The warm Christmas. It’s a fascination of most northerners, for whom spending Christmas’ in Northern Michigan with 30 inches on the ground was a normal experience. At some point certain holiday rituals become part of the DNA. Gathering wood for a nice long Christmas fire. Preparing wassail, hot chocolate, or mulled wine. Whatever warmsy drink you prefer. Venison from the Thanksgiving hunt. The wind blowing through the coniferous forests that are so calming. Busy Christmas week last minute shopping, and not because you need anything. You just love being in the crowd and pretending that you’re in the old cities in the nineteenth century. Basically recreating the perfect Dickensian Christmas (and not the Nicholas Nickleby versions either!).
Those were so many of my Christmas’ that it was all that Christmas could be in my head, so having Christmas in Scottsdale during our 8-month stint in Arizona was fascinating to me. Taking Christmas photos is not a tradition for us, but when the tree is a cactus and I’m wearing shorts; yeah, gotta do that.
So as I lay here on Christmas Day in Fiji, on the tiny island of Malolo Lailai. the fan in my little bure is spinning in the laziest possible way, and it’s the only movement even close … so I lay there soaking in the air movement. As I hear Blue Christmas spitting out of the wireless Bluetooth speaker, my only connection to the modern world, the fan gets slower somehow, and everything is surreal.
I’m in an Agatha Christie novel. I can even match the characters from A Caribbean Mystery to these Australian, English, New Zealand, and a few European visitors … several wearing their perfect linen whites with Cuban hats. Some wear bikinis and dinner was only about 30% “proper” dinner attire instead of Miss Marple’s 100% adorned dinner companions. Still, 30% flabbergasted me, as we are living in 2015. I realized that I lived in a different age myself being so firmly in the 30%, as Eric popped the Christmas champagne cork and Ellie snapped her Christmas cracker.
The fan speeds up again and the tropical birds bring me out of my reverie.
Christmas in the South Seas …
Coconut and pineapple.
White linen.
Colonial.
Slow…
