Christmastime Vows, 2010

I woke up this morning with a Christmas song in my head. It wasn’t one of my favorite carols or something I can remember hearing recently by happenstance. It’s the one that goes: “Rocking around the Christmas tree, have a hap-py hol-i-day. Everyone dancing merrily in the new-old-fash-ioned waaaay.” I can’t pinpoint the place or time I would have known these lyrics, but Christmastime works like that, infiltrating your senses and traditions layer by layer, year after year, as you grow up and move around and create traditions of your own.

The oddness of this makes a little more sense if you know that Ryan and I are skipping Christmas this year. It’s entirely too hard to think about celebrating what would have been Lorenzo’s first Christmas with us. It’s too much to think about getting on an international flight and bouncing between our two local families and maintaining an upbeat attitude as we catch up with more people than we’ve socialized with in an entire year. As selfish as it may sound, I don’t have the energy for that. I miss my family and I’m still trying to figure out a way to shrink the world so we can all see each other more often, but this year and this holiday are different than all the others that have come before and there’s no denying it. And beyond Christmas itself, I think you can understand why Ryan and I are eager for a new year to begin.

We’re still acknowledging the holidays, but we’re toning it down and doing so on our terms. We’re renting a car and driving south just about as far as you can comfortably travel by car here, to Chile’s Lake District. And we’re driving because we’re taking Ruby! It’s her first Christmas and she is a big part of our family now, and Ryan and I want to spend this time with her, too. So, I went in search of “pet-friendly accommodations,” which is more of an oxymoron here in Chile than it is back in the States, but I found a couple of cabañas that don’t mind, provided we follow a few basic rules. That we can do. Boarding her over the holidays this year is what we couldn’t do.

So the Pardinis are hitting the road! The luxury of traveling by car for once is that we can pack all that we need, and we can really see this country as we travel through it. I’ve expressed before that there’s a Chile I want to see that doesn’t have anything to do with Santiago. It has everything to do with nature and fresh air and clear lakes and volcanoes and maybe even penguins! How amazing that we can also show it all to our little Chilena Ruby Girl. And while that may buck traditions like decorating a tree or decking the halls, that feels pretty special and family-focused and, hey, we’ll be surrounded by more tall green trees than we’ve seen in ages.

Our anniversary also falls between Christmas and New Year’s, so that will mean Ryan and I can honor that day without having to carve more time away from the people we travel so far to see when we’re typically home for the holidays. This year, we need that. We need to remember what we felt like nearly two years ago when we, surrounded by all those people we’re going to miss this year, committed our hearts and our lives to one another.

We never could have known what kind of challenges we would face so soon into our marriage. We never could have had a conversation then about what we would do if a fatal illness befell our first child. You may think you can have those conversations with someone, but you can only converse on the surface of the water, in the little boat you’re floating along in when your love is relatively new and uncomplicated and the challenges are still invisible to you. You don’t know what’s going to tip the boat or what you’re going to have to swim through to get back to solid land with somebody. And Ryan and I have swum through the thick of it together. It’s a journey we’ll always be on to some extent, and I can’t say we’re on anything like solid land yet. But we’re swimming. We’re swimming our committed hearts out, and we need to take a little rest together.

So if you need to skip Christmas one year, Chile might just be the perfect place to do it. Of course, they celebrate here, too. But it’s a summertime holiday. It’s not even the biggest holiday of the year—that’s reserved for the dieciocho. Plus, we’re just about as far from the North Pole as possible. So Santa and all the rest feel like something that happens at another time of year, not now, not in December with Chile’s reliable sun high in the sky.

But I suppose, even with all that, I can still wake up with a Christmas tune running through my head. As much as you want to avoid something, it has a way of reminding you it’s there because it always has been, even when you’re so very far away.

So, Happy Holidays, everyone. Thank you for supporting us this year. Thank you for reading. Thank you for writing. Thank you for listening. I didn’t write a Thanksgiving post this year or much of anything last month, and I might tell you why one of these days, but in the meantime please know how grateful I am for all of you and that I hope you dance merrily and have a hap-py hol-i-day.