Today we fly.

It's two days before Christmas, and of course it doesn't seem that much like the holiday season here in Southern California.

We spent the day Monday wrapping up the remainder of our Christmas shopping, and today we travel east on Southwest Airlines. Or is it southwest on Eastern Airlines? These days I have trouble keeping my directions straight. Wherever it is we're going, we will be with the people we love and that's what matters most. We'll see Virgile and Sterling, Pauline and Ryan and the Amazing Baby for Christmas Eve dinner and Christmas morning present-opening.

It will be interesting. Little Maddie is walking like a pro and talking more than she did when we saw her in November, but she is still at a stage in her life -- 15 months -- where she won't remember any of this in a few years. At some point during the holidays, we'll have four generations of our family together and it will be wonderful.

As I get older, I find myself more sentimental about things like that, especially looking at the road behind me instead of the road ahead. Maddie is 1 year old in daunting times. Her mother was a year old during Ronald Reagan's first year as president, I was a year old during the Korean War and my mother was a year old just before the Great Depression started. Indeed, when I look at the generation of my family that is no longer around, my grandmother and grandfather were a year old two years before the Spanish-American War.

I think the first Christmas I remember was when I was 4 years old. My mother had purchased one of those great old Lionel electric train sets for me, back in the day before they were made out of plastic. It was probably the nicest Christmas gift I ever received as a child, and it was a wonderful feeling to come down from upstairs in my grandparents' house on Christmas morning to see it set up under the tree.

[caption id="attachment_202" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Lionel trains"]<img class="size-medium wp-image-202" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/HO_Layout_1-300x225.jpg" alt="Lionel trains" width="300" height="225" />[/caption]

I never had a really elaborate setup, primarily because there was no place I could leave my train set up permanently. Still, I have many fond memories of it.

I wish I remembered more about those years and the ones that followed, but so many of my Christmas memories are just images from a slide show, things like having trouble going to sleep on Christmas Eve ... or going to church in the icy cold ... or driving around to see all the homes that had been decorated for the holidays.

This year I'll be doing something very familiar for the first time. My daughter Pauline really liked the family tradition of my dad reading "The Night Before Christmas" aloud on Christmas Eve, so she recently informed me that she had purchased a book so that I could read it to little Maddie (and eventually the brothers and sisters that will follow her).

Next Christmas -- probably one Maddie still won't remember -- she will celebrate it in Indonesia, where Pauline and Ryan are going for their third tour in the Foreign Service. Sterling and Virgile will be in Athens, Greece, on their first tour.

I don't know where Nicole and I will be. Maybe one of those two places ... or maybe here. Or possibly South Carolina or Tennessee ... or maybe Virginia again.

I'm kind of at the point where it doesn't much matter <em>where</em> Christmas is.

I just want to celebrate it with the people I love.