AUTHOR’S GAB, READER TALK.
A LETTER TO YOU, THE READER, SO THAT YOU CAN FINALLY FIGURE OUT WHAT I’M THINKING.
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THIS MONTH: Old Tradition, New Perspective
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“One thing about trains: It doesn’t matter where they’re going. What matters is deciding to get on.
-Conductor, “The Polar Express”
Dear Reader,
Whenever I watch the Polar Express, the above quote is always the one I hate the most. “Hogwash. Of course it matters,” I think to myself, “You have to know where in the heck you’re going. Because, once you get on, you’re going somewhere, whether you like it or not. Wherever that train is going, you are going too.”
The same line of thinking often applies for me when thinking about my family traditions. For me, it always seems redundant, like “Oh yeah, this again.” It always makes me feel like I’m in some groove I don’t want to be in, like I’m running around in circles and never doing anything original with my life. It’s like hopping a train and knowing exactly where I’m going every single time, and it gets really annoying. Particularly, there’s one tradition I loved when I was a kid but have mixed feelings about now as an adult: my family’s annual visit to Crossroads Village/Huckleberry Railroad. We’ve been going there for 22 years now on the day after Thanksgiving, as a way for our family to kick off the Christmas holiday season.
Crossroads itself is a historical village in Genesee County, MI, where old buildings from the 19th century were taken for preservation. It functions a bit like Greenfield Village/The Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, with people dressed up in period clothing explaining how things used to work back then to visitors. It also features a period-appropriate steam locomotive (which bears an uncanny resemblance to the train from the Polar Express), a vintage, original Parker carousal and a ferris wheel (warning: extremely slow ride; do not attempt unless you have something important to talk about in close quarters and enjoy getting stuck at extreme heights). At Christmastime, on the day right after Thanksgiving, they host a tree-lighting ceremony, complete with caroling and fireworks. This is especially unique because they actually use new lights and redecorate THE ENTIRE VILLAGE every year, including the masterpiece of it all, this tree:
The entire thing is rewrapped from root to tip each year with white Christmas lights, and its the brightest, star-like, shiniest, most spectacular decoration in the entire village. Sometimes I wonder if I come once a year just to see that thing light up and to marvel at it once again. For that reason, it’s the one thing about the Crossroads tradition I don’t think I would change, even now as an adult.
Because of moments like this tree, our family has developed a certain way to even go about walking through the village, with spots we go to and skip every year. There are also certain activities which must be re-hashed, like my brother and my dad’s annual game of checkers in the barber shop. Loser does the other’s chores for a week, and my brother always seems to win. We walk the village, enduring the cold, take our Christmas picture, watch the tree-lighting and fireworks, get almonds, ride the train, head to Pizza Hut in Flint and go home. It’s all very clear-cut and systematic, and we all know the drill by heart.
When I was a kid, Crossroads used to be a magical place. I would look forward to seeing Santa, browsing the toy shop and riding the train and carousal. It was a satisfying adventure I didn’t mind repeating because I could re-invent it all every year we went. Besides, I was never one to send letters to Santa, so how in the heck was he supposed to know what I wanted if I didn’t tell him? Somehow, this was an all-important mission I had to accomplish each year if I had any chance of getting what I wanted under my tree come Christmas morning.
Then, I grew up, and Crossroads lost a bit of its magic for me. There were things I still enjoyed seeing and the Christmas spirit never got old; but, I began to feel out of place, like slipping into an old glove I wasn’t using anymore. I was too old for Santa, too old for carousals and train rides but not too old for tree-lighting ceremonies and fireworks. Consequentially, I started feeling like there was something better I could be doing with my time, new ideas and experiences which could be explored to kick off the holiday, besides repeating this one. The problem was that I couldn’t seem to find anything suitable to replace it with, nor to get my family to go along with, particularly since my sister loves the tradition and couldn’t imagine her life annually without it.
So, while other people are out Black Friday shopping and Christmas-tree hunting, the tradition remains, and my family still goes to Crossroads to this very day. In fact, while we may or may not go Black Friday shopping in the morning to get the deals, we actually don’t go “real” tree-hunting until the following weekend. But, right after Crossroads, my mom always sets up the fake tree in the living room/front room with my parents’ ornaments and my dad pulls out the Christmas lights and decorates the outside of our house. My sister, brother and I always decorate the real tree when the time comes, and I get to relive my fantasy of having my own tree decked out in all-glass ornaments, complete with a stained glass star and white lights, in my own apartment.
What do you do, then, with an old tradition doomed to repeat itself year-after-year? Or, better, how do you approach it? What perspective can you take?
I think it’s a lot like the Conductor says in the Polar Express: what matters is deciding to get on, not necessarily where the whole thing is headed. Because, to focus on where the event is headed is to miss the point, which is to spend quality time with people you care about. What makes your experience enjoyable is the simple act of performing the task to be together with those people, and not what you can get out of it or what you will be doing.
This is a lesson the Grinch well-learned when he tried to steal Christmas: “it came just the same”. And, why? Because, it wasn’t about the stuff or the activities; it was about bonding, sharing experiences and creating community in some way, shape or form. That’s what made the tradition of Christmas so special, and not anything else.
It made me think about how each piece of writing is a lot like an old Christmas tradition: it’s been done before. No matter what story you have come up with, it’s technically not unique in any right, because people have written something similar to it in the hundreds and thousands of years before you were even born. If you look at it this way, your writing and reading can get discouraging, and you begin to ask yourself why you bothered with it at all, if it’s so meaningless.
But, if you take the perspective of simply applying yourself to the task for the sake of participating, I think you will find something remarkable: no one can tell a story quite like you can. No one is you, and, therefore, they do not have your talents, nor your experiences. Consequentially, if you say nothing, you are withholding valuable information about the human experience no one can ever access but you. Looking at it thusly, it doesn’t matter if the community will like what you have to say, it just matters that it is SAID.
Don’t worry about getting swept along for the ride; you can figure that out later. Otherwise, you might just get stuck over-analyzing all the specific details, plans and pressure-points of your journey/destination and miss your “train”. And, of course, once you miss a train, you’re either running late or not going at all, which is never a good thing, indeed.
Think about that.~
Sincerely, Your Writer,
Jessica A. McLean
The Rose 