A different Christmas vision

JOSEPH N. BELL

I won’t be teetering on a ladder stringing Christmas lights on our

house this year. I won’t be bringing down three large boxes full of

Christmas accouterments from the rafters of our garage. The snow

scene will not be on our sideboard or the porcelain angels on our

piano. The only Christmas tree lot I’ll visit will be in Boulder,

Colo. And I’ll be sitting on an airplane Christmas Day, full of the

spirit -- but not the conventional vision -- of the season.

My wife and I violated the home-for-Christmas pattern once before

when I hired out as a speaker on a Cunard cruise that had us in the

Panama Canal on Christmas Day and the West Indies on New Year’s. We

had a fake tree in our room, Christmas music in the nightly floor

show and much too much to eat and drink. It was a mixed bag, and not

altogether successful. One of the high spots turned out to be a

technological miracle that delivered the Rose Bowl game to the TV in

our room when I was getting tired of cruising. So we went back to

following the rules after that -- until this year, that is, when we

will observe several Christmases and one Hanukkah, but none at the

politically correct time.

Last weekend, son Erik and daughter Patt -- along with two

delightful young women hungry for family who accompanied Erik --

shared our first 2003 Christmas with a mixed religious menu of roast

beef and latkes. The beef was grilled on a stunning surprise gift

from my two daughters: a magnificent new barbecue. They gave me a

less splendid model 10 years ago, which expired in the middle of

grilling a steak for guests last October. It just sort of turned up

its toes and disintegrated.

The new grill required some modest assembly, which I would have

struggled over the next day until I was told we needed the grill

immediately for the waiting beef. That was far too much stress for my

technical skills, so the visiting young women took over, put it

together and fired it up. I would have gotten there; it would just

have taken a little longer. No, a lot longer.

While you read this -- providing you’ve gotten this far -- I’ll be

flying to Denver where my other daughter, Debby, will pick me up and

drive me to Boulder. My younger grandson will be home from college,

and his older brother won’t be able to get away from his job in San

Francisco before I have to leave. This has been a regular visit for

almost 20 years. Now, the cast has changed drastically in Boulder,

but not the need to touch down there at Christmas. But this time, the

visit will be brief because I’ll need to get home to pack for France.

That’s where we’ll be going on Christmas Day. There will be

several days in Paris, and the rest of our time will be in Provence

at the home of our friends Howard and Francoise Appel. When we return

home, the neighborhood luminarias we will help assemble on Christmas

Eve will be long gone, the holiday lights will be back in their

boxes, and we will share a community sigh of relief that both the

pleasures and stresses of the holiday season are behind us for

another year.

Our trip to France is part of a mostly unwritten, unspoken sense

of time ricocheting by and the need to grasp and hold it whenever and

however possible. The Christmas message from our North Carolina pals,

one of whom is even older than I am, reflected this feeling. They

wrote: “As we age, days, months and seasons pass with blinding speed

... . We find some satisfaction in what we have done in years past.

We feel a certain sense of frustration in what we might have done,

and haven’t. But perhaps we’ll still do it.”

I can remember when time crept for me, when I prodded and cajoled

it to hurry up, in a lather of expectation of events and conquests,

real and imagined, ahead. You can chart it. Time picks up speed in

direct relation to increasing age. That’s the Bell Curve Theory of

Relativity.

The first time we want to put a chokehold on time usually

translates rather quickly into a determination to accelerate matters

of personal importance. Not in frenetic haste but in a kind of mellow

awareness. And that translates into working at seeing the people you

love more frequently than economic and workplace constrictions have

dictated in the past.

So we go to France, knowing that we will see these dear friends

again in the spring. Our Portland, Ore. friends will be coming to

visit in late January, and the North Carolinians a month later. In

between, I’m actually going to finish the Civil War novel I’ve been

writing ever since the battle of Gettysburg so I can get on to other

writings.

Meanwhile, I don’t kid myself that any electronic miracles will

bring me the Rose Bowl game this year. Not in France. But that’s a

small price to pay for the holiday joys ahead.

One of those joys will be a two-week vacation from this space --

for you and for me. So I’ll be seeing you again here on Jan. 8.

Meanwhile, I’ll tip one to you back in the States in the spirit of

Christmas and the promise of the new year.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.