Christmas, Actually

One day last week – a cold and rainy day when, mercifully, I had no reason to leave home – I thought of Christmas and a specific image came to me, thrown up on the screen of my memory like one of the green-tinged slides that document my childhood. My mother and I were walking down Main Street, shoe boxes under our arms, shopping bags dangling from our wrists, our chilled breath hovering in the air for just a moment before floating off into the gray sky.

And it wasn’t just a visual impression. I could feel the cold and I was looking up at my mother, not yet the four inches taller than she that I would eventually become. The collar of my coat was itchy. I could hear the traffic, smell the exhaust.

How odd that, for all the tinsel-lit stages from which my child self stood on the back row and warbled all four verses of “Silent Night” and “Hark The Herald Angels Sing,” for all the sticky cedar trees I watched my father struggle to get upright in the skinny red and green tree holders, for all the houses in the nicer neighborhoods whose yards were strewn with string after string of fat colored lights, for all the new flannel pajamas and peppermint candies and hard plastic wreaths, that particular image is what illuminated my thoughts.

How unusual that an ordinary moment, one not even definitively associated with the holiday, was the one scene from decades of Christmases coded somehow by my brain to respond to that particular neural command.

The day grew dark. The yard light bloomed. I lit a fire, made some hot chocolate, and sat down to watch my favorite Christmas movie, "Love, Actually." I admit that there is some dispute about whether “Love, Actually” is actually a Christmas movie. It is not a retelling, allegorical or otherwise, of the Nativity. It is not a dramatization of a folktale involving a beneficent fat man. It is, some say, just a loosely connected series of stories that happen to happen at Christmas.

I don’t know how many times I have seen it, but it is enough that I can anticipate scenes, quote lines, know what has been cut for commercials. I knew as I fast-forwarded through the opening credits that I was going to cheer (Go, Sam, go!) and laugh (“There was more than one lobster present at the birth of Jesus?”) and cry (How could Alan Rickman do that to Emma Thompson?). It would be a comfort watch – no suspense, no surprises.

Except, of course, this time (just like the first time) I held my breath with Colin Firth’s marriage proposal as though there was some chance his Portuguese cleaning lady might say no. I sighed every time Laura Linney called her poor broken brother darling. I growled at Billy Bob Thornton’s lechery. And just about the time Hugh Grant loosened his tie and took off boogeying through 10 Downing Street, I realized some important.

The timing – the happening at Christmas – is the whole point. The mystery and magic at the heart of the story that stars a naive teenage girl and features a supporting cast of dirty shepherds and a clueless innkeeper leaves room for cameos and walk-ons and ad libs and turns even the ordinary moments – walking down a city street, for example – into memories that last forever.

Memories that are Christmas, actually.

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