A rooted dream grows of fruits, lingering inside

This holiday: a hope to quiet the dismal cries.

Still, a bigger desire dares surface to invade,

Love and peace for all, in this world we have made.

**********************************************

Starry skies on a cold winter’s night connect

Youthful memories the heart’s mind collects

In streams of true holiday themed souvenirs,

Our dreams begin glowing like stars ever near.

*

Lights twinkle akin to joy's mirth everywhere

Despite the frosty chill found in the heavy air

Hot chocolate, songs, and warm hearts provide

A birth of true love in a feast no longer denied.

*

The sound of children’s laughter takes flight

Drifting ’cross light blankets of snow so white,

Bells ring, cascading to the moonlight’s height

To proclaim peace, altering man's dimming plight.

*

Minds and hearts unite as one, eager to release

The long-awaited presence of resounding peace

As enlightenment touches on our revolving souls,

In a fruition of love’s sweet mercy ever extolled.

On every holiday or birthday, mine or others, I wish always it seems for the same thing, or at least, since maturing. I no longer want to cure the condition we all share.

You know, "Life," though there was a time that I would have said I wished for peace, thinking how it should be a cure-all for war, pestilence, disease, general stupidity, and related suffering.

Then I slowly, painfully recognized that I didn't want to live without fight.

I want to grapple with problems. I want to overcome challenges in faith and possibility, physically and emotionally.

And accordingly, I sign my greeting cards with that dual edged wish:

Here's to a Creative Year.

*I’ll apologize in advance if any references in this gift request plants a festive earworm in your head. But, like the motto underneath my family crest states: Si nos miseri erimus, ceteri quoque erunt.*

All I want for Christmas is to get “All I Want for Christmas” banished from my skull. I don’t think Ms. Carey’s annual ditty is a bad song per se. Many people enjoy listening to it while getting into the holiday spirit. It’s perfect background noise for wrapping presents or decorating the home. Since October 29th,1994, it has successfully targeted a specific niche from Thanksgiving to December 26th. I can’t dismiss its popularity. Kudos to its longevity.

But much to my chagrin, it dominates the seasonal soundtrack of my life. My limited mental capacity can’t, hasn’t or won’t commit all the lyrics to memory. And I don’t have the intellectual fortitude to prevent the fragments I can recall from replaying over and over ad nauseum. So, I am powerless to stop it from being the only partial song (holiday or otherwise) aired on heavy rotation from my mind’s DJ booth. I can’t ignore it either.

So, what I want to find under my Christmas tree is the cessation of being auditorily waterboarded by portions of this tune. Granting release from such Yuletide torture is a priceless gift that keeps on giving. I’ll be forever indebted if Santa leaves this for me.

Now, I am a fervent believer in the concept of “careful what you wish for.” I accept that when random lines from the Queen of Christmas’ jingle spontaneously surface, monopolizing the Muzak playlist echoing through the empty halls of my addled brain, it means there’s no possible way “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” or “Dominick the Donkey” will be able to gain purchase in my noggin.

It’s a victory, albeit a hollow one. I understand a blessing is a blessing even if said blessing is an incessant, lesser-of-three-evils one that can drive a man to the breaking point where he purposely doesn’t hang the stockings by the chimney with care. Still, a bit of variety or say in what I hear would be welcomed.

Psychological intervention may be necessary to discover why I can’t cue up something more appealing from my personal, archived mixtape. There are many suitable alternative carols with beautiful melodies I would cherish listening to internally. Like “Carol of the Bell.” Or “Silver Bells.” Both bring me auricular pleasure, but neither can loosen Mariah’s stranglehold and they stay muted. (At this juncture, I’d even settle for “Hells Bells” on continuous loop it if meant Mimi gets a break to rest her vocal cords.)

Thankfully, 2025 will be here soon which means “AIWFC” will have run its course and be shelved for eleven months. This gives me hope knowing that in a few days, there will be no cueing up of uninvited music that will keep playing.

To those reading this, I’ll end by extending a heartfelt “Merry Christmas.” If you don’t celebrate Christmas, then I’ll bid you a sincere “Happy Hanukkah.” For the non-religious in attendance, I’ll offer a generalized, “Happy Holidays.” For the remaining who don’t celebrate anything, I’ll conclude with a simple, “Be well and look both ways before crossing the street.”

Every Christmas, my family comes together to attend my Aunt's evening mass in her home. Before an exquisite nativity scene of some ceramic with great detail. Where we sing softly of Jesus Christ and the fish in a river where a beautiful woman was brushing her hair, and at the end, we kiss the baby Jesus.

And when I'd been little at midnight I huddled around with my cousins-- the very best friends I still hold to my heart-- as we excitedly waited for midnight. As the time set by the adults that we could tear open our presents from a wide array of shiny wrapped packages under a grand tree.

It really looks like a toystore under my Aunt's tree. Since the whole family pitches in to trade gifts for cousins and aunts and sisters and their parents and the older kids to the younger kids.

What I want this Christmas is what I want every Christmas.

The warm light and steady, soothing hum of united prayer. Lilting singing voices as we celebrate Christ.

I want the burn of tamales on my tongue and the fill of posole and meatballs in my belly.

I don't even care all too much what I get under the tree. But I do especially love, when family members remember that I love wrapped ones the most since I get to tear into it.

I just want a singular night where our family is happy and talking, us kids holed up in a room with snacks talking about high school and college and romance, and the adults commandeering the downstairs with their gossip and "carcajeadas."

A home.

A house is a house. But a house isn't always a home. Parents overcame heavy obstacles, strove, and died trying to obtain this for me and my siblings. It hurts seeing their labor be for nothing even years later. It hurts knowing I might labor and languish only to fail as well.

All I want for Christmas is a peek at all the wonderous and mysterious mechanisms that control the universe.

I want to hear the creaking, ticking, wheezing, and clanking of the infinite’s clockworks. It’s delicate machinery relies solely on the laws of physics to keep its gears lubed, belt’s tightened, and the bell’s ringing. This machine’s operating parameters are both intricate and precise, only needing to be wound every eight billion years or so.

As part of my all encompassing experience of the universe, I want to feel the raging, life and death giving heat of a trillion stars as they burn, flare, smolder, flicker, then die after sacrificing the last of their gaseous fire and light to the void. When the last spark is spent, only the vast coldness exists for billions of lightyears until one might feel the radiant warmth of another star. Like all of its kind, this star also ceaselessly spends itself pouring heat and light into the void. This younger star’s blistering heat might still be powerful enough to deliver total incinerating destruction to anything that draws too close. However, it also lends its light to the parasitic planets and moons that drift around it. These orbiting dependents benefit from the star’s light, heat, and gravitational stability. Still for all of its power, this star also burns towards an ending where it will eventually expel one final weak blast of warm and dimming ray of light into the cosmos.

As part of my glimpse of all that is, I want to see the birth and death of galaxies. I want to witness how seemingly random chemical and environmental processes come together in just the right quantities and under precise circumstances to create the first living cell on some new and cooling planet somewhere in the universe. I want to follow that cell and its dependents as they live, die, but somehow always change for the better with each new generation. I would like to see other newly born cells take on the challenge of life and change. From all of these cells I hope to see the strange and wonderful beauty of a flora and fauna that’s different from anything I have ever seen before. Most of all, I hope to be present for that moment after millions of generations and countless changes that the progeny of that one single cell becomes aware and has a thought.

As my voyeuristic peek at the universe comes to an end, I want to smell the ozone and the burning of carbon from the friction created when meteors collide as they drift through the universe. I want to breathe in the unique chemical heat of the friction that welds the two space rocks together to form an even bigger drifting form in space. I want to catch a whiff of the even more intense melting of the metals, carbons, rock, and remnants of organic compounds within those larger forms as they enter the orbit of a star. I want to smell the atmosphere on this new planet and hope that there is a beath of life somewhere within that harsh fragrant bouquet of melted rock, metal, and atoms.

That is what I want for Christmas, or a puppy. Whatever fits within your budget.

On a plate. Starving, writhing, begging me to spare you. All I want for Christmas is to bite you, get a little taste of you. But honestly, it'd be better if I left you for the vultures. Not even my dog could stomach a rotten egg like you.

They say the fruit of patience is sweet. They aren't wrong. It is so delicious, especially when you're full to the brim of it! Resentment, hatred, vengeance... Building up like red, hot lava beneath that cool exterior.

"She's so chill!" They say.

That's why they or rather you my dear, will never see me coming! Right now, I must be one of the shadows that lurk at the back of your mind, never truly coming forth because of how hard you try to keep me at bay; keep me from engulfing you in the very darkness you sowed in me. You really shouldn't have done that.

Because now you'll pay for it.

One day, the truth will come boiling to the surface and when that happens, you'll be done for. The best part is that no matter how hard you try to smear me, I won't care. I'll be past caring at that point. What I will relish however, will be your ruin and your misery. So, my dearest enemy, watch your back! What goes around, comes around.