When Jamie was eight years old, her family loaded into their eight-seater suburban and drove to the neighborhood on the west side of town, where the neighbors had decided either collectively or in an act of bizarre subconscious unity of the mind, to cover their yards in the biggest spectacle of lights, red and green and on every branch of every tree.
Like always, she was subjected to the middle seat between her bickering older siblings, as though her body could stop their fighting, the Berlin Wall in the shape of a little girl. She didn’t mind tonight because it meant she had the view through the windshield to see the lights and Christmas didn’t always mean much in her family but tonight it would mean something. Tomorrow they would eat pancakes and take turns opening gifts from Santa and she would feel her stomach clench as she heard the muffled arguing of her parents from the kitchen.
Later, her therapist would tell her that her stomach never untwisted and her shoulders never loosened because she learned in her early days to be on alert. She supposed it was why she picked at her lips til they bleed and why she could never get a deep enough breath and why her heart rate never dropped below 80 beats per minute.
When she was twelve years old, they went to their last candlelit service as a family, and they stood shoulder to shoulder in an aisle towards the front, a brave facade of a happy family. There was some magic in the air when the church turned the lights out and when the priest began singing Silent Night, solo and without accompaniment, and when he placed his candle against a candle in the front row and the lit wick flickered against the white of their wick until it caught flame. She wondered why her family couldn’t pass peace around the way the light was spread that night; she didn’t even ask for love anymore, just peace.
When Christmas came this year, she realized that it felt like more than just a holiday. Every year seemed to add to the weight in her chest and now she drove her own old, eight-seater suburban between the mountains she lived in, Bruce Springsteen echoing through the radio. Jamie and her siblings had spread out, away from a childhood home and she felt the ache at Christmas time, not because they’d ever had particularly festive holidays but because the air here seemed to take on a quality of love. She wondered sometimes if they all just came and stood up here in the mountains and breathed in, if they’d learn how to love each other.
Over the summer, her father had died. It was something with his lungs, weak from asthma and cigarettes and lies. She hadn’t seen him in years and now while she walked under the Christmas lights on Main Street, she wondered if she would ever get over it. She wondered if Christmas could ever be recovered, if St. Nick was strong enough to bring her family together, if thirty-two years was too old to still be wishing for Santa Claus to bring her some magic.
Death smelled like her 1999 Toyota Camry, a spilled Taco Bell Baja blast and sand from the beach, cigarettes and the cast of a broken wrist. The funeral had been short and awkward, mostly because she and her siblings didn’t really know who he was and more than that, they barely knew each other. In a drunken moment the night before the funeral, they’d all decided to spend the holiday together, solidarity like the neighbors that all decked out the street in lights. It hadn’t happened and instead she filled the post office box with letters and spent the holiday alone.
She knew how death smelt and she could tell you what it looked like too, the womb of a thirty-two year old woman in the 21st century when medicine was at its height and infertility was at 50%. Some years it would feel like the world was taunting her, young foxes springing out on the trail in front of her and her siblings filling their homes with babies but she also didn’t want to believe in a world like that, so she shrugged it off and kept walking down the trail. She was glad for it, mostly, because she’d never had to question if she wanted to introduce her dad to his granddaughter and she never had to figure out if god was real or Santa himself. But she also wondered what her Christmas tree would’ve looked like with toys wrapped instead of the handful of gifts from her mom and closest friends.
On the ski hill, trees were covered in bead necklaces and bras and when December arrived ornaments covered the trees near the base and Santa hats showed up to top them. It reminded her of her earliest Christmases when they lived in New Orleans and they used the beads from Mardi Gras to decorate their tree. If she let herself drift for a moment she could almost remember the feeling of her father lifting her up to reach the upper branches and how their house would fill with the smell of cinnamon rolls and orange icing. When they moved back east, after her parents split, her grandfather, the one on her mother’s side, would take them to the local Episcopalian church on Christmas Eve. He treated it like it was holy so they all did too, and after the service was over, all the candles lit, and they were back in the dark car, he’d say in his gravely voice,
“There isn’t room for much these days but a little bit of hope,”
And she’d believe him.
She still believed it, as she came over the mountain pass, the crescent moon rising behind the row of pines on the ridge, Bruce Springsteen playing again on her radio, and the crisp air feeling nothing like the holidays and everything like love.
Breckenridge, Colorado based writer, Claire Griffis, has been creating in various forms ever since she was a young girl. She has collections of journals and sketchbooks full of her early drawings and writings that her mother saved, and in the years since, she has never stopped creating. Claire’s writing focuses on the natural environment around her while exploring the inner world through short form prose and poetry. Her secondary art form is landscape and abstract acrylic paintings, utilizing vibrant color and detailed texture. Claire is passionate about the beauty of the world around us, and the stories that we all have to tell, about the magic of the world and the wilderness that is within each of us.
In her time away from art, Claire works at the Breckenridge Outdoor Education Center where she helps run adaptive outdoor recreation for individuals with disabilities. She spends her free time hiking, climbing, rafting, and getting inspiration for her next piece of work. playing again on her radio, and the crisp air feeling nothing like the holidays and everything like love.
Academy of the Heart And Mind 