JOSEPH N. BELL -- The Bell Curve

I have just returned from my annual Christmas visit with my youngest

daughter and my grandchildren in Boulder, Colo. We follow a regular

routine during this week that starts with shopping for a Christmas tree.

I’m allowed to buy it and take part in putting on the lights. Then I sit

back, usually with a martini, and watch my daughter and grandchildren

decorate the tree.

The rest of my time there is subdivided into shopping for gifts,

wrapping them, writing outrageously bad poems to accompany each gift,

taking my daughter and son-in-law out to lunch, schmoozing with my

grandsons and enjoying family dinners. All of this has been going on for

so many years that it has become tradition.

But sometimes tradition runs head-on into change, and something has to

give. Because Christmas is so closely associated with family, it is the

most difficult time of the year to accept change. Christmas magnifies

everything. Joy. Pleasure. Hurt. Pain. Loneliness. And especially for

older people, it magnifies nostalgia.

In Boulder this year, tradition had to step back. One grandson was

away at college. There were some basic changes in the family and new

people to meet and hopefully get to know. Instead of a family event,

tree-buying involved only my daughter and me. Time and inspiration ran

out before I could write my poems. Yet, the visit was totally satisfying

and delightful.

Somewhere, somehow I was apparently learning to put nostalgia into

perspective.

There’s a poignant scene in the second act of Stephen Sondheim’s

“Sunday in the Park with George” in which the artist is contemplating the

changes that have taken place on a site he once painted, and his departed

mother appears before him in a vision. They talk about the past and his

childhood, and she paints one beautiful, glowing word picture after

another.

He corrects her gently, but her perceptions are clear and firm, and he

finally allows her that place. His perceptions aren’t negative. Just

different. He’s comfortable with his, and she with hers. And it becomes

clear that nostalgia is a capacious bag, to be drawn from selectively

according to the needs of the individual. Nostalgia is Christmas Past.

Change is Christmas Present.

I have a cornucopia of Christmas nostalgia. Such memories as the

funny, unscannable poems on Christmas tags from a quicksilver daughter.

Or the gift of a performance of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” on the

organ from her younger sister, who began and ended her organ career with

that virtuoso number. So many, many more -- just as there are many such

memories from my Christmases in Boulder.

But I came home from Boulder last week infected with the spirit of

Christmas Present to a house not yet dressed for the holidays. I bought

a tree and strung some lights, and that evening my wife and I went across

the street on neighborhood business and found the members of a young

family decorating their tree. So we made a date with the two youngest --

Jamie, 6, and Cory, 9 -- to help us decorate our tree the following

night. They did, and my wife made cookies and played the piano, and we

had an altogether lovely Christmas Present.

We don’t have any small children of our own around anymore, but we

have a large one who will be home for the holidays for the first time in

several years, and we plan to start building some new traditions. They

may not last long before they become nostalgia, but we’ll enjoy them both

ways.

I learned slowly that the one thing those who fear and resist change

need most to understand is that change need not be -- and usually isn’t

-- disrespectful of tradition, which provides the stable reference points

that prevent our lives from being in a constant state of tilt. But when

tradition hardens into rigidity -- into a kind of mental rigor mortis --

the joy is squeezed out of it and change becomes acutely painful. This

happens most frequently to institutions, but it can happen to families

too.

Oddly enough, the family members most likely to resist change are the

children, to whom the familiar -- even when it isn’t altogether

satisfying -- is infinitely preferable to the unknown. There’s a risk

that as we grow older, we will revert to the child in us that suffers

change badly and builds high defenses around tradition. Sometimes,

Christmas Present isn’t allowed to penetrate those defenses.

If these seem like heavy thoughts to grow out of the buying of a

Christmas tree in Colorado, they aren’t meant that way. They are meant

only as an invitation to share Christmas Present with us -- and to send a

fond wish for a satisfying and fulfilling holiday season to all of you

who dip into this space.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.