Christmas 6: Traditions

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Traditions were important. Traditions were the backbone to not just culture and identity but also to caring and compassion. She always thought she was a traditional person and couldn't live without the structure that holidays provided for her. She could mark her years by the holidays, she always knew how much time she had between each holiday and they were so different from the previous and following one that a person made the most out of it while it was there and looked forward to the next one and those steps would continue until the year set again.

Living in Japan where the traditions she grew up with weren't as deeply engrained into this culture as the one she had grown up with, Minako was starting to feel, disconnected. Sure her friends tried and there were certain things that were the same or similar enough, but it just wasn't.

After two years of this, living without the traditions, the subtleties of home, going home for a few years, made her realize that she couldn't recapture it and that made her sad. Her time was over.

Despite what religion said, despite what TV and movies tried to make it out as, Christmas was in a lot of ways a child's holiday. It was magical and incredible and as an adult, you could only reclaim that sense of wonder by watching it through a child's eyes. It's why her parents had tried so hard to protect her innocence, not only for her sake but for theirs as well.

However she had always been a slightly cynical child. Sure she smiled, laughed and did everything in her power to ensure that no one saw deeper. Sometimes she wanted to rip off the shell and she did and she felt odd to be so naked in such a way and so she would pull the shell on over her and zip it back up.

She wasn't a fool, she knew many people saw through her and she tried even harder to be who she pretended to be, both inside and out and for awhile she fooled everyone she fooled herself. But leaving England and living in Japan where it just drove her crazy that while on the outside everything seemed perfect, they were doing the same things as back home, it wasn't perfect and she lashed out because she couldn't figure out how to make it perfect.

So she just gave up. Why should she have a lot of those Western holidays in an Eastern country? Where they didn't celebrate it and they didn't know how to even if they did it for her. She gave up a part of herself. Before leaving England, even while she struggled with herself and her image, before it got even more worn out, she'd experimented, wanted tradition but wanted to mix it up a bit too so it wasn't so much of the same thing.

It had been a heady mix, all the jagged edges she tried to keep hidden at home, the thin membrane that had gotten thinner while away, parts of those edges poking through and couldn't completely get pulled back in, cutting others who got too close, mostly because she was lonely she attacked any who crossed that threshold but not all were friendly combatants, some were the enemy and it was getting harder for her to tell the difference. It was odd, but it was part of that expectation, reality failing and grumpiness rolling into a bigger and bigger ball that nobody could ever dare stop it or get inside.

She really thought she would continue to go until she rolled off a cliff's edge, or she'd be melted down and what was left wouldn't even be her jagged version, but a mere skeleton. She'd already stopped caring about so many things, traditions, niceties, only doing what she wanted because she wanted to do it or would get her ahead somewhere. Most of the time, but even that effort was a dragging action. She even turned down friends' invitations because she rather spend time on her own after awhile of what seemed like forced exile. They had been too busy for her before, so now she would continue doing what she was doing, on her own, whether it was at home or out and about.

Sadly, that became what seemed like her new tradition and some traditions were meant to be broken. Hopefully she'd never fall into that routine again, but to hope for that would be putting expectations on others that they couldn't reach and so she would have to find something else to do to combat those feelings, find a way to be around people and with people rather than just be by herself amongst other people. No one listened to her.

Then she found it, on the eve of Christmas Eve, it didn't matter what it was, for her it was an improv class. It wouldn't matter if anyone listened, she would finally just get to say it and say it to people who had to at least pretend to listen. She was able to get it out of her, spending too much time in her own head was bad. For her this was the solution, for others, who knew, but they'd have something they could do that helped them, they just had to find it.

This though was her Christmas miracle. It might not have corrected everything that was wrong with the holiday in Japan or the lack of being able to go back to it in England but she could scream out her frustrations to a group of artists who would understand her pain and then be happy and able to deal with everything with a much more relaxed attitude with her friends and then she wouldn't be alone so much anymore because she would be more pleasant to be around. Even though before, long before she was probably even more pleasant and positive. Now she had deeper emotions and people realized it too and she had the bubbly happy personality.

Then that following Christmas as she stepped out from the studio and looked up to the softly falling snow, listening to music she heard a dozen times but had always cringed because of the pronunciation, she took a deep breath and released it. It was time to wipe the slate clean and start anew, make her new traditions with her friends here, she could borrow some from her old world that she liked and incorporate ones here that she liked and leave out all the bad.

Then she would be ruthless to make sure even if small things changed, these traditions would stay in place, they would be followed every year and her children would never, ever be away from home during the holiday season, tradition would be vital to them. They would never want to break from tradition and try what she did, because traditions could help center you or destroy you.

Even years and years after her traditions were followed the same every year without a murmur of discontent, even praise at how they loved doing what she had planned, Minako still found herself at the acting studio, sometimes to let out screams of rage and sometimes to give advice or to be an audience member for someone who needed the same therapy she did. Partly because it helped and mostly because it was tradition. Did that person just scream wrong? Minako wanted to go again because that wasn't the way it was meant to be! Did tradition mean nothing to no one?

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EAN: It's just a silly one I decided to write (the first one to be completed actually though Postcards and Twinkling Circus Lights had been started first). It's short I know but it's on the heels of an extra long one. Usually these are 3-4 pages, Christmas 5 was 5 pages long and this was 2, so it's balanced now.

EAN2: Well guys, we're at the halfway point! Yay! Now I just have to sit down and write the next six. At least I got ideas and chapter titles!