The Ghosts of Christmas Present

Finding richness in the unseen

Paris Mountain at sunset

Christmas Presents

I’m posting this week’s musings in Stable Roots a day early because it feels silly to talk about Christmas the day after the event just because I love order and consistency and can’t abide change.

Also, I did Charles Dickens a disservice when I mentioned I was tired of him. Sorry, Charles — I’m making up for it this week with a nod to you in the title. Dickens was the master of producing serialized writing, leading the way for peons like me to arrive in your inbox every Thursday (or Wednesday). We have a lot to thank him for in the mass production of story.

We’ve taken Christmas down a notch in the farmhouse. We sourced a tree from the fence line and the decorations are up, but we’ve taken the pressure away from gifting each other extravagantly. Experiences and presence are at the top of our wish lists.

Speaking of wish lists, Daniel Rueda and his family in Swannanoa, NC lost their house, their belongings, their vehicle, and tools for working when Hurricane Helene cut a path through their community. Daniel posted an Amazon wishlist and was slayed on the internet for listing something as frivolous as a drone. How dare he have wants instead of needs?

What people didn’t understand was that he needed the drone for his construction business. Tamar Reno and I spoke about his story — a drop in the bucket of stories from the mountains — on a recent episode of my podcast. Tamar’s wish was that Daniel would receive a drone and that need was fulfilled by someone from our beloved farm community. I cannot thank them enough. I went from feeling meh about the Christmas season to being all fired up.

This is the sort of present that matters, now, in the present. How can we show up in the here and now and be of some service?

Here are links to ways you can help Daniel Rueda’s family rebuild their lives: Amazon Wishlist and GoFundMe.

And here is a link to my ever-changing list of other people who need your help as they rebuild their entire lives after the destruction of Hurricane Helene.

In this week’s post, I’m sharing three views of the holidays and how the present, our presence, and the prescience of the unseen work together to weave a web of connection in the world.

Let’s get started.

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A view from the ring.

And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?
—Walt Whitman

Present

Night roads in the country remind me of the limitations of my vision. The headlights reveal just enough to move me forward one illuminated stretch at a time.

It’s Christmas Eve and I slow my car to watch a woman pull a long stretch of water hose across the narrow street to a pasture fenced in sagging wire and hickory posts.

This woman and I once shared barn space together, our herds mingled, she knows me better than my family. We’ve not spoken in years because the raw places in my heart brushed against the metal of her rightness and ignited in a slow burn of resentment. That’s how the cycles keep spinning with the planets. We’re still convinced our sun is at the center of the universe because that’s all we can see.

My headlights blind her. She can’t see who is behind the wheel.

I could dim my lights, pull over on the wide, winter-grass shoulder of the road, help her water the far pasture. I’ve walked this land since I was newly made, filled with stories and yearning, spending an hour with a dragging halter trying to catch my horse. I can feel my way through it in the dark.

I could tell her how frustrated I was, how sorry I am. In farms, olive branches come wrapped in help.

I could tell her that my temper is a form of protection, that it’s the sharp, barbed fence I use to keep my uncatchable horses safe. If I can’t tame them, I can hold them.

I watch her move beyond the edges of the headlights to the gate I know by the rough touch of rust, the chain that will slip from her fingers and drop to the ground.

There will be time.

There will be time to ask for her forgiveness.

There will be time.

I wait for the movement in the water hose to settle and the gate to close behind her before I creep the car slowly forward and drive away.

The time to offer the olive branch of help is the present. I recently learned of Marilyn Wrenn’s passing. I did eventually speak to her — we picked up as if nothing had happened, but I regret not stopping to offer help watering the far pasture that Christmas Eve. I regret not being brave enough to say I’m sorry. Deep peace to you, Marilyn.

Presence

It’s like speeding through red lights to reach the party at the same time I’d arrive if I went the speed limit. This is what Christmas feels like — the part I begrudgingly agree to attend. If I rush through it, I can speed home to sit still.

The pressure — to buy and to be and to perform.

Holiday parties were jewels of the seasonal crown when my family was alive and together. Together can have many meanings.

We dressed and packaged and arrived to houses, restaurants, offices. The decorated trees, pre-strung in their cardboard storage boxes smelled musty and bound like old books, fiberglass flecked from the attic. I picked the tinsel apart with my fingers — every strand placed in just the right spot.

Christmas taught me the bone-deep urgency to produce, how this could become a way of being when cooked with a precise pinch of expectation.

How wrapping paper is rolled in lineage, the cheap pieces easy to tear and wrinkle, the expensive fibers thick against my hands and straining to bounce back into its memory, a paper cut reminder of the sharp cost of blood.

I don’t dress for Christmas anymore, but when I did, I started early. Little velvet dresses and patent leather shoes that pinched my heels. I understood that pain was important to beauty, that the bow on the package needed to be perfect before it was unwrapped and discarded.

But there was only so much my feet could stand. As the crowds thinned to murmurs in the corners of the rooms, I’d kick my shoes off and stalk a path to the hair tonic and whisky of my grandfather.

I don’t remember specifics of gifts or guests or conversations, but I remember this with detail that has been sewn into my hems — my sock feet on top of his polished shoes as I leaned into his legs and danced with him.

I remember time with my grandfather, his attention to my questions, the box step of us moving together, the wire-handled box of fortunes in my small hand, his presence a gift to my future.

The willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.
—Samuel Tayler Coleridge

Prescience

I don’t dress for Christmas anymore. Instead, I stalk a path down to the barn at midnight wrapped in the memory of a language I never learned. Horses don’t tell time, but they get by just fine without it.

The old stories marvel at the miracle of animals talking at midnight on Christmas Eve, the darkness leading to the light of morning, a throwback to the manger, and the wise men traversing deserts to gift rich resins to divine inspiration.

The legend of speaking animals goes back to Roman Saturnalia — a solstice feast where roles are reversed. My Turkish ex-in-laws celebrated with costume parties of switched-gender outfits before the holy January of Gregorian Christmas.

Dark becomes light.

Fear becomes hope.

Christ arrives with a promise.

The seasons shift.

If our stories are primary colors, the ingredients simmered down to a roux, what does it mean when our holidays are not an obligation of pantomimed abundance?

When do the animals speak? Because I want to be there.

There’s frost on the fallen tree limbs and the inky sky is dull with starlight filtering through the city glow. Deer graze the kitchen scraps on the compost pile. A doe watches me curiously, a spiral of tangerine peel hanging from her delicate lips.

The horses are sleeping, some lying some standing. Their eyes slip open as they hear my steps. A blow, a snort, a cough.

“Please talk to me,” I say to the herd, a gathering I’ve never had to dress for. “I’ve brought you peppermints.”

The plastic crinkle of the wrapper brings the barn into full wakefulness. Bribery/gifts — dark/light — two sides of the same offered coin, a token for the ferryman.

I sit on a mounting block step and wait.

The air is colder when my body is motionless. “This is where I’m at —” I say to the barn, “I want to learn your language but Rosetta Stone doesn’t offer a course. I need you to dumb it all down for me.”

Frequencies are my life’s blood. Radios built my family — information crossing through the unseen. I suspect that hearing the horses works in the same way, but I’ve swam too long in science to be conscious of the mystery when it comes.

I settle into my breath and listen to the warm air through the horses’ soft nostrils — touch and sense and faith. I’m hungry for miracles, but I suspect we all are right now, each of us craving toward the divine light of inspiration.

A horse lowers her head and reaches toward me. I stretch my hand out and offer a peppermint. There is understanding in the milky current of this exchange.

“I’ll work on listening better,” I say, or I will learn to listen differently, listening with my skin and breath and teeth, in the atmosphere that descends on a place where a herd of any type gathers. I will lean into it all and listen.

Maybe the magic isn’t in the tangible but is nestled somewhere in the promise.

Maybe we find it when we stop looking.

The deer steps deeper into the forest and I watch my breath in the space between my world and theirs. Knowledge, like mist, is porous, moving, present.

There is no actual mention in the Bible of animals being present at Christ’s birth. We’ve collectively added them into the mangers of our memory, or maybe we’ve always known that the animals have a deeper sense of the mystery than we have learned to grasp.

Animals see what is in front of them. Animals don’t talk themselves out of believing. Animals listen with their hair and skin and feet.

Animals read the frequencies.

As midnight passes into the early hours of Christmas morning, I realize I don’t need a miracle to prove my belief. Faith works beyond science.

And as for the animals talking — when my thoughts and questions quieten past the crashing waves of my expectations, I realize that they’ve been speaking to me all along.

But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.
— Luke 2:19

I’m sending you so much love this Christmas

I wish you presents, the present, presence, and prescience this holiday season. I’ve even made a Christmas card — as evidenced above.

I might have been married before, but this is the first time I’ve wanted to stick it on a Christmas card. And THAT is how I know he is the right one.

In all seriousness, I get a lot of comments from strong, beautiful women who believe balanced, mature, safe love is a myth.

I had given up looking.

It’s absolutely okay to not want anything to do with finding someone and to build your life fundamentally around your wisdom. We don’t have to be with another person to have a rich existence.

But if you’re looking, you don’t have to buy the expectations, fabrications, and myths that we’ve been sold about who the perfect partner is.

Mine was right beside me my entire life and I was too blinded by dogma to see him — until he patiently waited for me to accept what he offered.

I talk about this and six thousand other things here at Stable Roots. And you can find the first chapter of my love story here (with links to lead you through the other chapters).

On this Christmas, I wish you peace and a felt-sense of your inner light. Your body knows its truth. Your spirit is ready to nourish you. Your mind is ready to be transformed by the awe of the nature.

There is still magic in this world.

Let’s find it together.

Love,
Kim