So this is Christmas

Move fast.  Wake on the couch with the left foot through a hole in the afghan.  Wake on the couch with the dry mouth and the sick stomach.  Move fast, slow-witted, move fast.

The chocolate pudding and the yogurt half-consumed and sticky in the bowl.  Move fast the spinning world.  Move fast.

But my arm is injured.  My arm is injured because pool cues are not built to be broken.  And I am moving slow.  This slow moving with things to do, with things to do, with things to do today on Christmas Eve.

So?  Get out and go.  I run errands in the much too earliness.  To Videomart, to Blockbuster, to Alice in Videoland.  To each of the video stores collecting Christmas videos.  Collecting DVD disks for the holidays, and already I’m sweating through my shirt. 

Back to the flat.  Back to the flat to flat pack the backpack.  Then to drive to the store.  On the way out of town to drive to the store to buy perishable presents for the girls.  The girls already on the way to Kaikoura.  And I’ve got to go.  I’ve got to get out and go.  But it’s all too slow.

In the squeal of wheels around the round-a-bout, in the haste of an exit poorly planned, I drive an hour in the wrong direction.  Gas guzzled now hanging in the atmosphere.  Gas guzzled by pistons still gulping as I tear out of the Shell Station with a new sense of direction.  To back track the trail of burned petrol.

Through the city streets and it is Blastoff once I hit Highway 1.  North toward Kaikoura and toward the Mountains.  North along the coast and into the hill country rising.  North toward the  promise of a sun-tanned Christmas.  Swerve around the slow movers because now—and only now—am I moving fast.

The Corolla my tool and I am building a bridge from Christchurch to Kaikoura.  With a speedometer and a steering wheel.  With a clutch and a stick.  And it is pedal to the metal.  Move fast.

But I don’t arrive until four p.m.  Swerve into the gravel at 118A South Bay Parade.  And all of a sudden there are Carolina beach babes in the summer sun.  All of a sudden.  Before my eyes, in the land south of the south, there are familiar faces.  Here.  These faces here are familiar faces here in this alien place.  And Oh!  How absolutely and how absolutely undeniably gorgeous a smile can be. 

A smile on a freckled face.  These freckles.  Oh!  These freckles here are the leopard-print snare of the fashionably good-looking.  A print to go with any print.  Or maybe.   Maybe they are instead the dark snowflakes of some Santa Clause Cupid.  Maybe they were thrown and thrown haphazardly by some randy St. Nickolas .  Thrown into the shining sun of the summer Christmas, as he swerves through the sky in his love sled.  Love.

It is a snapshot in a postcard.  This re-greeting in paradise.  And the season is upon us.

We rush to the grocery store before the automatic doors can slide shut on the Christian consuming.  Ingredients packed into the shopping cart and boy is it bustling here in the Countdown as we countdown the moments until holiday proper.  We’re on our way.

In the checkout we ask if we have enough.

And Holy Hell that question is answered soon enough.  And it is answered emphatically with the unbuckling of belts and the buttons unbuttoned, these exclamations from everyone in the aftermath of the Christmas Eve Chow Down.  What was to be the “appetizer dinner” turned out to be a full meal.  And a half.

Rap:

A feast of corn chips and guacamole, corn chips and queso,

Corn chips and salsa, let’s pick up the pace.  Yo,

There were crackers with cream cheese, pepper jelly dyed red,

And stuffed mushrooms zesty that went straight to the head.

There were cherries and strawberries beside sugar in bowls,

And cookies, sweet cookies, that we felt in the soul.

Pair it all with a goon and some bottles of wine,

And sit down to the set-up.  Yes, it’s time to dine.

Yes, it’s time to dine.  And before the sun sets on Christmas Eve we are too full for the wine to take effect.  Yes, we are sleepy-eyed slouching on the sofas. 

How the Grinch Stole Christmas in a Technicolor funk fest across the television.  Something is wrong, the colors distorted.  But we all watch on, too lazy to do anything about it.  Now the belt unbuckling and the buttons unbuttoned.  Dr. Seuss painted in day-glow pixilation, and too soon it is time for bed.

Only to wake with distended bellies and begin cooking once again.  “So this is Christmas.”  The water outside set on fire by the sun.  And already the fire balloon drifts high in the sky.  Shirtless, shoeless.  Shades on the face and swimsuit wearing.  Sun pilgrims after three-egg omelets packed fat with veggies, after an epic fail at hash browns—these black fritters, fried, baked, and woofed down despite the hard crack of the outer-shell crunch and the liquid hot magma of the mush in the middle.  Sun pilgrims after Miracle on 34^th Street.  After another batch of cookies popped into the oven.  Sun pilgrims.  “So this is Christmas.”

We sit on South Bay.  The batch backing up to the water’s edge, the small black-pebble beach as a barrier.  Mountains across the water west and mountains all around us.  The point and shoot Sony digital camera does not do it justice, the scene.  The scene liquid and living.  The mountains and the sea.  It is drama, this landscape.  It is once again paradise.  Paradise out the backdoor of the batch and seagulls soaring in the sunset.  Merry Christmas.

But it does not feel like Christmas at all.  The full stomach, yes.  But everything else is a farce.  It is sunshine and sweating here.  It is pop-music, rock-music, rap-music on the radio.  Where are the Christmas Jams?  It is swimsuits and a cookout for dinner.  Potato wedges and hamburgers.  This is the tradition here in the Land of the Long White Cloud.  And it is fun to participate.  Yes.  But it does not feel like Christmas.

Top Gun more appropriate than It’s a Wonderful Life, we watch Tom Cruise speed-needing on a local television channel while Jimmy Stewart sits caged in a rented DVD case.  This is just the way it works.  And it does not feel like Christmas. 

But it feels like something else.  Here in the gloaming, the seagulls soaring in the sunset.  The soft glow of the paradise postcard viewed through the sliding-glass door.  It is something else.  A family of Carolina ex-patriots, some of us missing home, some of us happy not to be there, but all of us together.  Feeling fat and happy in the rented house on the summer sea.  Lazy and languid on couches sprawled.  It is something else.  And the fact that we are all here makes it A-O.K.