It has been a week since Thanksgiving, and I’m still working on leftover turkey. Carted all the way from Maine to Maryland, it is now in the form of turkey soup. I crossed eight states bearing Tupperware containers of love incarnate: home-cooked food.
Affection, in my family — as in so many families — is often expressed through food. Whether it’s sitting down for a meal together or just sharing a cup of coffee, food, that basic necessity, is a pillar of social gatherings. My family called me a full week before I got home just to ask whether I had any culinary requests.
My parents put me on the southbound bus back to Baltimore with a full stomach. “I’ll be back in less than a month,” I told them.
“Maybe by then I’ll be hungry again.”
From 7 in the morning until nearly midnight last Sunday, I watched the Northeast slide past my bus seat window. Going over the Piscataqua River and leaving Maine behind me held less fanfare than usual, given that I will be back in just a few short weeks. When the third pickup truck bearing a Christmas tree drove past my bus, it finally hit me: It’s officially That Time of Year. The Holidays. The Christmas Season.
Each city we drove through was newly decorated with the sidewalks as crowded as the streets. From Boston’s South Station to New York City, we battled through the crowds: shoppers, travelers and sightseers, everyone was out. I changed buses in New York City’s Chinatown, grabbing a quick meal of hot, savory rice for dinner during a rare opportunity to stretch my legs. On the last long haul to Baltimore, the lady sitting next to me slept on my shoulder until Philadelphia, making a sound like a tire slowly losing air. I kept my eyes on the lights of the highway, counting the mile markers to my destination. It had already been dark out for six hours when I finally arrived in Baltimore.
I’m not used to it being dark out so early. It has been three years since I’ve had a North American winter. With the exception of one monthlong sunset on the Antarctic coast, I haven’t seen it dark before 8 p.m. in a long, long time. The early nighttime is strange and, in my current urban setting, somewhat disquieting. The lack of light, to my unaccustomed eyes, makes Baltimore a darker, more foreboding place. And yet, since Thanksgiving, the Christmas lights — something I have missed — have brightened Baltimore, turning the city into a different place altogether.
For the last few years, while I worked for the Antarctic Program at the South Pole, Christmas was something that happened suddenly, almost without warning. Now, the month of December stretches out, hung with decorations and music and parties. As though a switch was flicked on with the final Thursday of November, music is playing, advertisements twirl, and the entire city seems to redouble its efforts to light up the sky with colored bulbs. And I’m loving it, over the top though it may be. Winter’s darkness needs it. The holidays take an otherwise grim change of seasons and turn it into a showcase of festive decorations.
Every afternoon, I walk a mile from work down to my apartment by the harbor. In the new 5 o’clock blackness, details that I hadn’t noticed before stand out. The glow of the traffic signals, the way the taller, well-lit buildings shed light onto the sidewalks like secondary streetlights. An ambulance howling down the street draws even more attention than usual, its circling red lamps blinding bystanders to anything else. Even a single string of lights on an apartment railing can alter the new, dark landscape.
The glint of reflection, too, stands out in ways that it hadn’t when the sun stayed up until long after dinnertime. Now puddles throw the lights of the city back up at us, shattering and refracting the rays of lamps and headlights as boots splash through their surfaces. The metallic ornaments that decorate wreaths hung on row-house doors glint with passing headlamps. When a foggy, thick midcoast mist begins to fall, the precursor to snow, every city streetlight is adorned with a lacey halo.
Coming home in the evening, I shake out my damp clothes and turn on the kitchen lights. I can hear Christmas music coming from the house right behind mine, trilling, cheerful notes that could sound trite but which, tonight, are simply comforting. December has turned Baltimore — and all of the cities I traveled across through the Northeast — into glittering, newly minted places, bright for the holiday season. I open the freezer and take out the last Tupperware container of Thanksgiving leftovers. It even tastes like the Christmas season has begun.
Meg Adams, who grew up in Holden and graduated from John Bapst Memorial High School in Bangor and Vassar College in New York, shares her experiences with readers each Friday. For more about her adventures, go to the BDN Web site: bangordailynews.com or e-mail her at meg@margaret-adams.com