Christmas Snapshots

We are living through a global crisis right now. It makes me want to run home and wrap my arms around my family, rest my cheek against their shoulders, and close my eyes. 

Under normal circumstances, I am only able to do this about once per year.

I am an expat. I usually only make it home for the summer or winter holidays, unloading a year’s worth of longing into a few short weeks. 

But this is a world-wide pandemic and there are no flights, no visits, and no long-awaited hugs. Many of us, not just expats, are isolating ourselves from family and friends. And we are doing this for the strangest of reasons: because we love them.

As an expat, I have been video chatting with my family for years, my spot at the dinner table replaced by a laptop. I attended my father’s retirement party projected on a wall. But as many have come to learn in this pandemic, video calls are not enough. 

For the holidays this year, nothing in my adopted country was enough to make me feel at home. 

I came here 10 years ago with six suitcases. I did not have enough room for the Christmas bubble lights or my mom’s favorite baking tin or even many family photos. Sure, I have some photos just not enough to re-create my childhood family Christmas on another continent. 

If only I had more photos, stacks of photos, four-decades-worth of holiday photos all in chronological order. Then I could reminisce properly. I could see my lost Christmas toys reappear. I could see faces fresher and snow brighter. I could have my entire family in the palm of my hands. Yet like so many globetrotters, these photographs are stuck in storage thousands of miles away. 

If this pandemic has taught us one thing it is that we need to be creative. Meeting up for a drink has now been replaced by meeting up for a stroll in the park, bike riding around the lake, or talking on the phone. These solutions are not really as creative as they are time-tested. 

And there is a time-tested way for me to connect with my family even though I am far away. People have been doing it for years. It doesn’t require any photos, memorabilia, or even a screen. It’s not easy, though. It can even be painful at times. 

But left with no other option, I fold my legs to the side and sit back on the couch to do what I, what we so often neglect to do, think about how much I love my family.

Imagine that you are looking at the Christmas photo album in my mind . . .

1980s

We all are in this one.The kids: my older brother, our younger cousin, and me. We are playing Trouble with our favorite aunt at a fold-out card table. It’s that game where you have to go back to home if someone lands on your piece and the dice are trapped inside a plastic bubble. Grandma and grandpa sit behind us at the big table. They are drinking coffee, black and hot like in their Finnish homeland. Tucked under my arm, a Christmas present, a wind-up doll who could roller skate. The receipt is still in grandma’s purse. Luckily, grandpa was able to reattach Baby Skates’ yellow plastic wheel. My mother snapped the Polaroid of all of us at our respective tables. At first, the photo came out bright white like the snow. No one said it but then slowly, our happiness appeared. 

1990s

Here we are in front of the tree with gold garland and bubble lights. You see identical Menards flashlights my father and my uncle gave each other, unplanned. My uncle put the batteries in our toys, just like grandpa would have done, joking, “you kids have more energy than that Energizer bunny.” 

My aunt and grandma look on from the sofa. A small electric foot bath unwrapped at grandma’s feet. Please tell me I hugged you two before this photo was taken. After my aunt had set down the presents and board games and shook the snow slush from her boots. After my grandma complained about the weather, amongst other things and took off her coat. They would have smelled like melted butter, browned onion, and Scotch tape mixed with perfume. Or perhaps, I was already too cool for their embrace. 

My mom isn’t in this photo. I think she’s in the kitchen. Wherever she is, she is keeping track, keeping track of the dice for the game, the misplaced present, the gravy boat, my hat, and all of us. How is it that I just relaxed on Christmas day back then, never rinsing a dish? 

My brother’s girlfriend took this photo. I sit on the carpet with my cousin, our Christmas gifts in plastic, glitter, and technology fanned out around us. Maybe it was the glossy photo paper used at the time, but I think it was us, especially us kids, we were shining brighter than the Christmas tree.

2000s

My dad gave my brother’s girlfriend and me our first digital cameras for Christmas this year. We used it to take a photo of my aunt holding a miracle, our family’s miracle, my aunt’s miracle–a baby girl named, almost twenty years younger than her brother. The photo is time-stamped 00/00/00 00:00, the factory setting, the moment when time was supposed to stop, but didn’t. In the background, sits grandma. We are almost like four generations under one roof. My baby cousin in my arms, young enough to be my own.

For grandma, I had no excuse besides disliking and not understanding the inescapable process of aging. I knew that this would be one of her last Christmases, yet did I even say goodbye? 

I hug you now, grandma and thank you for the Christmas cakes and thoughtful gifts. I wish you could have seen the world like my aunt did. A world where anything was possible.  

2010s

And here we all are for Christmas, well some of us at the skating rink, what was left of us.

Like a tidal wave hitting Kansas, my aunt died unexpectedly before my grandma succumbed to Alzheimer’s. I made a series of toy sock animals with the bright red heel as the mouth for my baby cousin but how could they ever replace a mother. 

My older cousin moved away to be with his girlfriend. I would go, too. Farther away than him who was in Tennessee. It was heartless for me to leave at that point, given my family’s fading numbers, but I did. 

In the photo, you can see the roof of the beige Jeep Cherokee sticking out from behind the skating rink. The warming shack was closed, so my dad drove up a snowbank and directly onto the ice. 

It’s hard to see with all the falling snow but that’s my boyfriend, soon to be husband, my baby cousin, bigger now, and I. We have been skating for hours. I held my cousin’s hands and slowly skated forwards so that she could learn how to skate backward. In the background, my brother and his girl friend, well I call her my sister-in-law now, are sliding across the ice in their boots. It was 10 degrees below zero and I was so warm inside.

*Without knowing that I was writing this, my mom enclosed the photos at the top with the Christmas gifts that she mailed to us!