My students tag tables, walls, and chairs because their greatest fear is that no one will ever remember them. They do not believe they can give impassioned speeches, rally people in protest, paint masterpieces. They think they will die, small and forgotten, and it dictates their every action.

I wanted a life of adventure. I wanted to travel. I wanted to work my way up to being Somebody. I wanted to leave a mark on the Earth and be remembered.

We may deny the truth of our childhoods while we are living them, but we one day realize the truth of our parents as readily as we do that of Santa. Neither are as perfect as our memories would have them…

Sins don’t go away as long as there is someone to remember them.

Maybe I have never had the Christmas I remember, since we never remember the event itself but just the last time we revisited the memory. I have woven together a few dozen scraps (the Sears catalog, my father videoing everything we did, Christmas parties and visits with Santa) and pretended they amount to one perfect, cohesive moment, but I am as guilty as baby-boomers, who dictated unconsciously that all the songs they listened to in 1963 would be the timeless Christmas standards of today.

We paw at nostalgia even before we hit twenty, wanting a holiday that never happened, a wholesomeness that could not survive in the wild.