Christmas.

Fain fell asleep before we could leave cookies and milk for Santa Claus, carrots for Rudolph, and, of course, a piece of cheese for Santa Mouse. Mom scattered crumbs on a plate with a Post-It note from Santa, but it went unappreciated by the little one. His eyes were too full of jolly, coloful choo-choo trains, wooden cars, plastic zebras and giraffes and horses, and several varietals of Elmo.

Last night, mom, dad, Fain, and I went to my paternal granny's house in the next town up the highway. Two out of three of my dad's brothers were there. Talk about a Christmas miracle. I can remember the brothers congregating in Granny's tiny kitchen when I was a small girl in pig-tails. They were large, bearded, swarthy men who drank beer out of cans and threw plastic-coated playing cards across the table at each other. The kitchen clouded with the smell of chicken frying in grease and cigarette smoke. Granny shouted and harped on her four sons, and they yelled back and cursed and laughed loudly. (Dad excluded. He was never much of a drinker or smoker or a loud-mouth or a potty-mouth, which may explain why it's been so many years since we've spent Christmas with the rest of his family.) I loved it when I was a girl. I remember sitting on my Uncle Timmy's lap, telling him which card to play. I remember being delighted by the noisiness of it, the rambunctiousness. It was so unlike my maternal memaw's more genteel family gatherings.

Anyway, I haven't been home for Christmas in years, maybe even a decade or near it. Sometimes I sent cards. Mom and Dad went by Granny's around Christmas, I guess, for a quick visit. But, generally, the brothers managed, I think, to avoid one another. I don't know why. I imagine they just grew apart over time. They were different, went different ways. So, here we were last night, crowded into Granny's kitchen again, though there was no cigarette smoke or fried chicken. Uncle Ronnie brought a bottle of local wine that wasn't too bad on ice. Uncle Doug and his wife Lynn came, along with their son Brett. I baby-sat for him when he was five or six. He had a stutter and was wild and uncontrollable. Now he's taller than any of us and handsome with a license in pharmacology. He has a nice, deep voice and not a trace of a stutter. I went decades without seeing him, and yet time passes so unnoticeably, so quickly, that it seems as if he must have taken advantage of a time machine or a magical growth serum to have gone from a small stuttering kid to a full grown man so suddenly. It's unsettling. I see the little boy in him, and I also wonder where the little boy dashed off too.

Granny seems exactly the same, despite several heart attacks. She still shouts and harps and teases and laughs loudly.

It was a wonderful experience.

Today we had dinner with my maternal memaw and grandaddy. More turkey and dressing and collards and cornbread. More iced tea and cake and coffee. More plastic cars and stuffed animals.

When I was a girl, we had Christmas Eve at Memaw's house. My mom and dad, my Uncle Johnny and my Aunt Carole, and Dearie, my great-grandmother. Dearie would say, "Well, I probably won't be around next Christmas, so I guess I'll have just a little more toddy."

Then one Christmas she sat and stared blankly and forgot who I was, and I guess I lost interest in going home for the holidays that year. I was devoted to Dearie. I loved the way that she told the story of the three little pigs. I loved her soft, crinkly skin. I even loved her slightly humped back. I loved her sense of humor and her quick wit. That last year I came home, she was there, but she wasn't. I wasn't interested in returning the next year. And then in a few more years she had passed.

Now Aunt Carole stays home with her ailing mother, and Uncle Johnny comes alone for a few days. He tells jokes and avoids talking about politics as best he can. His son David came Christmas Eve. David and I were nearly best friends when we were kids. We put on plays some years. We acted out several parts each and wrote music and drew backgrounds and put baby powder in our hair to make it white when the part called for an old person. We also used baby power for smoke. Now he's a director at a theater up in the mountains. He rode in my car to breakfast Saturday morning, and I said, "So, what have you been up to for the past six years?" He just kind of laughed, and we fell into normal grown-up conversation about work and that sort of thing.

I mean, I have to say that this has been a strangely comforting Christmas for me. I haven't seen these people in so long. I suppose they must be very different than they were, different people altogether, in some cases, and yet I still felt happy to see them and felt familiar and comfortable and sorry to see them go.

Mom and Fain gave me a children's book. I don't remember the title exactly. "Let Me Hold You Just A Little Longer" or something like that. I only flipped it open. I surmised that it was about a mother wanting to hold her little son just a few minutes more, but he's intent on slipping away. I just opened the package, flipped through the pages, and felt myself tearing up. It's sad that there are so few days throughout life when you realize the necessity and the delicacy of these ties.