Cheating Chirstmas

Cheating Christmas   AKA   Avoiding despair   AKA  Emilie teaches me to windsurf

“I have a sudden glimpse of all the Christmases of my life lined up one after another,” says Henry in The Time Traveler’s Wife, “waiting to be gotten through, and despair floods me.” This is a sentiment I can relate to. 

I would have liked to have gone hiking with my kids over Christmas in New Zealand or have chosen a random city, like Rome, to plonk ourselves down in to explore to our hearts content. But such options, this year, seemed beyond my budget, beyond my capability to organize, beyond possible.

I would have liked to have had a traditional Christmas at home with as many family and friends as we could round up with long snowshoe hikes and impromptu games of hockey out on the bay and huge communally cooked meals. But I don’t live anywhere, don’t know anyone, and can’t cook, so again, beyond possible.

Christmas, when you don’t have a family, or your family is totally messed up, is not the happy occasion depicted in movies with a large group sitting round a table together disagreeing on whose dressing recipe is the best.

The Time Traveler’s Wife starts out joyful full of laughter and light but then gets darker and blacker as events spiral out of control towards certain doom. No light at the end of the tunnel. I have read it often and it never changes. Each time the same bleak future first looms and then arrives. I have pulled it out to read yet again but am not sure I want to finish it. Perhaps I ought to stop part way through while there is still the hope of a different happier ending to the story.

But at the end of the book I am surprised, and surprised to be surprised, when, from beyond the grave, Henry speaks, almost as if to me. “Stop waiting and be free,” he says, “Go out into the world and live. Love the world and yourself in it, move through it as though it offers no resistance, as though the world is your natural element.”  And I know this is what I must, somehow, do. Soon.

But the world is not my natural element and I do not move through it without resistance, so, instead, this Christmas, I cheat; I run away.

The details don’t matter. Nothing got planned in the fall for a variety of different reasons.  Ben (my oldest son) decides spend Christmas with his girlfriend in the states. At the last minute I convince Fred and Alexander (my younger sons) and Laura and Emilie (their girlfriends) to go to Cuba with me.

And it is, for me, good enough.

We don't do anything spectacular, anything particularly special, anything even remotely outside our comfort zones...

But we do go sailing, and snorkeling, and play tennis, and walk the beach. We explore our resort and the next resort over and the nearby marina. We take the bus into the nearest small town to browse the markets and play mini-putt. We eat at buffets and a la carte restaurants; tiny appetizers with smoked salmon and prosciutto, lovely soups, lots of very fresh fish, and the occasional disaster. (One night my main course, the chef’s special, turns out to be octopus bisque, full of, yes, small whole octopi, complete with floppy heads and tentacles with suckers on them, which, unfortunately, is beyond my culinary limit.) 

When it’s windy the four of them pull out their kites and go kite-surfing and when it’s not Emilie teaches the rest of us how to windsurf. I, I have to say, am amazing. I’ve tried to windsurf before but have never gotten further than pulling the sail up and then falling off. Emilie shows me where to put my feet as I start and how to transfer them further back as soon as I am moving. She stresses the importance of keeping your forearm extended and of sticking your bum out. By the second day I am flying out to sea and back doing long steady tacks without even getting wet. The warm sun above, the turquoise water flashing by below, even the energy consumed by paying such close attention to my balance and the sudden surprising dunkings in the cool salty water when I forget to, all of it is fabulous, fantastic, freeing. As is the whole week. Surrounded by the youthful vitality and vivaciousness of the four kids I am once again wishing one could bottle essences such as these, save the whole experience somehow, to pull out and savour later.

I feel, just a bit, as if we are on The Axiom - the resort ship in Pixar’s WALL-E - because we are kept well medicated with alcohol. There are bars in the main lobby, in the restaurants, in the snack bars by the pools, in the pools themselves, and at various spots along the 1.2 km stretch of beach that belongs to our resort and they make excellent (free) drinks; pineapple with coconut run, strawberry daiquiris, mojitos with lots of fresh mint… and, as we take a break from activities in the afternoon and lounge under the beach umbrellas or loaf in one of the four pools, as we gather and play cards in the lobby before supper or board games afterwards, we drink our fair share of drinks.

By coming here with them I feel I have cheated, avoided somehow the spirit of Christmas. 
But I have also, for this year at least, avoided despair.

Baby hermit crab sand art.

Taxi hood ornament.

One of a gazillion paintings for sale.

Emilie, Alex, me, Fred, and Laura. :)