Christmases past have often felt like a game of offsetting penalties: If you give my children an Amazon gift card, then I will give your children an Amazon gift card of equal value. It all seemed nonsensical. Couldn’t we just give each other’s children a hug and Christmas wishes and call it a day? This year was scaled back and thus better, and while my children probably rue the socks and miss the cryptocurrency exchange, it all felt more like Christmas for me.

I came from a tradition where spouses give gifts. I blame my grandparents Doris and Ray, who gave each other lavishly wrapped gifts bearing tags that said “To Doris-Worsy, Love Raisy-Daisy” (and vice versa). The exchange took place while Bing Crosby crooned on the enormous console record player and a giant wood-burning fireplace warmed the house. Typically Raisy-Daisy would give Dorsy-Worsy a lace-trimmed silk slip, and she would blush like no one had every blushed before. Those slips were absolutely gorgeous, and when my grandparents moved into assisted living, most of them were absolutely dry-rotted in the box. (It is extremely difficult today to find a decent slip; most offerings are a terrible nylon polyester with a scant nod to lace. They are wildly and sadly utilitarian. I worry that my grandfather’s purchases over-hunted those grounds, thus rendering lovely slips extinct.)

Chris and I do not exchange gifts. This fact bothered me at first, and in the middle, and indeed for many years after that. But a happy partnership is quite the gift, a recent realization (thanks, cancer!) that has shut down any bad feelings. A few weeks ago, Chris asked, “Would you like to go back to Paris?” (Gentle reader, there is only one response to that question, especially when one’s last and only trip involved figuratively wearing a referee’s shirt and blowing a whistle to negotiate disputes between one’s children.) Chris had found round-trip fares from Orlando for under $400 per person for October. There was an expenditure for seat upgrades to poor person’s first class — the two-seat row on the bulkhead immediately after the first class cabin with free drinks and Coca-Cola — and the need to carry on one’s luggage. Perhaps this was a major violation of the spousal no-gift policy, but I called it Christmas nonetheless.

We are going to Paris to eat and see museums, not necessarily in that order. We may take the train up to Amsterdam, largely to see the Van Gogh Museum. My love affair with Van Gogh goes back farther than you can imagine, and as many things tend to do, it all goes back to Moultrie.

I grew up in Moultrie, a town in southwest Georgia that had a population of about 17,000 people. It was the kind of town where one’s mother flung open the door and pointed to one’s bike frequently, ordering rides to the library and to the Sunset Plaza Shopping Center. In 1980, I was 11 going on 12 and in seventh grade, and in case you think that I was a beautiful and lithe preteen, let me disabuse you of that notion with my 1981 Colquitt County Junior High School yearbook photo:

These were not kind years, and it certainly did not help that the short haircut that I imagined (a short, shiny bob, very French) had been translated into a center-part butt cut by Barbara’s Cosmetique. Fortunately, in an inspired fit, I wrote “me” with an arrow to point out my school photo in the event that my 51 year-old self forgot that girl. If it helps you imagine the then-me as the now-me, that shirt (my favorite) was a very bright yellow, and I was undoubtedly wearing it with the bright green denim skirt that I always wore it with.

I had a rich inner life, and a bicycle, and one other thing going for me that I did not even know: I lived in southwest Georgia when Jimmy Carter was President. People were willing to do nice things for Sowegans (with southwest Georgia being “SoWeGa,” and its denizens “Sowegans”). One of those nice things — which was a very nice thing indeed — was that millionaire philanthropist Armand Hammer agreed to send his priceless exhibit of Impressionist art for display in the Moultrie Public Library. I am not talking about the B-side of Impressionism, either: In a room roughly the size of my current living room, there were 10 to 12 works by (among others) Cezanne, Cassatt, Degas, and Van Gogh.

This is an event that never could have happened in current times: priceless works of art crammed into a small public library in rural Georgia, all guarded by a local deputy. There were small posts with velvet rope separating the viewer from the painting, and on the school field trip, there was a line outside the door as we all shuffled in, single-file.

I preferred viewing the art while not on field trips, and on my blue and white bike, I rode to the library many times to look at the paintings. Someone recently asked me how long the exhibit lasted. I have no idea, other than it felt like my entire childhood. At that age, in that time, it did not strike me as extraordinary that I would wake up in my room on Quiet Cove, hop on my bike, pedal to the library, select a few books from the young adult section, and then stare intently at these paintings.

The Van Gogh — a painting of the Hospital at Saint-Remy — was my favorite.

I was telling my much-younger sister about this exhibit while we were in Orlando this October, and because the internet feels boundless, I googled it. It was not a dream, as I feared, and it really happened. On YouTube there are videos of Moultrie in 1980, Mayor Willie B. Withers’ Lincoln Continental spanning several city blocks, and a dinner to kick off the exhibition. At the end of the final video, there is Armand Hammer, expressing his hope that the exhibition could perhaps change someone’s life.

I almost burst into tears, for that life was mine.

Those were not easy years for me, the growing-up, and while I know now that those are not easy years for anyone, it seemed like such an isolated struggle. I dreamed of a better, more colorful, more sophisticated life. With a painting of a hospital in my mind’s eye, I took as many French classes as I could in high school. In college, the Francophone teaching assistant made fun of my accent and sentenced me to extra language lab. (I was definitely from the south of France.) It was in art history classes in college that I realized that Van Gogh was Dutch. (To be fair, he later moved to France where he undoubtedly spoke French.) He did not pick up a paintbrush until he was 28 years old.

I love the notion that change is not reserved for the young, that my favorite painter (then not-a-painter) awoke one morning and thought that perhaps he would dabble a little and see where it went. I started keeping a blog five years ago because I needed to make a change. I started painting three years ago because a friend at one of those wine-and-art places asked if I had ever taken painting lessons. I had never thought of myself as a creative person before those endeavors, and now I wonder how I lived with comfortably in my own skin. I do not think that I did.

Except when Christmas brought me new bikes — and especially the lowly Christmas that brought me a new piano — I have always preferred New Year’s Day. It is the promise of change. On one hand, change seems so difficult. On the other hand, it’s like that old joke: How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

I have broader-reaching goals this year. I would like to have a showing of my art. I have been contemplating an Etsy shop. I have told my father that I would like to spend a week at his farm and do nothing but write, paint, and walk. But these changes, and the work needed to get to that point, seem easy to ignore.

So I decided to work on the small things in the way that I order my work life: with a to-do list. I have typed up a document entitled the “Good Habits Checklist.” Here is the an entry:

The days are the same, except that I allow myself a later bedtime on Friday and Saturday night, and I have exercise goals that are on a weekly checklist. I include one sweet a day not as a mandate to eat a sweet, but as a direction not to eat more.

Because there is still a bit of the overachiever in me, I have begun the Good Habits Checklist in advance of January 1. I have enjoyed the direction to express creativity in ways other than knitting for 30 minutes a day. I have tried cooking simple things, like candied kumquats, which brilliantly takes care of the “one sweet” limitation, a fruit serving, and 30 minutes of creativity all in one fell swoop:

I have begun quilting from scrap fabrics:

I continue to sew (and thus generate scraps for quilting);

And I am still painting:

It has been a far happier life to carve even a small time to make things. I thought that finding 30 minutes a day would be a burden, but it has not been. Staying off the phone helps. And in a gesture of good faith, I switched to Suave 2-in-1 Shampoo and Conditioner to shave off time in the shower. (It promises salon quality results, which is probably true if your hair maintenance consists of Chris’ cutting your hair on the back porch.)

I have promised to pay myself $100 cash for each month that I comply with 90% of the checklist. There is a sterling Tiffany olive branch ring that my daughter asked for, and received, this Christmas. With a couple months of diligence, I will have one just like it. I will wear it, and when I look at the olive branch, I will feel relief that I have finally made peace with myself.

ALC