On a sunny fall day a few months ago, I was walking with Wiggles when I saw three siblings playing frisbee. The oldest boy was teaching his younger sister how to throw the frisbee to her brother. It reminded me of how much I love playing frisbee.
When I was a little kid, I never learned how to throw a baseball or a football. I wasn’t good at basketball. I certainly wasn’t a fast runner (my sister used to call me Steven “Turtle” Ainslie).
But I learned how to play frisbee at an early age. It was always fun.
In high school, I played frisbee a lot. We would play a game called “Tips”. You split into two teams lined up a distance from each other. One side throws to the other. A player on receiving side tips (hits) the incoming frisbee with a hand, hand or foot and then another taste tries to catch the tipped frisbee. You got 1 point for catching a hand tip, 2 for a head tip and 3 for a foot tip. First team to 21 wins.
I played hundreds of games of Tips. Plus hundreds of hours just tossing around the frisbee with my friends. We played during lunch. We played after school. We played on the weekends. We played in the summer. We played in parking lots, fields, parks and cemeteries. For years, I kept a frisbee in my car for spontaneous “emergency use”.
I remember pulling out the frisbee to toss around during a miles long standstill traffic jam once. We ended up playing on the highway with a bunch of strangers for hours as we waited for the wreckers and police to clear an accident scene. It was the most fun I ever had in traffic.
I stopped playing frisbee after I met my wife. Life got in the way – school, child rearing, work, chores etc. Play time became stepdad time as I filled my free time with activities that my stepson enjoyed: kickball, basketball, baseball and video games.
Then later, when the kids were grown, it was too late to play frisbee with my wife. With her back surgeries , knee issues and other health issues, frisbee was not an option.
When I saw those kids playing frisbee, I thought “I should get a frisbee”. I didn’t, because I have nobody to play frisbee with. Frisbee is no fun alone.
Which brings me to Christmas. Even though my wife and step-kids were Jewish, we celebrated Christmas. I brought my tradition of getting/decorating a tree, hanging lights, putting up outside decorations and wrapping Christmas gifts to put under the tree.
When the kids were little, they loved it. It was new, different and an added bonus to Hanukkah, which was a kind of mediocre holiday. My wife and I loved the tradition. Seeing the kids laugh and squeal with delight as they argued about decorations, put way too much tinsel on the tree or ripped open their presents on Christmas morning was even better than being a kid on Christmas Day.
For many years after the kids had moved away, we still decorated the house and put up a tree. I think we stopped doing this the year my wife had treatment for a serious infection. She was bedridden for months and sick all the time. Celebrating Christmas fell off my priority list and never returned. I got busy with work and caring for my wife. The kids had moved on. And life continued.
I haven’t had a tree or put up decorations in over 15 years, even though I still love looking at my neighbor’s trees and decorations at night – from classic to elegant to over the top inflatables.
I’ve got all the time in the world now and live alone so I can put up whatever decorations I want. But I haven’t.
Last week, I realized why.
Because for me, just like frisbee, decorating for Christmas is no fun alone.
So when I was at my friend’s last week and saw she had decorated her nearly empty home with two small lit Christmas trees and a few decorations, I was a bit surprised at the feeling it gave me.
It made me feel warm in my chest. It felt cozy and homey. It was sweet. It made me think of homemade cookies, sitting by the fireplace, Christmas carols and family.
There was something about being there with her that made it feel like Christmas to me.
I don’t know whether I’ll decorate for Christmas next year and I haven’t bought a frisbee yet, but I’ve come to realize after 3 years of living a fairly content solo life that some experiences are much better when shared with another person.