Christmas is approaching very quickly, and our family's travels to Ohio are approaching even more quickly!  My thoughts and emotions have been very scattered, leading up to the holidays.  I'm feeling extremely enthusiastic -- almost euphoric at times -- about the prospect of being back with family for this special time of the year.  But then at the same time, in considering the realities of all of my family being back together for the first time in several years (with some of the cousins just meeting each other for the first time, even) and trying to blend our disparate lives again for a couple of weeks, I've had little foreshadowings of the stresses which are also somewhat inevitable.  Holidays are a funny thing in this way.

In a sense, we find ourselves driven by the tension between two
truisms:  "There's no place like home," and "You can't go home again."

Our celebrations of the winter holidays seem to have an awful lot to do with sentimentality.  This became clear to me as I thought about the Dutch cultural phenomenon of Sinterklaas -- wondering how parents could go to the lengths they do, to make the holiday special for their children (and really, my Dutch friends, I don't know if you can fully understand the extent of these lengths unless you have young children here yourself).  I was having a hard time understanding how parents would put up with the whole charade, when it suddenly dawned on me that it all comes down to sentimentality.  I don't have much in the way of childhood sentimentality for Sinterklaas (since I didn't grow up in the Netherlands), so I don't have the fuel needed to power myself through the annual re-enactment of that particular holiday.  I do, however, have my own special memories of Christmas in America, and that's what I'm trying to get back to during the holidays -- along with my fellow Americans who tend to make a lot of movies and write a lot of songs about this particular holiday (while to Dutch people, who didn't grow up with American Christmas, the whole hype seems ridiculous).  So when I think about it like this, it all makes a lot more sense.

The whole pageantry of Sinterklaas and Santa Lucia and Christmas and is fueled by nostalgia and a hope to recapture some of the child-like wonder of the season -- or at least to allow the next generation to capture such an experience in our stead.  I'm not necessarily saying that this is bad or wrong.  I'm just saying that there's something powerful there that drives the engines of the American Christmas Machine (or the Dutch Sinterklaas Machine).  And I honestly think that it comes down to sentimentality, more than the Dutch quest for low-key gezelligheid, more than the American quest for meaning and purpose, more than any sense of materialism or mythology...

Does this explanation make sense to anyone else?  Does anyone else feel the tension of living between those truisms?  In any event, I wish you all a happy Christmas -- celebrating whatever it means to you right now!  Enjoy the nostalgia, enjoy the sentimentality... but don't forget to enjoy it for what it is this year, too.