I have a bad attitude about Christmas. I hate to shop for presents, I don't feel especially cheery and I decorate only with reluctance. It seems like an intolerable burden. Jingle Bells sounds like a fingernail on a chalk board. I want to run from the room when I hear it. I am not religious, so the spiritual aspect seems to be drowned in commericialism. Endless ads for jewelry and clothes and cars. Who the hell buys a car for Christmas?
It wasn't always this way for me. When I was a kid, it would seem like magic. Santa would land on the snowy roof of our house and come down the chimney and leave presents. Sometimes, I imagined that I could hear him in the frosty, cold night air, where the snowflakes would glisten in the moonlight. I grew up in the midwest, where the winter weather would actually be wintery.
But then adulthood sets in and Christmas loses its magic. You may not have enough money to buy presents. You rack your brain trying to figure out what your mother would want for a present, when she doesn't want anything from you. You feel enormous pressure to do a thousand things in a limited amount of time. You have cookies to bake, presents to buy and wrap, a tree to buy and decorate and cards to mail. On top of it all, you eat too much, don't exercise enough and the days are short. If you live in a crappy climate with daylight savings time, it gets dark at 4:30 and the sun doesn't shine for days.
The Norman Rockwell Christmas doesn't exist. I resent the illusion of happiness and perfection. Sometimes life gives you a wallop and it doesn't care if you were supposed to have the perfect holiday. My father got cancer one year. He lingered long enough to get through Christmas, but he was weak and getting weaker. He never got to wear the flannel shirt I got. He died three days after Christmas. It was sunny, snowy, cold day and the birds were singing. My relatives came, not to celebrate the holiday, but to attend his funeral. It was a shock to me. I knew he was seriously ill and likely to die, but the actual death was an emotional blow. He was a college professor and only 60 and looking forward to retirement. His death seemed wrong somehow.
Then, the joyous holiday family gatherings may not exist. Your family life may not be perfect. You may have a disfunctional family that hates each other's guts. You may have a husband who left you for someone else, making you wonder where your wonderful life went to. Everyone else seems to be happy and having fun but you. You are in a black hole of depression looking out at the world and wondering if the weight of sadness is ever going to go away.
Christmas isn't all bad. If you have a young child, it's like the magic is back again. It's fun to see their wonder at all the sparkley stuff. You watch them try to decorate the tree, but only hang ornaments two feet off the ground. Of course, you have to get your tired body up in the middle of the night to create the illusion of Santa delivering presents. Once they don't believe in Santa, however, the holiday seems more ordinary.
Yet somehow a vestige of the cheer remains. It's fun looking at other people's lights when you don't have to do the work putting them up or pay the electric bill. You get cards from people you haven't contacted all year. You get to go to parties and eat food that other people made. Sometimes you get a present of two. Your memories through the years give you a connection to long gone people that you celebrated the holiday with. When I was a child, I had some aunts visit at Christmas that were a time warp from the forties. I thought that they were eccentric, but now I would give anything to be able to see them again.
So this year I decided that for once, I am going to try not to get depressed about Christmas. I am not quite sure how I will do this, but so far I am doing O.K. You can control your response to a situation to a certain extent. I am not buying into the illusion of perfection anymore and I have accepted that no one is going to make me happy but me. I am alone except for my daughter, but that is my life now. I may or may not put lights up outside or bake cookies. I will not put up inflatable Christmas figures that collapse in the daytime and look like dead soldiers a battlefield.. I will not feel bad that my experience of Christmas is not living up to the hype.
Christmas will not defeat me.
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Over the years I have had similiar feelings about the Christmas "hype." It all seemed so hollow, and you get together with people you wouldn't visit during the year. It seemed "phony" in its sentiment.
ReplyDeleteChristmas will never be perfect as long as people are the main characters in the play. For the last two years, we don't shop, give presents except to the very young, and the money we would have spent on presents and food, and outside lights and a blown up Santa in the front yard, we give in items, food to a homeless shelter, and the rest we give to helping residents in the local nursing home have a good Christmas...still not a perfect Christmas because I'm not...but it's good.