We look up anyway
My daughter was home for the holidays—from midnight on Christmas eve to mid-day on Dec. 26. It was a rare holiday visit. In recent years, we’ve either had to go to her in Miami or spend Christmas apart because, as a ballet dancer, Dec. 25 falls during her annual long run of the Nutcracker with Miami City Ballet. She dances through Christmas eve at the Arscht Theater in Miami, then resumes by the 27th with a handful more shows in West Palm Beach’s Kravis Theater leading up to New Year’s.
I made the most of anticipating having her home, bringing boxes of reflective, glittery, sequined ornaments, twinkly lights, vintage garland, mercury glass votive candles and other festive tabletop items out of our downstairs storage, decorating a fresh Canaan fir from a nearby tree farm and adorning various surfaces and spaces so that the magic of the holiday could be felt. I do this every year because I love the feeling of the shortest, darkest days of the calendar being illuminated—even for a week or two--by the ephemeral decor of the holidays. I love the memories of being a child and decorating the tree with my brother and parents that some of these old decorations recall. This year as I prepared at home, I hoped that my daughter would feel some of those memories of all of us decorating together when she was little during her visit.
We were sitting for Christmas dinner, complete with our silver reindeer candles twinkling, asking her about “Snow”—that big corps number in the Nutcracker that shifts the story fully into the fantasy of the land of the Sugarplum Fairy. (It’s my favorite part!) We were asking her what the snow confetti falling down on the women dancers was made of, and what makes it so notoriously slippery. She told us she thought it was made of a kind of coated paper, and that anything on the stage that is not the stage becomes a potential slipping hazard. Then she added, almost as an aside, that at the end of each show, they sweep up the confetti and use it again, and again, throughout the whole run—in her company’s case, 27 Nutcrackers this year. She said sometimes it’s hard to hold your face upwards in Snow, not just because you risk getting paper confetti in your eyes, mouth or nose—but because each time they sweep up the confetti, other things get mixed in—whatever dirt, grit, rosin and other debris happens to be on stage after the number, including things like earring backs, bobby pins, the occasional contact lens, and last year, she said, a plastic fork. By the end of the run she told us, the dancers can hear whatever small metal or plastic objects that have been inadvertently mixed in with snow confetti hitting the ground, or feel them hitting their bodies while they perform. My husband and I–-and she—all laughed incredulously about this while we ate our Christmas potato gratin by candlelight.
Later, I was thinking about the many times I’ve seen the Nutcracker, and how ethereal Snow always feels—because of the combination of the music and the lyricism and synchrony of the dancers in their white costumes—and how that belies what she told us, that it’s slippery and hard to see through that peculiar blizzard at times.
It’s not that I fail to appreciate how much of a marathon Nutcracker season is for dancers, especially the women who repeatedly perform all those big numbers—like Snow and Flowers—which ours does, when she’s not dancing other, featured roles—and sometimes even when she is.
It’s that despite knowing these things, it’s still breathtaking and marvelous, and something I want to experience because it transports me. It’s also that despite the Nutcracker run being hard and long and sometimes maddening, and even boring, I’m told, they still dance it. It still sparkles and illuminates.
It’s like life, only more intense.
It made me realize that I decorated our tree and our house—with my husband’s participation, in the week leading up to Christmas and our daughter being home, after I had spent a grueling week at my mother’s house in Sarasota, clearing out her closets, donating her clothes, deciding what to keep and what to send to Good Will. It was a rough way to spend the middle of December, and so sad, knowing that my mother would never celebrate another Christmas with us or without us. She died in September.
I celebrated Christmas with my husband and daughter and felt so grateful, despite things not being perfect, despite feeling emotionally very tired in the wake of my mother’s death and all the administrative work that comes along with that. I celebrated Christmas having barely shopped or prepped or sent holiday cards, something that often occurs because getting it right for everyone I want to gift and acknowledge at the holidays is overwhelming.
In a metaphorical sense, there was a lot of grit and hairpins and at least a few forks in the seasonal “snow” that fell on me as I carried out my December activities. Aside from the personal stuff, my heart breaks anew every day over the terrible tragedies ongoing in the world.
These things make it hard to look up, but we do anyway. We have to.
