Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas!
The patients say it to the doctors, the doctors say it to the patients, the nurses and the doctors say it back and forth to each other. So much smiling, Father reflects. Those wide and festive grins. Where does the happiness come from? There’s just something light about the spirit.
What a bright and beauteous Christmas tree, out in the hospital hallway, covered in garlands and glittering balls of red. All of the staff are wearing these festive red hats. Father has put on one, but he doesn’t feel like it suits him.
What a balmy day to celebrate Christmas. The weather rarely changes on the Cook Islands, remaining around twenty-five degrees Celsius, with the evergreen beam of the sun’s sheen. Patients come in and out, wearing the same floral-print shirts as the doctors. People forge through their illnesses, people live on.
Father never takes off his lab coat, no matter how hot it gets. Father works and works, and the expression on his face never changes.
At the lunch hour, Father goes back towards his village grounds to join Mother and the neighbours. Loud Maori songs chant through the tongues of all the men and women standing around the table with the Christmas pig at the centre. The orange, purple, pink, and yellow colours of their shirts bounce off the natural green of the fauna around them, as well as the eggshell-blue colours of the houses. The men and woman sing with the biggest of smiles, bob their bodies back and forth, side to side.
They talk festively, joyously to Father, they share their hugs and wishes oh so merrily.
Today, it is Christmas Day.
There are only two villages in Mauke. Each alternate during the week between hosting the Christmas and New Year’s feast. One village serves the food, and the other villagers come to every house and sing songs, and then it reverses for the next holiday. This year it is the duty of Father’s village to host the Christmas feast. For New Year’s, it will be their duty to sing.
Father cannot carry a note to save his life. When he joins his wife to sing, the villagers listening find it impossible to keep the laughter from breaking onto their faces. It all comes with good intent. It is not that they want to jest, but that they simply cannot keep their feelings from showing. Every man of this island is a man of these villages. They are all like family. There is no feeling to be felt except closeness and camaraderie.
Hurrah, hurray. It is Christmas Day.
What if all this island was suddenly underwater? What if all the world bombed itself to smithereens, and it was only life on these idyllic little shores that would be left? What if food was to suddenly stop growing? What if everyone was to suddenly starve to death?
These are the thoughts that sometimes enter Father’s mind, particularly because he is now talking once a month to Son, and those are the things that Son worries about.
But too much thought is akin to a disease. Sometimes it is worse than a malady. Disease affects almost everyone. Overthinking is locked to certain people. Father is not an overthinker. Father is calm.
It is just that he has to think a lot more about the health of his loved ones as he ages. It is just that there is so much bad news coming the few minutes he has the television on, and he knows it will affect him someday in some way. It is just that there’s a lot of good in Son’s mind, but there’s also a lot bad, and now that they are trying to speak more Father has to be aware of this.
So, it’s not like all of life is on the small, humble island of Mauke. Life is bigger, and it is only when Father is a few years away from his seventies that he starts to think about it.
2022 was an odd, odd year for most of humanity. And yet life on this island was slow, life here was more or less bliss. People went to sleep with their bellies full of breadfruit and fish. People were still living as their ancestors did for hundreds of years, even as the rest of the countries of the world were panicking.
Christmas Day is almost over. Christmas Day was perfect.
And yet something about the day felt different.
Son had called in the earlier hours of Christmas morning. It was just as the sun was coming up, and Father was putting a lab coat over his brown floral shirt. Son was angry that his school wasn’t hiring him for the next year, Son was angry to be the only person of colour in that apartment of hippies he had chosen to live in. They smoke weed every day, and when the police come, the first person they stare at is me. Father told him not to live with such people. Then Father also told him to wear condoms more often, and Son got angry at him.
Was Son just angry because he had no one to celebrate Christmas with? It wasn’t Father’s place to tell him to come home because Son already knew he had a home with them. He just didn’t like living in an island in the middle of nowhere.
Christmas is a day of community. Christmas is a day of family.
The day is ending, and Father goes to sleep. Somehow he feels accomplished. A part of it comes from having smiled off the effusiveness of his neighbours and hospital colleagues. A part of it comes from genuinely feeling good at the end of a day. And another part of it is coming from the image that is carrying him to sleep. It started with him thinking of how baby Jesus had felt as he was being carried around by the wise men, and then Father remembered how warm it felt to have once had a baby boy, and to cradle him fondly against his chest.
Very inspiring story. Lots of emotions to feel during the holidays. Aren’t we blessed?