Kimberly Emerson

Like many people, I’m rarely at home for Christmas.  Thus, in my head, Christmas is automatically equated with travel.  (Which, when you think about it, is very spiritual – after all, Jesus was born in a manger because Mary and Joseph were on the road.)

My usual traveling companion is my younger brother Geoff (pronounced like Jeff, though he has gotten accustomed to being called Goe-frey, Godfrey, and any number of other things).  He’s good company – smart, funny, and content with some periods of silence.  Usually we drive up to Mom & Dad’s house, some nine hours away.  This year we decided to fly. 

Either flying or driving from one end of California to the other is an interesting exercise.  (When anyone who is not holding a textbook uses the word “interesting,” be wary.  A car wreck is interesting.  That does not mean you want to run out and have one yourself.)  It’s a long state, with much beautiful scenery.  None of it can be found along the I5, the main artery for folks traveling from Los Angeles to Sacramento.  The I5 is the fastest way to get from North to South in the state, but be prepared.  You will get lulled into a coma by large farms, orchards, and dead or dying vineyards, only to be jolted back to horrible consciousness by the smell of the largest bunch of cows you never wanted to be this close to.  These poor cattle are packed into the arid ranchland as tightly as possible, all looking like Cows of the Living Dead as they stare at the cars passing them by.  If you’re the lone vegetarian in your family and you’d like some back-up, take your relatives for a drive down the I5 and leave the windows down.  That smell could put starving hyena off red meat.

Given this exciting vista to anticipate, many people opt to fly instead.  My brother is the exception.  He enjoys having the power to determine when he stays or goes, and challenging himself to make the trip in a shorter amount of time than we did the previous year.  This is a sore point, since I drive a hybrid, and my goal is to spend as little on gas as possible.  Besides, I’ve told him, if you’re trying to save time, it only takes an hour to fly.  Geoff pointed out to me a couple of years ago that it only takes an hour in the air; by the time you add in all the time involved in getting to and from the airport, plus the time spent in the terminal waiting for your flight, you’ve spent as much time as would have driving.  As it turns out, he’s almost right.  For our 10:00am flight on Christmas Eve, the schedule went as follows:

7:45 am : Leave my house.

8:00 am : Arrive at Ann’s house.  (I’m leaving my car at her house, and she’s driving me from there to the airport.)  Hope that Ann is awake, and that I don’t wake her husband and four kids up on their day off.

8:10 am : Leave Ann’s house when she’s found her keys, a can of soda, and some chewing gum.  She’s awake and remarkably cheerful, for someone out of bed at 8:10 in the morning on Christmas Eve.

8:20 am : Arrive at Geoff’s work, where he has elected to leave his car for the duration of our 9-day absence.  Wedge Geoff and his suitcases in the car.

8:35 am : Arrive at airport.   

8:45 am : Check in luggage.  Leave bag with attendant who is not as complacent as Ann about being up early on Christmas Eve, and hope that he doesn’t pick my bag to stomp on in order to vent his aggression.

9:00 am : Wind through security line, following woman holding infant.  Try to keep eye-rolling to a minimum as security guard forces woman to remove the baby’s shoes.  When you’re down to removing the baby shoes, it seems like it’s time to give up on the metal detector gate and bring out the security wand.  (Same set of guards are oblivious to the fact that I’ve forgotten to take my ziplock bag of liquids out of my carryon.  Not as much of a threat as the baby shoes, evidently.)

9:15 am : Arrive at gate.  The distance from the ticket counter to the gate increases proportionately to the heaviness of my luggage.

9:30 am : Give up on line at Starbucks and go to McDonald’s for breakfast.  Get fast cup of coffee that I don’t enjoy.

9:45 am : Watch Geoff’s luggage as he decides to get in line for Starbucks.

10:00 am : Get on to plane directly behind my brother and the cup of coffee he is somewhat smugly enjoying.

10:25 am : Finally get off the ground.

11:45 am : Land in Sacramento.  Hug Mom and Dad.  Virtuously avoid the Cinnabon stand.

12:00 pm : Wait for luggage, decide to go back to Cinnabon stand for pack of rolls, to be eaten for breakfast Christmas morning.  I blame the smell.  I think they have a secret connection from the oven to the building ventilation system.

12:30 pm : Get to car in the parking lot, after dropping $14.00 and fifteen minutes on Cinnabons.  The clerk clearly had other things on her mind while she was waiting on us and the one couple in front of us. 

12:50 pm : Stop for lunch at Panera’s.  We’re saving the Cinnabons for tomorrow, and it’s been a long morning.

1:30 pm : Get back on the road to Mom & Dad’s.

3:00 pm : Arrive at Mom & Dad’s house. 

Driving from SoCal, if Geoff gets to drive as fast as he wants, we probably could’ve driven to Mom & Dad’s by 4:00.  The liquids in my suitcase would not have secretly endangered America, and we would never have been tempted by Cinnabon.  Hmmm.

Christmas itself is lovely, if a little hectic.  We make a big dinner on Christmas Day, to be eaten by my parents, Geoff, me and Grandma.  We make a huge dinner the day after Christmas, when my aunt, uncle, two of my cousins and their spouses come to join us.  We miss my brother and his family, who have elected to remain in Portland this year, and my cousin Jonathan and his family, who all have colds, but we manage to have a good time and eat too much anyway.  The monkey bread (bread dough baked in butter & parmesan cheese) helps a lot, as do the pumpkin and mincemeat pies.  (Yes, we eat mincemeat, and no, there isn’t actually meat in it anymore.  Give it a chance.  You might like it.)

Two days after Christmas, Geoff, my parents and I load our luggage and a bunch of presents into the car, and start off on an 11-hour drive.  No, we are not normally masochistic.  We’re going to Portland, to see my older brother Peter, his lovely wife Karen, and their two boys, Tyler and Ryan.  It’s a long drive, but it’s cheaper than flying (especially when you figure in all the extra baggage charges we’d incur since we’re bringing a toy store’s worth of goodies for my nephews.)  Peter works in Denver and flies home every week, and they stayed in Portland for Christmas.  I missed having them there with the rest of us at Christmas, but I can completely understand my brother’s desire to spend fourteen days with his family in one place, without having to go anywhere near an airport.

Having a lot of time to kill in a car, while all of us try not to kill each other, I thought it would be a good idea to bring an audiobook.  I tried desperately to get a copy of A Christmas Carol.  It was seasonal, and I figured it was something all four of us would enjoy.  It didn’t work.  The library was all out of copies.  The only one I could download onto my mp3 player was abridged, which means they leave out my favorite “dead as a doornail” paragraph.  Not acceptable (but fortuitous, since as it turns out, the car we took doesn’t have an mp3 hook-up).  Finally, I found my parents’ copy of the book and brought it with us, announcing to my family that we had four perfectly good readers in the car, we could take turns.  My family’s response was universally lukewarm. 

But it seems being trapped in a car can take the fight out of people, because when I start reading, they give up and go along.  By the time I am done reading the first stave (evidently Dickens felt chapters were passé), my mom agrees to read the next one.  We comment from time to time, enjoying the language.  Dickens’ prose works just as well now as it did when he first wrote it and decided it was populist tripe over a hundred years ago.  And may I say, Mr. Dickens, just because people like reading something does not make it bad.  The four of us in the car, bibliophiles all, loved it. 

I also find myself enjoying the luxury of being read to.  How long has it been, I wonder, since I heard my mom and dad read to me?  Probably thirty years or more.  I listen to the story and watch Shasta Pass go by, covered in snow.  The ground resembles a soft white blanket, fresh and clean.  Suddenly, I’m not in as much of a hurry to get there.  I want to stay here, listening to the voices of people I love, surveying this portion of California that is relatively untouched by man.  I realize what people mean when they say that life is about the journey.

It would be wonderful to say that this feeling stays with me and permanently changes my life.  Unfortunately, it pretty much goes out the window when we get off the road in search of an advertised Dairy Queen that has disappeared from the earth at the same moment that I really, really need a bathroom.  I curse the rural parts of Oregon that shut down on 5:00pm and start thinking fond thoughts of the airport.  Flying has its issues, but you are almost always within shouting distance of the ladies’ room.

Oh, well.  It was nice while it lasted.  Time to start kicking the back of my brother’s seat and asking, “Are we there yet?”