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| Lauren Stewart, Christmas 2012 |
Christmas 2012 will not be a positively memorable one. I was melancholic after visiting my sick friend in Mexico City and as soon as I was back on Wednesday the 19th it seems bits of Mexico City smog remained in my lungs and precipitated a pulmonary infection. Come Christmas Eve I was not well and I had terrible coughing spells. I was not keen on taking the usual stressful (the family always groans and objects) Christmas snaps. But today, December 29, we have Lauren, 10, sleeping over and she will carry on her shoulders the hefty image of Christmas 2012. She asked me why Pancho el Esqueleto was in the picture. I asked her if she remembered Abraham Rogatnick (who died three years ago). She told me she did. In Christmases past Rogatnick was with us for Christmas Eve dinner. Rogatnick gave me Pancho el Esqueleto a year before he died. I miss the man. Christmas for me is about my past. I remember my father, especially as well as my mother and grandmother. I remember those first Christmases with Rosemary in Mexico when we barely had money to buy anything. I remember Christmas with our daughters when they were young.
Lauren in her picture here represents the Christmases of her future (a future unknown to me) that will soon be her own Christmases past.
Meanwhile as I write this I hope that my other granddaughter who had made this Christmas an unpleasant one, will find order, and a code of ethics and behaviour that in this age, a post-God age, cannot seem to find comfort with Tolkien. Bilbo Baggins can never replace the tired old saints who Rebecca might just discover some day.