work.

My writing is most often a victim of nostalgia. Since achieving certain milestones in life, I have become more nostalgic in general. But the holidays put a magnifying glass over that habit. In the weeks surrounding Christmas, I have perfect specimens for comparison. What kind of tree did we have last year? When did we put it up? What did we watch on TV while we did it?

I keep a Christmas Journal, have since Charlie and I were married in 2001, and in its pages are the specifications of every Christmas for the last 17 years. Where we went, who we visited, what we gave, what we received. It’s both a wonderful scrapbook of family memories and a terrible albatross. In it I can read the varying shades of joy, excitement, and gratitude. But threaded in there, too, are the traces of hurry and obligation and disappointment. This year the entry is particularly soaked in loss and grief.

I’m glad for the start of the new year. A chance to refocus my writing life on goals and achievements in 2019. A chance to go back to the beginning instead of being trapped in the end, that familiar dance of ritual and memory, that weighs December down.