“I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas, as if whatever it was the pine boughs and the candles and the silver and gilt-ribboned presents and the birch-log fires and the Christmas turkey and the carols at the piano promised never came to pass.”
– Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar.
I always liked what the author Graham Greene said about the holidays, which are upon us. “Christmas it seems to me is a necessary festival,” he wrote, “we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling.”
Everyone has the right to their own Christmas, and I think every Christmas, like every fingerprint, is unique. When most people I know talk about Christmas, there is pain and joy, sadness and comfort. There are millions of Christmas stories, everyone has their own.
There is the Disney Christmas, of course, and the Norman Rockwell Christmas, and the Corporate Nation Christmas: the perfect festival in the perfect houses, Santa down the chimney, perfect children beaming in eager delight, perfect parents offering expensive gifts (the gifts are important), loving families radiating joy and good wishes, perfect table settings, wreaths and bows, sweet-smelling trees, twinkling lights, a time of good deeds and empathy and charity.
At Christmas, the poor are no longer frightening or unwashed or forgotten, they are all transformed into noble and unfortunate souls, often magically rescued by the spirit of Christmas itself.
We know life is not like that for most people, or for most families. We are taught to yearn for it nonetheless, it is practically ground into our consciousness. Christmas is a pressured holiday. I have big trouble with such enforced joy, we like to pretend it is all for the children, and for the good of others, but in our hearts we know better. It is just as much for us, our way of hanging onto the threads of hope and promise.
Families, like the legislative process, are not pretty. If I learned nothing else as a reporter, it was not believe the images people love to project about themselves and their families. There are lots of things happening behind those closed doors, some of them pretty, some ugly. There are no perfect families, just as there are no perfect lives. And who would really want one? The really loving families acknowledge their flaws and defy them.
Some of us can find salvation and rebirth at Christmas, we can relish the spirit of it in a world that is harsh on spirits and good cheer sometimes. I see many families that try too hard at Christmas, they wade stubbornly through the stress and the pressure, and the planning and choosing and guessing, and the cracks and fissures that chew at almost every family, acknowledged or not.
“For me,” said a good friend recently, “Christmas is all about stress. The gifts, the cooking the planning, needing to make it perfect for everyone. I think it is a woman’s holiday, the men can just sit back and unwrap their gifts.”
That is the American story, the Disney story people – and corporations – love so much, the one we yearn for and somehow need to believe. And I know some people for whom it is true. For most of the people I know – and for me – it is a fantasy, a surreal distortion of real life. Almost all of us fall short of the Christmas we are told we ought to be having, that is the Christmas the people who run our world very much wish us to believe in. The economy practically runs on it.
Over the years, I have fairly worn myself out trying to make it work in my own various families; scrambled, like my mother, to live up to it’s very high expectations. I think it is more complex than the Disney people care to know, and actually, that is what gives it richness and meaning. Not the Disney story, but the real story.
I love Christmas, I will always love it, it was the one day of the year when my fractured family put their troubles and arguments aside and tried to bury one another in gifts and anticipation. The post-Christmas crash, the return to earth was ugly. But we sure tried. The Christmases I often see are full of stress, spending, quarreling, cooking and pacifying. Christmas is most often marked by excess, not the simplicity of its namesake.
You know, the stuff of families. Guilt and misunderstanding, love and loyalty. My heart breaks for my mother on Christmas, the poor woman, raised by Orthodox Jews, honoring a sacred Christian holiday, desperate to make up to her children for all of the lost days of the year.
Do not ever tell your grandmother, she said every year. We never did.
My mother exhausted herself trying, she could never do it, of course, it was an impossible mission.
I thought of Christmas and the holidays at Foggy Notions tonight, “The Bog,” a very real place with good hamburgers, they pulled out all the stops this year, Kelly’s radiant and welcoming smile, her competence and efficiency, lights hanging everywhere, a sense of excitement., a big crowd at the bar, a roaring wood stove, wreaths over the pool table. Maria had an awful time with Christmas for much of her life, every present was a post-traumatic stress trigger. We are shifting gears, evolving, creating our own idea of the holiday.
We are doing it differently this year. We gave our gifts early, we are avoiding dinners and celebrations and expectations and mounds of presents. We have nothing to do on Christmas Day but be together and love one another, the sweetest gift of all. Perhaps, at last, we have found our Christmas, we have found simplicity.
I think are both done with trying to figure it out. We can’t. Blessings to those who can.
Our Christmas will be acknowledged in the living of our life together, our wishes to do good for people. We will give the gift of no expensive gifts, no excess, no stress, no family intrigue, no big dinners, hours of wrapping, no pressure to dance in the heady swirl of joy. I’ll take some photos, read some books, herd some sheep, walk with Maria and her pony. I can hardly imagine a day filled with more gifts than I already have. Why did it take me so long to see that?
We are giving one another the gift of love, respect and encouragement, all wrapped up in the great bow of living.
It will be a special Christmas for us, I think, a consolation.
I do think Christmas is a necessary festival. Obviously, we all need it, or we would have abandoned it long ago. It forces us to come to terms with our families, and with ourselves. We can look back or move forward. I think Jesus would have liked that part, loved our idea of the simple Christmas. Really, chain stores were not in the picture.
We can see very clearly the flaws in human relationships, otherwise there would be no necessity for Christmas, no need to acknowledge the runaway train that is life and celebrate the idea of giving once a year. Everyone is trying hard to do better, to understand that giving is a gift to the giver as much as the receiver.
Christmas is a respite, a deep and needed breath.
If there is much sadness at Christmas – people think of lost love, broken family, battered hopes, there is, in fact, also much consolation.
“Don’t grieve,” wrote the poet Rumi.”Anything you lose comes round in another form.”
That’s the thing about Christmas, I think. It comes every year. Everything we lose comes around in another form, year after year. Sometimes, the lucky ones can get some of it back.