Holidays! Yeah, like Holy Days! These kinds of days mark time. I remember days like this from long past. Not often I like to look back.
I try my best to live in the moment. I hate nostalgia. But these kinds of days are so charged with pictures and memories, and there's just the ritualistic aspect to the whole thing that kind of swamps you.
And there's time. Can't cheat time. At least not in the long run. Einstein proved that time is malleable, and it's all relative, and our experience sometimes validates that insight. Time really can stand still, or bend backwards, or speed up.
But then again, there are the undeniable signs of a live lived in time. There's the table with your family members, but then there's the empty chairs too. There's the ones who didn't make it to the table this time and haven't for many, many years.
So you sit down in the present, but the past looms over you like an enormous shadow. And then you start thinking or remembering that the past is getting longer than the future that lies before you.
And there are no guarantees. There's now, and the past (if you remember it) for sure. What happens next is anyone's guess.