The friends with whom I spent a few holidays last year are also those that have shared in some of the coolest experiences of my life, luckily enough. After saying goodbye to them, something that always comes too soon, I prepared for a final semester of school in yet another location around the world. Right now, I find myself in my new studio in the Islington borough of London, England in a quarantine that has only just begun but has already given me ample time to refocus my thoughts and reflections.
I want to talk about the holidays that I have been reflecting on and the way that things have changed over the last few years, not just this one, since ’this one’ (2020) has long since ended. I was so fortunate to spend nearly 2 months ‘out west’ this fall and winter both isolating and exploring, something that I don’t take for granted and have been reflecting on ever since.
As I start yet another new adventure in another new country, I’m reminded that I have so many pieces of reflection from this experiences this fall to weave into the ever-expanding tapestry of my memory. Experiences with those people that I met abroad years ago, in a situation so similar yet not at all comparable to the one in which I now find myself. So, without further adieu, a compilation of thoughts that I wrote down sometime in December and am only just now getting around to sharing:
2018
Our first Thanksgiving was spent somewhere on the South China Sea. Our group of friends sat at a table (two tables technically) in the Lido restaurant on Deck 9 and each of us was tasked with getting a plate full of one item that was being served by the ship that night. We figured we could pass around those heaping plates of the quintessential American Thanksgiving dishes to make it feel the most like what we were all used to growing up with. Sharing stories of what our traditions with family were like, we stopped only to join in as everyone in the dining area broke into a rendition of ‘American Pie’. We shared what we were each the most thankful for. After this ‘main event’, we all piled into one cabin and watched every Thanksgiving episode of Friends. It wasn’t anything huge or even that fancy, but it was a holiday that made us realize we were still celebrating with family that year, just in a different sense of the word.
Our first Christmas season spanned across Asia, with our first Secret Santa shopping trip taking place in the streets of Ho Chi Minh and our final items bought in the large stores of Kobe, Japan. The exchange itself took place back on the ocean, somewhere after Hawaii, as we sat in that same cabin of a ship that felt like it could never stop being our home. And it was a home; the first home that we shared together but certainly not the last. We continued to celebrate together, in ways that were familiar to some but not all of us. Pajama dance parties to holiday music on top of Deck 9, ice skating in Japan, after that final shopping trip, and watching Christmas movies only solidified that this was one of the most festive years I’d had since I was a kid. We saw how quickly we had grown to know each other, our closeness reflected in the gifts that fit every single person so well. It was something fun to do while we spent days on end at sea, I don’t think it was even intended to become a tradition. Yet it did.
2019
Our second year of Secret Santa saw the majority of us in Northern California, while some were Face timing in or missing altogether. We didn’t get to be together for Thanksgiving, because we were all in our own places getting to reconnect with those lifelong traditions we had all talked about the year before. A few of us reunited in the South to attend Kelsey’s graduation in Tennessee, and then in the Midwest as Jenna visited my hometown in Ohio and we visited Lauren that December. During the holidays that year, we all had a chance to celebrate as we walked by lit up trees in the centers of town and sang Christmas songs at the top of our lungs in the car. We spent this season in our college and family homes, the places that we either grew up or had since drifted to.
This time, our third year, felt like a callback to our first, if not a little more stationary and domestically centered.
2020
Our third Thanksgiving was celebrated twice, the first of which took place in the desert of California, following a day of bouldering, on a weekend trip to Joshua tree. In attendance were more of our SAS family that had not been at those original tables with us that first year, while some of those who had been at our celebration on the ship found themselves unable to make it this time around. This year, we added in some significant others to the table, who are just as much family at this point as those who brought them into our lives. It was a wholesome day and a hectic night but, sandwiched somewhere in between, there we were- celebrating and sitting together in gratitude and enjoying great food. It felt so much like that first year, unlike the majority of our lives, yet still so familiar, as we passed around plates and reminisced not on our family traditions but on that shared Thanksgiving somewhere on the other side of the world.
The second celebration, on the day of, was a much smaller affair held in a place that had become our newest shared home for however fleeting an amount of time it may have been. We were back in our house in Lake Havasu and had celebrated Dragosh’s delayed virtual graduation in the middle of working and looking up real estate and cooking for dinner. The table didn’t feel smaller than ever before, though, because we were the final four remaining from this time as roommates, and we got to be together. It was part of the plan, coming full circle from zoom calls in the summer to sitting around a table in person so soon before this little oasis dried up and we said goodbye to another temporary home.
Our third Christmas season saw my third year in a row of being with Jenna for the holiday, fitting as she is undoubtedly one of the most festive people I know. I stayed at her place in LA for a couple of weeks, the only logical location to follow that first year on the ship and the second at my home.
We spent this year’s Secret Santa at a beach house just outside of Santa Cruz with Hanna and Kelsey face timing in at different points to join Dragosh, Sierra, Steven, Jenna and I. We had drawn for Secret Santa early on and had time to do our shopping across the months of November and December. Much like that first year, I wrapped presents with Hanna, shopped with Jenna and Steven, and watched holiday films with all of them. The gift exchange on my last day before flying out marked the end of that time, of getting to be together again in different capacities. Just like the years that had preceded this one, our ability to be there was based on circumstance and time and location- no better or worse than any other gathering, but different yet again.
“we’ll remember these years as just the very beginning of our friendship”
These most recent holidays, that we had the absolute gift of spending together, were made only more important by the fact that it was such an intense year. We were all together for longer, without a break, than we had literally ever been and we celebrated for a longer amount of time, albeit in a more stationary manner. (But even then, not really, right? Road trips across multiple states hardly feels reminiscent of any kind of stasis, regardless of whether or not a passport was involved.) Celebrating together has been one of my favourite things since that first year. Some of us traditionally go bigger than others for holidays and it is always really cool to see how that shows up in the balance of our relationship, along with how we all approach the holidays that we are fortunate enough to spend with one another.
It doesn’t really matter who can make it and who cannot, or even how a holiday is celebrated. Eventually, there’ll be a year where the majority of us are in different places, but I’m really grateful for these years where we are all young and flexible in our commitments and able to prioritize sharing spaces for new memories and traditions that one day will be reflected upon as ancient history. To know that we’ll remember these years as just the very beginning of our friendship is incredible. That one day we’ll be old and looking back on the years that brought us everything we wanted and then some. Before that, when we’re in our thirties and wondering how it’s already been ten whole years since XYZ, I know that it’ll be these times of consistent reunions and togetherness and adventure that we think of. No matter what path life takes us on, even if most of us end up living near each other, it will be these things that we find ourselves yearning for one day.
So there it came and there it went, another set of holidays in yet another place centered around different homes. At the end of it all, the four walls never seemed to matter much, anyway.
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