Lefse

December 23rd, 2023

No matter where I turn, I can’t escape the refrain, delivered with a deep sigh: “It doesn’t feel like Christmas this year.”

I try to empathize with the observer; I attempt to comfort them by telling them that it’s just the weather. It’s the rain. It’s the lack of snow.

It’s the lack of something.

I haven’t had lefse in a while. It was something I grew up eating (I’m at least 59.4% Scandinavian, thanks DNA testing), and then my grandma passed away, and I don’t know if lefse passed away like she did, all at once, or if it slowly faded out of my life like a song that isn’t sure when it’s supposed to end.

I picked up some lefse today. Like snow, maybe it’s the thing I’m missing, the thing that will make it feel like Christmas.

It’s easy for me to talk about how great my mom was. Because she was. She was really great. But she had so many not-great moments and less-than-stellar days.

Holidays caused a share of those moments and days. On more than one Christmas morning, being close to her was like enduring static shocks from a particularly nasty doorknob. Though decidedly more chill (but still brutally hilarious) in her later years, the mom I remember from my youth was all kinetic energy, anxiety and worry and stress; I was sometimes the cause of those feelings, and sometimes the victim.

I remember those Christmas nights even more vividly, driving home though the dark from the events of the day, waiting for the heat from the front of the car to break into the cold in the back. The unwinding, the hair down, the interior light to catch the shapes of our hands, the debrief and the gossip, inhabiting our human ashes from the burnout of the holidays.

I know that it’s not the burnout we’re missing. I read an insightful article by Laura Kennedy today on the subject, and it feels like we’re burned out more than ever, and it’s not hard to understand why:

“Parenthood, high rent and full-time work. Caring for elderly parents while falling asleep nightly considering that you do not — and will not — own a home or have a pension. A sense of radical displacement from community, a disdainful suspicion that our jobs are fundamentally unstable, pointless mouse-moving busywork. A general sense that being alive is becoming too demanding and expensive to do comfortably or well, that ‘the dice are loaded’, to quote Leonard Cohen’s satisfyingly grim ‘Everybody Knows’. That there is a frightening, overarching way in which we are not ultimately able to determine what our lives look like, or to change them if we want to. That it’s all changing so quickly, but that human nature can’t accelerate to keep pace, and we are all hanging on by our fingernails as the momentum makes our eyes water.”

So if it’s not the weather or the lefse or my mom, what could I be missing?

It’s stupid, but I think it’s magic. I think I’m missing magic.

I’m tired of this version of the world. The version where so many people are selfish and cruel, and rewarded for being so; the version where people make politics their identity without applying that passion to discover what makes life worth living and people worth loving; the version where physical, flesh-and-blood community is a relative relic, a curiosity that’s harder and harder to find; the version where the writing is on the wall for our current stage of capitalism, where it feels impossible to get ahead and the best case scenario is to barely stay afloat; the version where we are at war, all the time, forever; the version where we have all the information humans have ever gathered at our fingertips, but we willingly choose to learn little, and more often choose to learn nothing at all.

All of that feels decidedly unmagical.

But today I saw a little girl notice that Santa Claus — the real Santa Claus — was eating lunch two tables away from her. She smiled and she laughed and she waved at him while she enjoyed her mac & cheese. He smiled and he winked and he waved back and he ho, ho, ho’d and then he left, and she stood there, unable to believe it, her eyes wide with awe and truth and joy.

It was magic.

And I hope you all find a little of it wherever you can.