The moon's pregnant belly presses against my window tonight, and I find myself—strange creature that I am—wanting the tinsel chaos. Wanting the artificial pine needles stabbing my bare feet, the burnt sugar smell of something trying too hard in the oven. My hands reach toward December like a drowning woman grasping for driftwood, any soft warm spot in this vast cold ocean.
Cheer is a thin thread this year, gossamer and likely to snap, but I'm winding it around my wrists anyway. My father is dying—that's the baseline hum beneath every carol, the bass note no amount of cinnamon can drown. Terminally ill: what a sterile phrase for the slow erasure of a man, for watching someone become fog. And there are no cousins waiting in the wings, no aunts with casserole dishes, no grandparents' house groaning with decades of ornaments. Just us. Just this small constellation of people who share my blood or my bed or my last name.
Mother. Father. Sister with her tribe of small hands and sticky faces. My daughter—moon of my moon—and my wife who knows how to hold me when I'm all edges. That's it. That's the whole roster. And god, it's enough. It has to be enough.
The meaning of Christmas shape-shifts like something hungry, something alive. When I was small it meant presents unwrapped with savage glee, the glitter of acquisition. Then it became performance—table settings, the right roast, proving I could conjure magic from Williams-Sonoma and sheer willpower. But now? Now it's stripped down to bone, to the marrow truth: I just want to be somewhere. To belong in a room without apologizing for the shape of my shadow.
No gifts this year. I don't want the weight of wrapped things, the pressure of gratitude performed on cue. I want presence—presence—bodies in chairs, voices layered over voices, my daughter's laugh echoing off walls that know my name. I want acceptance: the kind that doesn't flinch when I show up with my father's death clutched in my teeth, when I can't smile on demand, when I need to leave the table and cry in the bathroom like some melodramatic ghost.
A place to belong. That's all. That's everything. Some soft warm spot where I'm allowed to be the daughter of a dying man, the mother of a growing girl, the wife of a woman patient enough to love my jagged edges, the sister who shows up even when showing up costs everything.
The moon watches. The stars are distant and cold. But inside—inside there might be cider, might be my sister's children shrieking, might be my father's laugh one more time before it becomes memory. Might be my wife's hand finding mine under the table. Might be my daughter decorating cookies with more frosting than grace.
I'm grasping for cheer like it's a lifeline. And maybe it is. Maybe this year, survival looks like wanting to survive. Wanting to sit at a table and call it holy. Wanting December even when December is just another word for almost gone.
The holidays are coming. And I—strange, broken, still-breathing creature—I'm ready for them.