Every family has their Christmas traditions and mine is no different. Growing up my sister and I believed in Santa Claus, we had faith that, despite our sometimes bad attitudes, on the whole we were good kids which meant we should be rewarded with the toys we diligently selected from the Macy’s catalogue.
However what I remember most was every Christmas Eve, my parents, sister and I would sit on the couch in our pajamas after having gone to church, and watch the 1983 performance of the holiday Boston Pops Orchestra that my father taped off of PBS. John Williams was the conductor and led the Pops through the typical holiday favorites, at one point the audience (and us) would join in on a sing-a-long, Lorne Greene would read T’was the Night Before Christmas, and at the end Santa Claus (who my sister and I always insisted was the "real" Santa) would come through the back doors of Symphony Hall, give out candy canes on his way up to the podium, before brandishing Maestro Williams with a miniature E.T. in black tie holding a conductors baton. Every year it was the same, the same performance with audience members whose clothes and hairstyles began to look more and more dated as the years progressed.
As fate would have it, I ended up going to college right down the street from Symphony Hall, and every year my parents would say we would get tickets to the real thing, and every year we didn’t get around to it and said: "we’ll do it next year."
A few years ago, my sister and I feeling too old to be bothered with sitting through yet another performance, muttering things like "this is lame," while texting friends from our cell phones, watched distractedly until my parents gave up and turned it off. The next morning the old 1983 tape was accidently taped over, and the look of loss in my mother’s eyes had been acute. Looking back I know it wasn’t just the pain of losing this old recording that each of us had by that point memorized, rather, she was mourning the loss of our childhoods, of time, of the past parts of our lives that you only recognize you can’t ever get back again until you lose something real.
Of course after I lost my mother and last year being the first Christmas without her, I felt compelled to try to reclaim something my family had lost. I made calls, left countless messages and emails with the main offices of Symphony Hall until finally, just five days before Christmas, a woman in their offices on Massachusetts Avenue in Boston wrote me back. She told me that my story touched the hearts of everyone in their office, that it's the reason they keep doing their holiday concerts, and she would overnight me the tape. So, there we were on Christmas Eve, my Dad, sister and I watching it tearfully in the painful emptiness of the living room that was now showing us the one thing we took for granted the most - time.
The thing is, every year it’s the same and every year we buy presents and spend too much money and lose our minds while losing sight of what really matters. We grow up and grow bitter and let ourselves forget that at the end of the day we’re all packing and traveling and gift-giving because of the people in our lives that we love driven by the hopeful idea that something small, like an old recording of a concert, can bring a family together. We say "as soon as," and "next time," and "next year," when we know we shouldn’t be wasting another minute. We stop believing, in people and the innocence of youth, and become accustomed to coming home to certain things that once are gone leave holes in our hearts no amount of time can repair.
They say you can’t go home again, but we all keep going home every year to a place that constantly changes, a concept that means different things to each of us in different parts of our lives. But it’s important to remember as we go home and start to count down the final days of yet another year, of time continuing to get away from us, the memories of how things used to be, and the realization that in the end not everything has to become lost.
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