Last night my husband brought home a large train track and set it up on the floor in our living room. With our two-year-old son and four-year-old daughter huddled on each side of him, he pushed a little red button and sent the four piece locomotive whistling around the lighted tree. My son raised up on his knees, threw his arms over his head with hands tightly fisted, and squealed so loud our black lab raised her ears. My daughter clasped both hands over her mouth and giggled. Even my twenty-nine year old husband clapped his hands and smiled over his shoulder at me.

Sitting in a chair just behind them, I watched the white light in front of the train round the corners of the track over and over. Excitement bubbled through the room, but stopped short of me.

This is the first year both my children understand the holiday excitement and they've been on their best behavior for Santa's peeping eyes. I overflow with happiness for them, but within myself there is a deficit on joy.

The holidays are for families, maybe even more than for children. It's a time to sit around a long table being thankful for those around us. It's time for dark rooms sparked to life by twinkling lights and that special blend of familiar voices singing Jingle Bells.

It's being surrounded with family that always brought the holidays alive for me, and this year things are different. I live eight hours away from my family and Christmas will be spent with my in-laws. Though they are family, they aren't as intimately connected as my blood relatives and they don't have the history that brings special memories to mind.

I was a year old when my parents divorced, and my mother took on a full-time job to raise her three young children, of which I was the youngest. We rarely heard from my father, except on the holidays. Everyone would gather at my grandparent's house and not only would both my parents be in the same home, but all the cousins I rarely got to see would gather in the basement to play hide-n-seek.

Instead of just digging right into the food, we stretched around the kitchen, living and dining rooms and held hands. One by one, we said what we were most thankful for, and then my grandmother would squeeze the hand connected to hers three times, meaning ‘I love you.' Those squeezes passed around the circle, one set of hands at a time, until the circle was complete.

This ritual was a source of displeasure for many of my cousins, but it was often the highlight of my year. There was such warmth in that circle, that one year I actually burst from the room in tears. Maybe it was seeing my father and mother standing together, actually smiling. Or maybe it was watching my grandfather deteriorate further into Alzheimer's. I always blamed it on teenage hormones, but now that the members of that circle have either passed away or live too far for holiday visits, I realize it was so much more.

It's been years since I've heard a small child's voice squeak out something to be thankful for, and in turn my holiday spirit is fighting to survive. There is happiness watching my children glue cotton balls on a paper Santa to count down the days, but I am no longer counting them myself.

Tonight while cooking dinner I heard the whistle of the train and then the loud thump of small feet rushing into the living room. It brought me back to Grandma's basement, where my bare feet slapped over the concrete floor in search of hiding cousins.

I turned off the stovetop and walked slowly across the house. Leaning in the doorway, I saw all three of them from the backside as they sat on their knees staring at the blue and white lights blinking on the tree, and the train chugging along below. The little white headlight rounded the corner of the track and my daughter looked over her shoulder to me. She smiled and her little hand waved for me to come closer.

Kneeling beside them, I felt an enormous wave of warmth as she folded underneath my arm and rested her head just under my shoulder. I realized then that this is my new holiday circle, and small as it may be, it is more than enough.

 

Theresa Hammond currently resides in North Carolina, where her two children occupy most of her time. Her fiction has appeared in a previous issue of flashquake, as well as in other online publications such as Espresso Fiction.