I don’t need a Ghost of Christmas Past to revisit the good old days. I still remember well one of the best Christmases ever, way way back when I was 11. But then, Christmas is always at its best when you are young enough to revel in it, and old enough to spend a month anticipating it.

It was at my grandmother’s house. This house was a small place, built by my grandfather sometime in the thirties, I think, and it was a little bit tumble-down, but that just made it better. The kitchen was long, and the whole house was slumping down towards that back corner, so you could race toy cars down it. It could get cold and drafty, because insulation was not something en vogue when it was built, and the west wall of the living room was incredibly leaky—ivy had covered the outside and crept into the interior, so the wall was sheathed inside and out with stems and leaves. The place was heated with a coal stove—how cool was that? Most people nowadays probably have never huddled around a coal fire to keep warm—which wasn’t very efficient, but I suspect the lack of temperature uniformity would help keep families together, anyway. Oh, and the place was right next to the railroad tracks. When a train went by, the rumble deafened you and whole place shook and shivered and groaned. It was great—like a funhouse.

Best of all, my grandmother lived there with my bachelor uncle, Ed. We’d spend the night there on weekends, and Ed would treat us to comic books, and we’d sit up to draw and read our comic books and watch Batman and The Avengers and the late night creature features, with grandma in her chair doing her crossword puzzles and Ed passing out and snoring through the part where Christopher Lee got staked on a wagon wheel.

My grandmother had raised six kids in that little house, and most of them had in turn gotten married straight out of high school and started popping out kids of their own at regular intervals. We were an assemblage of big families with a common center in that small place, and on Christmas, we would converge. There’d be a mob of aunts and uncles, a swarm of cousins, a fringe of more distant relatives…there’d be thirty or more people easy, most of them small, frantic, and noisy. The air would be thick with cigarette smoke, that sharp scent of whiskey, and grandma’s cooking. The trains would be negligible, since we’d be making enough noise to drown them out, and it was our feet that would make the floor shake.

We kids had plenty of playmates. With so many aunts and uncles having kids so often, we each had our own cohort of like-aged cousins. This one Christmas, we each got the same present: a box of games. Checkers, chess, cards, tiddliwinks, dart guns and targets…it said there were 88 different games we could play. We were energized with Hi-C Fruit Punch and cookies, so we were going to play them all that night; we’d give each one 30 seconds, and no two people would play the same game simultaneously. Chess matches were resolved with dart guns, tiddliwinks were projectiles, and the one game everyone could play at once was 52 Card Pickup. I don’t know how the adults could stand the chaos (jeez, actually—my parents were only in their late 20s, and were young and indestructable themselves…maybe it wasn’t so hard.) I remember Grandma dancing a jig with her apron flapping, and everyone laughing and wearing giddy grins. It was a Christmas where we celebrated the joy of being a family together.

It was paradise. It couldn’t last.

That summer, there was another party to celebrate my grandmother’s birthday. Grandma was tired and seemed a little sad, something I couldn’t quite understand, and I wondered what I could do to cheer her up. We went home, but later my father was called back—she died with a sigh with her kids around her bedside. Our center was gone.

It hit me hard at the funeral. I was sitting in the front pew with my mom and dad when I realized that she was never coming back and the house would never be the same. I cried like I had never done before and never have since. It was like I’d been pierced by a spear and the waters geysered forth, running in sheets and rivers down my face. At the same time I felt like my heart had been ripped in two, I was astonished at the volume pouring out of me…and I knew. That was my childhood flowing away, evaporating and turning into molecules dancing in the air of a funeral chapel, becoming a thin rime of salt on my mother’s handkerchief.

We all become that dread Ghost of Christmas Future as we age, and we can never look back on those happy times without feeling an ache of grief and mortality. Most of the laughing adults at that party are gone now, lost to cancer and heart disease and age. The kids have all grown thick-waisted and slow, and we rarely shriek and chase our cousins through a crowded house, or hug a beloved uncle, or throw away the rules and play games however the heck we want. We’re scattered, and some are lost to accident and disease, others hurt by alcoholism or divorce or poverty or the thousand small tragedies that pile up over a lifetime. Many of us have our own little families now, but it’s hard to leap unhesitatingly into the revel, knowing that all of this will also pass, and feeling the weight of ghosts lost and gone. We do our best, but that carefree childhood is no more.

That old house on the corner of First and Willis in Kent, Washington is also gone. Last time I went by, it had been leveled and replaced with a parking lot for a convenience store. It’s an odd thing to feel the weight of remembrance, regret, happiness, and inevitability about a flat sheet of asphalt, full of people walking obliviously through my memories. Whose Christmas Past have you tread through today, unaware? What memories have you created today that will liven some young person for years to come, only to fade and dissipate, eventually gone forever?