Dearest Rachel –
I had to go back through all the titles of all the letters I sent you to make sure I hadn’t reused this one (although this site seems willing to allow for duplications, I still consider it bad form to repeat myself, even after all this time). It turns out that this little piece of family slang isn’t as common as all that, even in these communiques – including an observation of my own about how giving the twenty-third of December a name only serves to highlight the fact that it’s the twenty-third of month; yet another monthly anniversary, however much I might be trying to get past those.
Still, on this, the fifty-ninth month since your passing, it has to be pointed out that you would be using the term as a clever shorthand for the day in which the holiday season is already in full gear – the first of our “Christmas Eve” services takes place this evening, for example, so as you can see, it’s officially underway – and to allow it to fall into disuse would be a shame. Already, I’ve had to explain the term to Mom and Dad – ‘Adam coming before Eve’ and all that – and they’re still of perfectly sound mind, so the process of it dropping back into obscurity is underway. I’m pretty sure you would want me to stem that progression if at all possible.
The thing about Christmas Adam is that it exists in this nebulous twilight world between ordinary life and holiday. As I mentioned earlier, some of the holiday-related events that can’t all be crammed into Christmas Eve are starting to spill over into today, but at the same time, it’s really nothing more than your average day in December. It’s a regular work day, with a regular schedule attached to it – including the fact that I find myself feeling the need to head off to the gym before putting in a short appearance at the ‘office,’ despite also needing to report to church some time before five this evening (which wouldn’t be possible if I was still a part of the standard work farce these days – once again, I have to thank you for that).
However, when I got back from my workout, and Logan came downstairs for one of his daily breaks from office work, I informed him of his delivery as I made my way to my shower… only to receive a very puzzled look from him about it all. Apparently, this was no more something that he’d ordered than we had; this was either yet another case of misdirected delivery, or someone had dropped this off unsolicited out of the goodness of their hearts with no indication as to who or why.
So, for what basically amounts to an ordinary day, we’ve already started it off with something resembling a Christmas miracle. Not that we need any of the items as such – and even if we did, we’re more than capable of getting them on our own (with the exception of Daniel, who has yet to contact AAA about your car, but he plans to take care of that today, since it’s not the holiday distraction that it would be tomorrow or Thursday) – but we can certainly put these things to good use.
This incident has sort of derailed any observations I was going to make regarding the day itself; as to whether it’s part of the holiday proper these days, or if it’s just another day on the calendar (and should be treated as such). It feels so strange how, for all that we see various short videos on so many platforms about this or that thing being pilfered from one porch or another, we should constantly have the opposite ‘problem,’ if you can even call it that. But that doesn’t have much to do with the season; most of these incidents tend to happen on the opposite side of the calendar, in fact.
Which may lead into the conclusion that, for all that Christmas activities bleed into today – thereby necessitating a special name for it that I will try to keep up, for your sake – it really is just another ordinary day with the ordinary demands of the day that need to be kept up with. And with that having been said, I should probably get to them, with the usual request for you to keep an eye on me, and wish me luck. Special day or not, I’m going to need it.
Letters to Rachel 