Christmas Comes to Apartment Two

On Friday morning, in preparation for the holiday season, I joined my roommate on her annual trek to the largest Christmas store in the world, located about an hour and a half north in a little German immigrant town called Frankenmuth. She prepped me on the way. “My family has labels for Christmas decorations,” she told me. “There’s “classy”—that’s the elaborate, expensive-looking decorations. Then there’s “traditional” which is, well, traditional. And then there’s “holly jolly.” That’s the plastic reindeer and inflatable snowmen. And the street leading up to the store—it’s all holly jolly.” And she was right. I have never seen so much “holly jolly” in one place—light-up elves, life-size nativity scenes that are of significantly lesser artistic quality than, say, the Temple Square nativity, large painted Santas of every artificial material known to man, and lots of signs reminding us that “HE is the reason for the season,” despite all evidence to the contrary surrounding us.

We were welcomed inside by elderly women in seasonal garb who appeared disappointingly frazzled for a store that existed to maintain the most wonderful time of the year from January to December. The store itself was a maze (though a carefully organized one) of ornaments, nativity sets, trees, candles, baubles, stuffed animals, wreaths, advent calendars, snowmen, garlands, and everything and anything associated with the Christmas season. And it all ranged from “holly jolly” at its finest (note the giant inflatable snow globe that greeted us just inside the entrance), to the cute and homey, to the chintzy, to the elegant.

My roommate, whose entire family is pretty centered on Christmas traditions, came away with a costly but tasteful selection of Christmas items—advent candles (which her mother has been searching for for years), a very untraditional nativity scene that would have been my first choice had I been in the market for nativity scenes, and a cast iron candle holder that can be left up all year, but looks quite festive with the red apple-scented candles that I helped choose. I came away with a bit less—a couple Christmas tree ornaments (because I have to start collecting them eventually) and another item or two that I can’t reveal here for fear of giving away a surprise. I’m not big on shopping, but the experience was kind of fun. We listened to Christmas music on the way back, and got stuck in traffic after we (well, she) missed our exit and had to turn around, and had some pleasant conversation about graduate school and research projects and Christmas traditions and, of course, dating, and I was in a good mood when we pulled back into our parking lot in Ann Arbor.

I didn’t get nearly as much done that day as I had hoped. My roommate went Christmas tree shopping while I worked on one of my class papers, and she returned about mid afternoon with a real, life-size, pine-scented Christmas tree. I helped her set it up, and then went for a lovely run on our snow-covered streets, and when I returned in an even better mood than when I’d left, I found lights on the tree and ornaments and baubles laid out on our couch. I had papers to grade and papers to write and articles to read, but I couldn’t turn down decorating the tree, and now at the end of a rather unproductive weekend I am still in a mild state of Christmas euphoria. Our apartment smells of pine and citrus and cinnamon, there is snow on the ground outside, there are Clementines in my fruit basket, the Tabernacle Choir has been singing Christmas songs to me for most of the day, we have friends coming over tonight to indulge in baked goods and caroling around the piano, and I have hand-picked my favorite Christmas hymns (nearly all of them) to be sung over the course of the next three sacrament meetings.

So I’m feeling pretty good. I’m not thinking about everything I have to do in the next two weeks (at least not today), and thought I am thinking about home and about the family and friends and surroundings that I still miss (especially at this time of year), I am also aware that I will actually be there soon, even if just for a short time. And I am also aware that, much to my surprise, I’m starting to feel at home here, that I am becoming comfortable with my apartment and my street and my school and even my grocery store, and that I can now pick out friends in the sea of faces in my ward. As the semester draws to the close, I am suddenly realizing that I am no longer feeling sad and frustrated and alone. It’s funny—even though as I look back at the semester I can remember these feelings very vividly, and I can say without a doubt that it has been one of the hardest adjustments of my life thus far, I am feeling remarkably at peace about where I am. Things aren’t perfect (in fact, they are never going to be), but they’re right. I’m no longer just thinking that—I’m feeling it. And that’s what’s important.