![]() I can’t help but wonder if we will still be having Sesame Street parties for him when he is 30 and his dad and I are approaching our senior years. We sit here, frozen at age 2, only his body and ours continue to age. In many ways, it feels like time stands still for us when it comes to my son Jack. I still have a child who calls me mommy and needs me by his side to fall asleep at night. Why wouldn’t I be excited to celebrate the day of his birth? The day this brave, funny, loving soul entered the world fighting for his life and introduced us to a love we had never known before.Ī part of me feels lucky that I don’t have to say goodbye to the days of preschool themed parties.įourteen years later, and I still have a child who loves to play peek-a-boo and read board books. The emotions this stirs up are hard to put into words. I had to search Amazon for Sesame Street decorations that didn’t have ‘Happy 2nd Birthday’ written on them. Meanwhile, I am planning a Sesame Street party for the 12th year in a row. Rather, they are going out to dinner with a few friends or possibly having a few friends to spend the night and go to a movie or a sporting event. Of course they have outgrown themed birthday parties. Their boys are starting to look like men. ![]() I’ve seen pictures of their sons’ fourteenth birthday celebrations over the past few months. I’m still friends with these moms but mostly just through social media. Needless to say my visions of our boys growing up together, having play dates, going to the same school and being on the same sports teams did not pan out. When my son was born, I had several friends who had baby boys around the same time. This is what birthdays with severe autism and developmental delay look like for us. More than four very familiar people will overwhelm him. The party guest will be me, his dad, his younger sister, and his grandmother. He will be 14 years old and we are having a Sesame Street themed party with an Oscar the Grouch cake. Park City, UT.My son’s birthday is this week and I am planning a party for him. ![]() The Bellagio Conservatory, Las Vegas, NV. Pacific Furs Tree Lot, Glendale, AZ, 2012.ĭomesticated Reindeer. One time a year, they have a stage or platform to be creative in the best way they know how.”ĭive Bar Santa. ![]() Says Rieser of his manifold carolers and decorators, “I am celebrating their celebration. And that in itself is its own sort of miracle. Ultimately, Rieser’s portrait of Christmas is more sweet than it is bitter, highlighting not the enchantment of the holiday itself but the painfully mortal ways in which we strive to make our lives glittery and beautiful, if only for a season.Ĭonfronting this version of Christmas is a bit like learning that there is no Santa Claus at first, our hearts ache, but then it slowly dawns on us that all the while our parents have done something extraordinary to keep the spell alive. But the photographer doesn’t fault us that, and Christmas in America is anything but cynical. In the stockings and sleigh bells, he found an almost desperate struggle to-as he puts it-“keep up with the Joneses.” Our attempts to make this time of year magical, either for ourselves or for the ones we love, can at times be blundering more often than not, we fall just a little bit short. In our obsession with Christmas, Rieser discovers something that is distinctly American. Since then, the project has brought the photographer on the road to Las Vegas, Boise, Salt Lake City, Alabama, New Orleans, Seattle, Portland, and Florida, with plans to visit New York and the Midwest in the coming years. From there, he went literally from door to door, learning about what it truly meant to deck an entire house for the holidays, to cast a nativity scene, or run a charity race exclusively for those dressed as Santa himself. Using Phoenix as his point of departure, Rieser set about on a hunt for Christmas aficionados, guided by a directory of elaborately outfitted private homes. The vision of that mammoth and lonesome Santa, advertising a local tree lot, stayed with him throughout the following year, ultimately inspiring him to create Christmas in America: Happy Birthday, Jesus, a series of images that scratches beneath the rosy veneer of the holiday season to reveal a far more human side of Christmas, one in which hope and merriment are tinged with the occasional pangs of disappointment and melancholy. After years of spending the holidays at his childhood home in Missouri, he turned down the road to see flickering in his rear-view mirror a large inflatable Santa Claus, rocking back and forth with the breeze. In winter 2009, Los Angeles-based photographer Jesse Rieser made his way East towards his parents’ new home in Phoenix. This Is The Place Heritage Park, Salt Lake City, UT. North Phoenix Baptist Church, Phoenix, AZ.
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