Christmas Calling (Jolly Jones) - Norah Jones
My dad told me that Christmas was one of the only times each year that he’d speak to his grandmother. The family would make a call to England and then wait. This was the era of switchboards, not fibre optics, and there were many more calls trying to reach across the Atlantic Ocean than could be transmitted at one time. Their Christmas call didn’t always get through.
Family calls are still a part of my Christmas traditions. I’m grateful for broadband and video codecs and everything else that lets me watch people across the ocean break into a smile in nearly real time. A video chat on December 25 has been, during some years, the only time I’ve talked to a certain uncle or aunt. This makes me want to have more occasions to muster as excuses to call people. Birthdays, of course, but maybe the equinoxes should also become phone-call holidays for me?
(To be clear, this song is not entirely about phone calls, but the second verse includes I could call you on the phone, instead of feeling all alone this Christmas, which is my second favourite part of the song after the line I wanna be a Jolly Jones, instead of feeling all alone. What a hilarious way to refer to your kinda-sad self! I love it.)
I love a nice long phone call, but I’ve had more of them than I bargained for since this October. It’s been a somewhat unexpectedly lonely and chaotic few months, on account of having a work visa application rejected and thus being practically ejected from the USA, where I’d been lurking on a tourist visa. In August I said I was “going to spend time with my girlfriend” and “staying with friends” at the US border, both true statements that perhaps elided the fact that I hadn’t exactly moved out of Berkeley after my H1-B grace period.
As I was thinking about whether to move back to Berkeley (if that’s even the right framing; it’s not like I’ve signed a lease somewhere else), I made a list of people I most consistently enjoy spending time with, which is an exercise I’d recommend to anyone. California is overrepresented, but I love a lot of people in a lot of places. I’ve resolved to set up a monthly reminder to pluck a few names at random from the list to text or call; I have far more regrets in my life of the form “I wish I'd stayed in touch” than “I wish I hadn’t kept trying to talk to them.”
Who are you going to call over the holidays?
- Tessa
PS It is possible that this is the first newsletter you’re seeing from me this year, because the others went to spam. It seems like Google has become extremely prejudiced against links to Buttondown. I have now turned off click-tracking in the newsletter, and I hope this helps! You can see past countdowns in the online archive.