There is Room
Last December 6-year-old Jake and I were in the middle of a lesson when he stopped his rowdy version of ‘Jingle Bells’ to ask, “Miss Amy! Where is your Christmas tree?”
“I don’t have a Christmas tree,” I replied.
“Why not?”
“Well, we really don’t have room for a Christmas tree,” I said, hoping that this might end the conversation.
“There is room!” Jake declared and began to look around for a space large enough for some Christmas cheer. I directed him back to ‘Jingle Bells.’
He wasn’t going to be distracted. “Right there!” he said. “You could put a Christmas tree right there!” and pointed to a doorway between the fireplace and the hall.
“That’s a doorway,” I said.
“But that’s OK! No one uses it,” Jake insisted.
Well, there you have it. With a little creativity, there is room, after all, for all the holiday cheer one can stuff in one’s life.
As it turns out, there’s plenty of holiday to choose from this month. “Do you know today is the first day of Hanukkah?” I said to Little Corrine as we were setting up to play a ‘Jolly Old St Nick’ duet arrangement. “I know what Hanukkah is!” she told me. “Tell me about it,” I said. “Well, Hanukkah is Buddha’s birthday,” she said with confidence.
“Kid,” I said, “I am all about embracing all the spiritual traditions, but I am here to tell you that Hanukkah is not about Buddha’s birthday.”
It was Garrison Keillor who famously said, “When left to their own devices, we [Wobegonians] straight for the small potatoes.” I thought of this recently after hearing a young child talk about her Elf on the Shelf. “What is an Elf on a Shelf?” I asked her. “You know,” she started. I could hear the eyeroll in her tone of voice. “Elf on the Shelf is the elf that comes to live at your house every December to watch over things and do mischievous tricks. Mine is named Cookie.”
Suddenly, I remembered Keillor’s small potatoes. When faced with a season that should be chockablock with meaning and intention, we humans will go straight for the small potatoes. Or the elves. Same thing.
Our heat went out on Saturday morning, December 20th, giving a new perspective to Winter Solstice, and just in time for a chockablock weekend of Nutcrackers and Lessons & Carols Services. Although the temperatures that day were ridiculously above average, a 55-degree house is a chilly house indeed.
2025 marked twenty years in this little house we call home. We have too many plants, too many books, just the right number of cats. Also, we have a new roof, and several new parts on an ancient boiler. But no Elf on the Shelf. Or Christmas trees.
Sometimes we like to imagine that other people think we are interesting. That they might assume that every night over dinner we have deep intellectual conversations about books and art and music. Friends, I am here to disabuse you of any such notion: Mostly we talk about our cats.
“That cat is cute,” I say 108 times a day.
“Trollope is my best friend,” Matt answers.
“Truffle is the sweetest,” I say.
“Those cats are cute,” Matt responds.
And so it goes. For hours. Small potatoes.
Sometime this fall, Matt programmed his phone to change the screensaver every hour, using photos from his vast collection of thousands of pictures. Specifically, he set the app to choose only photos of “Amy, cats or landscapes.”
After a while a pattern emerged:
In almost every landscape, I am somewhere off ahead, walking down a path.
“It looks like I spend a lot of time walking away from you,” I said.
“You aren’t walking away from me,” Matt said. “You are leading me into the future.”
Huh.
That sounds like a lot of pressure, because the future has always been uncertain. In particular, it has been hard to find a rhythm this December. We’ve been busy with all the normal preoccupations of the season—Nutcrackers, choir concerts, Lessons & Carols services—but I’ve been more distracted by problems big and small, the troubles and struggles of my little world taking on an extra heaviness.
But that’s not the whole story of course. Wander down enough meandering paths and you learn a few things worth holding onto. Climb enough mountains and you discover how to travel lightly. Life is never either/or. It is both/and.
Also the cliché is so true: The years go by so fast. Blink, and it’s another December. Another Sugar Plum. Too many elves.
Several weeks ago, Matt interrupted my practicing to ask, “What time are your Nutcrackers on the 21st?”
“2:00 and 7:00,” I responded and went back to the piano.
That night at dinner, Matt said, “Would you do a reading at the 6pm Lessons & Carols service?”
“I have Nutcracker,” I said.
“I figured it out. You have time! You can do a reading and still make Sugar Plum.” He seemed very proud of his calculations. (There is room! No one uses that door!)
Huh.
(For my reading, Matt assigned me the “Linus”—I mean LUKE!—passage: And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field,…I was tempted to end the reading with “And that is what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown” just to get him back for all the dashing and dancing across town.)
It wasn’t until I was sitting down for a moment in my very cold house to catch my breath before leaving for the 2:00 Nutcracker and then to read at the 6:00 Lessons & Carols service and then to rush off to launch the 7:00 Sugar Plum (Good grief!) that I finally put on Ella Fitzgerald singing her “Swinging Christmas.” And immediately my heart lifted. This album has been the soundtrack of the season for my entire marriage. Hearing Ella sing about Chestnuts and Sleigh Bells was like finally coming home for the holidays. Who knew that a jaded professional musician just needed a good jolly soundtrack to get in the spirit of the season? And just like that, my little heart grew three sizes that day.
“What is your favorite of the Four Seasons?” Lucy asked me on her last lesson before the holiday break. I had just played “Spring” from our Name that Tune list for her to identify. “Winter!” I said, without missing a beat. “Me too!” she said. “I love ‘Winter’!” And for a precious moment, thirteen-year-old Lucy and I shared a soundtrack.
I wonder as we tramp forward into the future if these shared soundtracks will be a thing of the past. Already I notice that while students are excited to tackle a book of Christmas songs, many kids don’t know the traditional tunes anymore. “The First Noel?” I’ll ask, trying to help them pick a carol to learn. “Silent Night?” Over and over the kids shake their heads. Sight-reading through a book of Christmas songs has taken on a whole new meaning, because if students aren’t familiar with the tunes, they really are sight-reading.
From a pedagogical perspective, this is fine. But regardless of one’s spiritual persuasion –Hanukkah or Buddha’s Birthday, Winter Solstice or Elf on a Shelf—something is lost here, for music has long been a common denominator during the holiday season. One cannot make a diet forever out of small potatoes.
It gives one pause for sure. But we have come to realize that as the years race by and the path ahead of us may be shorter than the one behind us now that constancy is a superpower and that endurance might just be a superfood. There have been so many surprises along the way. Elves turn up on shelves just when you least expect it. Kids love Vivaldi. And a Little One delightfully conflates Hanukkah and Buddha while playing ‘Jolly Old St Nick.’ You learn to let things go. Pick your battles. Trade being right for being kind. Turns out, in ways both metaphorical and literal, there is room.
We long for the forever house, forever marriage, forever cats. But nothing is forever, and we understand this too, and that wishing it so only causes suffering. There will always be war and poverty, injustice and sickness in the world. But there will also always be books to read and music to make. There will be gardens to weed, plants to water, cats to feed. Our days are often too long, too full, too scattered for the things we care most about. We reach too often for the small potatoes, the charming elves on the shelf, the sugar plums and the Christmas trees. We balance precariously if at all.
But somewhere along the way, we have become the people that former students and choir members, visiting friends and family come home to talk about traditions and practices, elves and Christmas trees, troubles and heartaches. It is the gift of sitting still and rooting deeply. “Tea?” someone will text, knowing the tea kettle is always on at our house. Luckily, we have a lot of teacups.
And when the chaos of the world threatens to spin out of control and the darkness descends, we hold onto each other and our sweet cats and breathe slowly. There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, wrote Marilynne Robinson, every one of them sufficient.
May your future include all you hold dear.