Holiday Memories and My First Night at Home in Armenia
Last week, my family put up the Christmas tree right after Thanksgiving. I am just one of those people. I have a basement, and in that basement are boxes of holiday themed decorations. Not a ton, but enough to drop little vignettes on a few windowsills and then two full boxes of ornaments that cover our tree so completely I finally thought for the first time this year that I may end up soon becoming a person with two fake Christmas trees in my house. (Don’t tell my husband.) (Husband, if you’re reading this, I’m totally kidding.) (I’m actually not kidding.)
I do this because my childhood was super gay in the Christmas way. You know… we decked the halls and donned our gay apparel. We decorated the tree with handmade ornaments and told the same sweet stories every year.
“These were the first ornaments we bought on our first Christmas together,” my mom would say, handing one of us an ornament from a box of gilded cardboard angels.
Or she’d simply hand me an trash-craft angel I’d made in second grade, and I’d shout, “The paper plate angel!” and find a place on the tree that was open enough for a dinner plate sized ornament.
The family I grew up in, we are holiday people. The bonds shared over happy, sensorial memories, the same sights and sounds and smells coming out year after year, grow now the way old redwoods do, ancient and hard to see where they begin and end. Now, they just are, built filling up the couch to watch holiday movies or running together to our parent’s room to wake them up to go open presents. I can hear the set of bells connected by electric wires programmed to play Christmas carols. I can smell the sugar cookies in the oven. And don’t get me started on the Christmas stromboli. (That’s for a different blog.)
I am not a Christian. But Christmas traditions make me feel deeply connected to my immediate family and the family that ripples out beyond that to cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, great grandparents. So I carry those traditions on every year, setting up the decorations, putting on my favorite Christmas songs (which are all on this list).
When I moved to Armenia to start a two year stay, I brought some of that love and those memories with me. This week in a reading on Instagram I shared a piece from my upcoming book:
On the first afternoon with my new Armenian host family, I fell onto my new bed and stared out the window. The cool air of the room fell on my bare arms, my neck and face. The smell of grass and milk from the cow barn in the basement filled my lungs.
I was caught suddenly, overwhelmed by the sense that I’d arrived at a moment I’d dreamt of.
“I kind of can’t believe it,” I told my newest friend, another new Peace Corps volunteer named Zoe. “I feel like I’m in some Lonely Planet guide. Like I kind of can’t believe I’m going to live here. I didn’t even know this place existed six months ago.”
I went to my suitcase and took out a vacuum sealed bag of puppy chow my Aunt Susan sent with me. She made bags for me at every holiday, and before I left she handed me two bags of puppy chow to bring with me to Armenia. I took a pair of scissors and cut it open, immediately filling the air with the smell of the snack – powdered sugar, peanut butter, chocolate, corn Chex. This was the smell of every family holiday.
I needed a bowl to put it in. I didn’t speak Armenian. I went into the living room. And when Anahit saw me she stood up straight from the couch and patiently said a few words to me I couldn’t understand.
“Inch es uzum?”
I shrugged, smiled, made a sign with my hands hoping to convey a bowl, then pointed to the snack my aunt made.
“Aaaaaah,” Anahit said with a finger raised into the air.
I gestured to the bowl of Puppy Chow. I wanted my new Armenian family to taste it. This was the first time I felt like I was really sharing myself. This was my life. My aunt made this. I carried it from Texas. This snack in a bowl had all memories I couldn’t tell them – the Christmases where we snacked all day and night, taking little paper plates from the table by the microwave and looking over a spread of snacks my grandmother and Aunt Susan made. Maybe I’d grab a cookie. Maybe a yogurt covered pretzel. Maybe even a few potato chips. But always Puppy Chow. I’d eat as much as I wanted, sitting at my grandparent’s kitchen table watching the adults play dominoes. We all ate it. My Uncle John. My Aunt Susan. My parents. My siblings. My Granddad. My Grandmom. Me. The powdered sugar would fall like snow from our fingertips onto the top of our t-shirts, a little tell-tale snowdrift of sweetness, a mark on us all.
Armine picked a piece up between her fingers. She looked to her daughter, then to her son. She smiled and put it in her mouth.
“Oooooh,” she said, her smile growing. “Inch lav e. Inch lav e.”
“Lavn e?” I said. Is it good?
“Ayo, ayo,” She said, nodding and exaggerating her enthusiasm to help me understand
All of us together then put our hands into the bowl. Arshak began miming ecstasy with each bite, performing for us a simple comedy. This was a kindness to me, that he created a way for me to be in a joke with them all, all of us laughing together.
They gave me a room in their home. I shared a memory. I couldn’t tell them about my family. But they could taste my home.
My beloved first host family in Armenia, 2009
This love, the one my childhood family built over two dozen Christmases that I carried with me vacuum-sealed to Armenia, and the other love that my first Armenian host family gave to me right away on that first night – it’s a bridge I travelled over, a bridge made by everyday people who chose to love me to build a slice of life with me. I cherish the memory of my first night in Armenia, and I cherish the thought of it now. I love that all of these small things – puppy chow, Christmas traditions, sitting together on some summer night and laughing – it all adds up to a life built to love.
