About a year ago Dad called me to tell me he had cancer. A while ago— maybe a week?— I realized how lucky I was that I’d been able to spend last Christmas with him. His last Christmas, my last Christmas with him. We didn’t do anything but watch movies, sleep and eat— he couldn’t eat much, but he did what he could.
Four years ago this Christmas was the last time my children and I were able to visit for the holiday, and it was our last Christmas with my mother. The following July while I had my own house full of my children for their summer visit, I awoke to a voicemail from my Dad. I knew before I listened what it meant. Before Mom died Dad and I never spoke on the phone. I still have that voicemail saved.
The other day I could not bring myself to stay at work. On my way home I decided to take the opportunity to do some birthday and Christmas shopping for my children, something I rarely have the resources to do in a manner that isn’t at least mildly stressful. This year is different in that regard, and I was attempting to take the opportunity to enjoy myself while thinking about my children and what they’d love to have as gifts, and how much I love them. Parking in a part of town I wasn’t familiar with, I came across a bizarre holiday decoration situation: in a small yard between an old brick apartment building and a tall wrought iron fence, was a tiny field of evenly distributed Halloween and Christmas decorations, stuck in the soil with stakes and other accouterments. I was immediately smitten: I am a huge fan of celebrating all the holidays simultaneously, of affirming the both/ and of things we two often pointlessly parse apart. I took out my phone to take a picture and said, to myself and under my breath, “that’s what I’m talking about,” before being startled by what must’ve been a 1,000 year old woman who’d been sitting behind the dark screen of her front door the whole time. We had a lovely conversation about this philosophy of holidays that we both shared, and I felt vindicated that such a venerable elder affirmed my personal proclivity, and edified. I took my leave and headed to the store for the shopping, my new plan of doing that without panicking already going swimmingly.
Today I’m loading up mom’s old Subaru for a trip down to Long Beach to visit my partner’s family for what mom used to call “Turkey Day.” I bought it from dad just under a year ago, driving it from California to Kansas over the New Years holiday during the atmospheric river that coated the entirety of that trip in ice and snow from Western Kansas to the Sierra Nevada. Since then I’ve driven it up and down the west coast, from Portland to the Salton Sea, and back to Kansas to see Dad just before he died, then back again.
This week I learned that at least part of the origin of modern day Halloween lies in the ancient Druidic rite that marked the culmination of the Pleiades— that point when “the seven sisters” are at their highest point in the night sky. I’m not sure what the connection to the gaelic Samhain is here, exactly, but I do know that centuries of galactic and calendric fuckery and natural drift mean that said holi-day no longer— or never— falls, perfectly/ *technically* on the evening of October 31st, but somewhere, these days at least, around mid November.
Often people become upset with me because of my propensity for singing Christmas songs year ‘round. For some reason, the worst part of the year to sing said songs are from October to November. I will admit that these people are often members of my immediate family and that I often enjoy singing christmas songs at this specific moment in time for that very reason, but this is simply a silver lining to my theory and practice of holidays. Just after both my encounter with the old woman and my learning of the Pleiades, I had been having an argument with my partner about this very thing. The rhetorical advantage of my affirmation of every holidays all at once and all the time means that eventually I always win these arguments, as I never negate anyone’s assertion that it is now this holiday time (it’s just that for me it’s also, simultaneously, that holiday time as well)— at least we can always at least agree on one thing. The memory of this particular clash is pertinent because I realized this morning that it— the argument— fell halfway between my encounter with the old woman and my loading up of the Subaru for our trip home— the day of this particular culmination of the Pleiades, 2023 edition, November 18th, the real Halloween.
The Japanese call the Pleiades Subaru, which is also a car my Mom owned and my Dad sold me, a fact attested by the stars on their logo— of which there are six, as the famous seventh is famously difficult to see. Hidden, maybe.
As I write this my partner’s luggage is building up around me. It’s almost time to load the last of it up and hit the road, back down south, in my Pleiades, in the direction of, but not to, my favorite place, the desert, rife with the hidden languages in which I’m sure it is written somewhere that every day is holy, or something like it, but that that doesn’t necessarily make them good.