So. This is Christmas.

I was out late tonight returning some dried logbooks to a few geocaches in the neighborhood after watching The Chronicles of Riddick on HD-DVD.

To be brief, I first saw this film at Sci-Fi Marathon at CWRU and fell in love with it. Then I watched it in SD on an HDTV and said to myself "Man, I really want to see this movie in HD." Well, tonight was the realization of that desire, and it was everything I'd hoped it was. To wit, I involuntarily humped the menu screen, and the picture was so good one of Monk's teeth popped right out of his head.

After the movie, I bundled up, collected the logbooks into little dimebags, and began a tranquil and serene walk through the town. There was a thin layer of frost coating everything, and aside from a few cars driving up and down the road, I didn't see a single sign of life. No pedestrians, no shapes casting shadows in living rooms windows.

I was alone, in more ways than one. I stopped at a big pine tree outside the police station. It was decked with big Christmas lights of every major color and stood out (naturally) as being the most festive thing in the municipal lot at eleven o'clock at night on Christmas Eve. If I were a spiritual man, I probably would have said a little prayer, asking God for guidance, or more likely seeking the hand of divine retribution against my enemies. (They should die like pigs in hell.)

Instead, I just stood there and admired the cold air and the pretty lights and the pacific emptiness of it all for a minute before continuing my journey. After all, I had caches to go before I sleep. The atmosphere along the Sammamish River Trail is as dark as the trail itself, and the only thing lit along its path are the underpasses of the bridges, to prevent rebellious teens from spraypainting graffiti over the embossed cement salmon.

In Cleveland, I wouldn't be caught dead walking in a place like that. Here though, I don't know. I see women walking by themselves all over the place after dusk, and that signifies a greater sense of security than back east, where everybody traveled around in groups in the Flats at all hours of the day. I felt totally safe shambling alone in the darkness next to a quiet murky riverbank, even if the FBI refers to my new turf as "America's Killing Fields".

The walk put me in a certain mood, a certain mindset, and the following is what came to me walking alone in the darkness on December 24th.

Christmas is a time of peace, happiness, love, and togetherness. I possess none of the above, and this is my status quo. I expect to continue lacking these qualities until so much time has elapsed that I no longer remember why I started lacking them in the first place. Around the world, children are anxiously awaiting the sunrise, when at the earliest possible opportunity they will be able to rise, wake their parents, and begin getting free toys that they believe were deposited there by a magical elf from Scandinavia.

Meanwhile, I find myself searching deeply within to try to find that same fascination, that same sense of wonder, that same power to believe that there is something good and pure in this world beyond compromise, immutable and undefileable. So far, I've found nothing. By special request my dear sweet mother has sent me my favorite tree ornaments from childhood: a bevy of Hallmark's Star Trek series, including that shuttlecraft that you plug into the strand of lights so you can press a button and hear Spock wish you Happy Holidays. She sent me my stocking, the blue one I've used for the last ten years, and she dug out the little ceramic drummer boy ornament that she made for me in 1982.

It's just not Christmas without that little guy.

And I don't know what it is, because I sure don't follow the logical progression from "decorate tree and give gifts" back to "magical woman makes babies out of thin air, wise men arrive to bestow child with gold and some things that smell awful". If anything, Mary would have been visited by an angel who told her that it was the will of God that some day, a miraculous film starring Vin Diesel would look amazing in a sci-fi epic adventure presented for home-viewing in 1080p with Dolby 5.1 sound.

To me, the ritual and the routine are fine, but they carry far more importance than they should, and I do not know why. After the kids grew up, Mom stopped going through the Christmas hassle. She was happy to have a break from trying to make our seasons bright and perpetuate this illusion that everything magical about Christmas just happened. Cookies and milk? Magically gone. Presents? Just there all of a sudden. No wrapping paper in the closet, no bag of bows and ribbon hiding under the bed. She started letting us pick our own presents, and eventually Christmas got to be so laid-back we stopped putting up the tree.

We had a Christmas coat tree for a couple of years. We thought it was clever. Eventually we just started piling our presents as they arrived on a table, nice and orderly for when the big day came and we could open them and finally eat, wear, or play whatever we'd picked out weeks earlier.

Does this mean I'm lacking in Christmas spirit? Perhaps. As soon as Stef put up the tree this year, it didn't feel right without that little ceramic guy on it. And looking back, I remember year after year decorating the tree back home with my sister. I remember the look and feel of precise ornaments that would go back into a shoebox in early January and not emerge for 11 months. And that, to me, is Christmas, something I've ignored for many years, and which digs at me as I look at where I am now and I realize that I'm not going to be home with my family for the first Christmas in several years.

They are perfectly OK with this fact.

In my old life, I'd get back home to visit them once a year after graduating college, maybe, maybe twice a year. Now, I find myself wondering if and how I'll ever get back home, and it occurs to me that I've gotten myself quite far from where I ever wanted to be as a boy, far enough away from the homestead that I worry I may never find my way back. I'm supposed to know what I want with my life. I'm supposed to have a career and a wife and some semblance of societal value that I can impart on children along with a healthy inheritance.

And, like joy, and peace, and togetherness, I lack those things, too. I don't know who I am. I don't know what I want. I am a 28-year-old boy desperately looking back and trying to piece together how he ever got this far from home and whether the journey warrants another step. So far, I've pretty much just been coasting on bad ideas and mistakes.

I'm not a religious man. The sins I've committed without remorse are legion, and I have it on good authority I'll commit at least as many more before I shuffle off this mortal coil. And yet to show for my age and experience, I have a surprisingly small amount of wisdom, and what little I do have is couched heavily inside thick sedimentary layers of paranoia and distrust towards the human race, something akin to "I'm OK, you'd better get the fuck away from my stuff".

Is this all there is? Looks like. I can look for some encoded meaning in decorating a tree, or wrapping up coffee mugs with fun sayings on them for the people I care about, but ultimately, I find that the most significant action in any of these things is that specific action itself. Thoughts count, it's true, but action speaks so much louder. I've been thinking an awful lot since I quit my job and moved thousands of miles away from everything I used to know. I don't regret that action in the slightest, don't mistake my feelings for regret. Instead, I find that I can philosophize about the state of the world for the rest of my days, or I can start doing something to improve the world.

Did I say improve? Perhaps that's not the right term. "Remake in my own image" would be better. Things are broken. Soon it will be time to make them straight.