-14 to Christmas Eve

“Photographs and memories, Christmas cards you’ve sent to me…” That Jim Croce line runs through my mind often during the holidays (Yes, I know it’s a song about a break up. “Jolly” is not a word that usually is associated with the random things I remember.) I was in middle school when I saved babysitting money to buy my first camera on layaway from Mack Camera–a Kodak Instamatic, and babysitting money paid for my film and developing habit for many years. While I was growing up, I never dreamed about my hypothetically future wedding or my equally hypothetical house or kids, but I could tell you in detail about the darkroom I would have someday.

My second year in college, my first credit card purchase ever was when I bought a Pentax K100 with a 50mm lens and a telephoto lens–I forget the stats for it. I paid it off within two months working extra at my work-study job, and that’s the camera I had when I took photojournalism classes and learned to develop B&W film.

My Pentax was at my wedding, and I’d shot four rolls of film before my mom finally took my camera from me and handed it to my friend Jack, one of the very few people I’d ever let hold my camera. (Yes, I’m territorial about a very few things. My tech was and is one of them.) The best pictures of my wedding are ones I took, not ones that were taken of me. In fact, there are relatively few pictures of me at my wedding.

But Christmas is my topic now, and yes, I have many, many pictures of Christmases past. Photographs and memories, as Croce sang. Photos are time machines, transporting us back to those moments, recapturing for a few breaths the feelings of our past lives.

For decades, I avoided being in front of a camera. There are whole decades that lack photographic evidence that I existed. One of the great surprises at this stage of my life, when I’m saggy and baggy and baffled, is that I’m in pictures almost as often as I take them. Or at least more than I ever have been before.

There’s a caveat, though. My grandfather played Santa for decades, but the last Christmas he was alive, when we all knew the cancer had returned and he wasn’t likely to don his red suit again, I put down my camera after a few shots. My parents’ living room looked like a press conference, so I’m sure pictures of Grandpa’s last night as Santa abound. By that time, though, I’d realized that being behind the camera often turned me into an observer instead of a participant, a detached recorder of people and times instead of a person experiencing the moment.

Learning to balance the participant with the photographer was a process, and admittedly, because of technology the dynamic now is completely different. I have a better camera in my pocket all the time than I ever imagined I’d have, and I know how to use it fairly well. And I can edit in ways that go far beyond what I ever learned in my limited darkroom time.

I could so easily decide to make every event an Instagram perfect shot–and I understand the temptation to do it. It’s fun and creates memorable shots and memorable moments. I’m glad, though, that I learned to put down the camera, quit curating the scene, and just be there. Photographs aren’t the only way to create memories.