I walk into the supermarket with my nose perhaps a bit too firm and my cheeks a bit too pink, completely startled by the regular holiday rush hour of perhaps too many people and yet so happy to see this overwhelmingness again. I listen to the squeaking of my shoes as I step on the melted snowflakes falling off the khaki fur coats. I walk through an icy slurry of dirt on what used to be a white tiled floor with my fingers still solid as a rock as I maneuver my cart through a never-ending traffic of people with cheeks as red as mine. The smell of tangerines barely overpowers the smell of the air conditioner with a light scent of smoke and for the first time in a while I realize that heat has a smell… I walk through crowds of families with their kids enjoying the shopping cart carriage service as I hear them hum along the Bublé and Sinatra Christmas classics, and life is as good as it gets. 

I survive the all-in-all procrastinated grocery trip with my family as I load myself up like a donkey with, again, perhaps too many bags, but I'm too lazy and too cold to make a second trip to the car. We turn on the TV; Home Alone is playing, while I'm peeling potatoes relying purely on muscle memory with my eyes glued to the screen. Satisfied with my efforts, I am allowed a break, and I bolt to the plastic bag with an ungodly amount of snacks and I pull out the best one — Sour Cream and Onion Pringles but with Julius Pringles rocking a Santa hat. Having consumed the entire can, I am left with no choice but to go and help out in the kitchen. I lay out salted mackerel in a glass dish and layer it with pickled onions blanketed with shredded beets and mayonnaise. The pot of boiled potatoes left to cool on the balcony is almost cracking from the frost outside as I run out to grab it barefoot in my pajamas. At that point I may not feel my feet touching the glassy floor but I'm just too preoccupied dodging the premature fireworks launched over my balcony fence.

We pack up our dishes, have a little snack in the kitchen and head off to meet the rest of the family. As expected, the uncles look fatter and older, and for some reason the aunties are thinner and younger than last year with their kids still being as inferior as always to the oldest in the family. We play our little games, I accept donations from the established gentlemen who call themselves "employed adults," dodge a couple of hugs from people I see twice a year, and we head off home.

At home I get to open the presents I actually wanted, and not a ten-pair pack of Puma socks that I still have in my dorm… and I get to play video games until morning as I stuff myself with leftovers. And of course, all of that just to wake up at 3 p.m. with the sun bouncing off the pearly rooftops straight into my overstimulated pair of retinae.

As I'm reading this again, I realize why I like to frequent supermarkets only during winter, why I enjoy staying up all night, and even why I nap during the day with my window blinds open when it snows. It's an attempt to relive a happy memory, a memory of a time when life felt like a fortunate puzzle fully solved. But, as sad as it may sound, there is beauty to it, too — we got to see the puzzle solved. Our families put the pieces of life together, to show us what it can be before letting us go to make our own for our kids to see. And, as much as I want to give almost everything I own for one more Christmas day like this, I realize that eventually I will be the annually fattening uncle making donations to kids that seem to be growing up too fast. So, if this much joy came from a mundane day full of food, gifts, and videogames, then life is worth living just so I can gladly become an employed adult supplying Pringles and socks to the kids of my family… as I eat my Christmas tangerines.