This is the first Christmas since my teens that I haven’t been completely annoyed by the whole thing. Oh, I still rail at the commercial where the Yuppie scum couple celebrate with $100,000 worth of new trucks, or how we’re supposed to think love means buying your spouse a high-end luxury car. But I don’t feel the usual sense of dread mixed with despair.
And I’m not sure why.
Maybe it’s because
- The weather has been sunny with temperatures in the 50’s, like December in Arizona, instead of cold and gloomy with slushy streets and bad drivers.
- Peg hasn’t had to do the Death March to Christmas in three years, and we’re going to a 6 p.m. Christmas Eve Mass instead of the 11 p.m. “Midnight” Mass.
- I’m no longer working for a heartless corporation that doesn’t give a shit about its people, and I’ve been doing something I find far more fulfilling.
- I’ve been off all month since surgery and I actually have time to enjoy things like wrapping gifts and making cookies, rather than the last-minute blitz to get it all done.
- I’m too old to be raging at the materialistic “gimme gimme gimme” of the season.
Whatever the reason, something changed. I’ve been pondering my inevitable mortality and prioritizing. As a kid I felt bad for not having much, then I felt guilty as an adult for having more than others. I’m still painfully aware of the divide between the haves and have nots, but I can’t fix it. I can only do my small part to make the world a better place for others, however fleeting that may be.
It’s often said, “The days are long, but the years are short.” At my age the days are short and, the years are even shorter. Giving and getting stuff isn’t important; friends and family are. Cherish those around you who you love, as you never know which one of them may not be around next Christmas.
© Can Stock Photo / zatletic
Perfectly said, love it & you.
Thanks, Dr Dare Devil Dave…
Love your insight & you!!!
I only wish there were more like you in the world.
Beautiful, Dave.
Goes to the heart of it.
I want to add my experience, if you don’t mind.
For some reason, despite all the nonsense associated with the holiday, as the decades have passed, I have remained fond of Christmas, hearkening back to the cold, snowy ones I experienced as a child in small-town far Northern Ontario, Canada, with aunts and uncles and cousins in our house and down the street. Maybe it was the deep cold and the northern lights; maybe it was the big, loving, uncles snoring on the couches after too much food and too much whiskey; maybe it was the Christmas story itself, reinforced by the late-eve magic of the carols in the small Anglican church perched on the protruding granite rock in the frozen gold-mining town; maybe it was just all the good things to eat, the things that we normally did not have; or, it could have been Mom and my sisters and I decorating the tree on Christmas eve (yes, we left it until then) — the same tree that my Dad and I had cut earlier in the day in the deep snow of the bush-land just outside of town.
I don’t know, really. Maybe it was all of the above. But something stuck, and it has never gone away.
Through the years I kept the good feeling, and never felt any pressure at all to join in the materialistic delusional state at all, or even to spend time with people I did not want to. When the radio stations and the culture started to go of the rails and play banal Christmas music shortly after Halloween, I have always simply turned it off, refusing to listen or participate until a few days before the actual date.
One nod to convention: the week before, I normally watch “A Christmas Carol” (yes, of course, the version with Alastair Sim — other versions simply do not do) and I watch “It’s a Wonderful Life.” In recent years I have added “A Christmas Story” — can’t miss Ralphie and family at that time of year. Too funny. I had a BB gun as a kid, and no doubt I almost shot my eye out.
I have spent a couple of Christmases alone, and they have been not just okay, but beautiful and serene, delicious, even. But mostly I have made it a point to be with a few people whom I love dearly.
So, to underscore your point: I don’t cooperate with the business of Christmas. To hell with that. All that is crass exploitation and madness, a misguided effort to make ourselves feel better in a world usurped by materialism. As you so clearly point out, that is not it.
But now, all these years later, though not a believer as such, I still cherish the story of the birth of that good, great being, Jesus, and I feel a special thrill on a cold and starry might, as midnight on the 24th comes to be. Something magic is about to happen.
Thank you again Dave. These pieces of yours always get me going. I hope you don’t mind the longish response.
Peter