For those of us of, shall we say, an earlier vintage, this is always a bittersweet time of year.

We are bombarded with ads and movies and songs about how this is the family time of year; images not of sugarplums so much as the Waltons dance in our heads. Everybody’s making family plans, or so it seems.

And yeah, it is for most people. But as we get older, one of the ways life changes is that it atomizes. Time weakens the bonds inevitably; the center, as the poet said, cannot hold.

This will be the first Christmas in three decades that I won’t see any family. One son remains in Fargo, the other is in California with his wife looking for a job. My mother is eight months gone, my sister remains in Minneapolis, my other sister is about three hours from me (actually, I might see her sometime over semester break, but it won’t be until after the holidays at the soonest). I have Karon, of course, and we’ll be spending time with her family. But I’m relatively new to them. There’s less than a year’s worth of memories to call on and that’s a pretty small stock.

I’m okay with all that. The longer I live, and the more the past and its associations recede, the less inclined I am to grasp at it.

It wasn’t always so. Years ago, when my folks were still alive and lived in my hometown, I often would slip away for a little tour of my past. The places I’d go wouldn’t necessarily hold fond memories. I’d visit the football practice field, the site of some of my most cherished humiliations, and to this day I can’t even tell you why I’d go there. It was as if by some rude pilgrimage I could change what had been, or at least make my peace with it. I never did and finally got sick of going. One of the advantages of getting older is at some point, you recognize that things were what they were and all the thinking you can do ain’tgonna change that. If you’re lucky and those things weren’t too bad – they really weren’t for me, compared to what I’ve seen others endure – there’s a certain peace in that. Life is nothing if not an exercise in irony.

But this time of year, when the air is thick with memories, you just can’t avoid your past, good or bad. It’s a combination of Christmas, which better be a family time, dammit, and the end of the year, when you inevitably take stock.

I’m one of the luckiest people I know and when you’re in that kind of shape, it’s hard to get real melancholy about all that. I miss my kids, who have grown into fine men, and as much as that I miss what they were. When your kids are little, despite all the crass commercialism and the hassles and the imposition of schedules, there still are moments when these holidays are times of purest wonder. There is that moment when a kid has torn off just enough wrapping to see the present Santa has brought him and seldom are the times a light in a child’s eyes has that quality. For the briefest of seconds – and you know that the older the kid gets, the fewer of them there will be – there is excitement, gratitude and a million other small but cherished feelings. There is magic; that word is overused, but at that moment it’s entirely accurate.

On the other hand, it’s been a lot of years since I’ve stayed up late Christmas Eve putting stuff together. I didn’t really enjoy that.

Anyway, those times are now nothing more than photos and videotapes and electrical impulses somewhere deep in my brain. And that’s okay. God, it has been said, gave us memory so we could have roses in winter. Among the things that make me a lucky man is that I’ve got a helluva garden.

There is an odd sort of peace (there’s that word again) that comes with the atomization of life. Since I made my big move almost a year ago, it’s happened at an accelerated pace for me. I’m doing things and talking to people I never imagined at this time last year. And in another lucky stroke, I feel like I’m exactly where I should be, even if I wish I could sit down to dinner with my older son and his wife or see a movie with my younger son. Another of life’s lessons is that nothing is all good or all bad. On balance, things are … well, I was going to say pretty good, but the word really is “fabulous.”

So yeah, I miss my family and my friends in the place I lived nearly half my life. I miss looking at the face of a 20-something man and instantly recalling what it was like to hold a smaller version of him against my chest, to feel his then-tiny arms around my neck, to know that for that brief moment between starting and finishing tearing off the wrapping paper I had made him as happy as he could possibly be. I wish I still could give him that.

But as the old saying goes, if wishes were horses, rides would be free. (There’s a less elegant but more accurate expression about wishes, but I can’t say that in a family newspaper.) When my hands hold wishes, now they are less definite; I can wish only that my kids have, on balance, a good life of minimum pain and maximum pleasure.

If that happens, they’ll have their own gardens to tend. That, ultimately, is my fondest Christmas wish for them.