Are the holidays here already? Sometimes this season reminds me of the difference between a normal person, a neurotic, and a psychotic. Come morning, the normal person says, “I’m tired. I really don’t want to go to work.” But they get up anyway and off they trudge.
Come morning, the neurotic says, “It’s morning. I really don’t have the energy to live.” And they pull the covers over their heads and go back to moaning sleep.
“Ah,” but the psychotic says, “It can’t be morning; I blew the sun out yesterday.”
It seems it was just yesterday that we dealt with this season. I remember it clearly: smiling through gritted teeth, wishing everyone a happy something while not remembering who they were or why on earth I was speaking to them, and worst of all giving and receiving gifts that were destined for a landfill in some country with no need of more plastic.
No! No! I know what you’re thinking. I am not Scrooge! I do not begrudge others their happiness. Please, feel free to watch all those movies once more, even the ones that were never intended to celebrate the holidays, even the ones that use farcical chipmunk voices and those that save depressed fools from drowning themselves. Make believe that you are home alone, if you wish. Just don’t invite me over to share that mock loneliness. I have better things to do, and they do not include shopping, especially not shopping in crowded malls the day after Thanksgiving.
Holidays shouldn’t be about shopping and spending money anyway. Nor about eating too much or drinking too much. By the way, when are there the most drunk-driving incidents? Wednesday evening before Thanksgiving. Yep. People getting drunk so they can tolerate being with the people they’re supposed to love.
“Well, then,” you might ask, “what should the holiday season be about?”
Gosh, I’m glad you ask me that. Let me start my answer with a big shoutout to seasonal affective disorder. Yes, Virginia, lack of daylight makes us depressed. It especially made our ancestors depressed because they weren’t really sure that winter would pass and that brighter, better-fed times would come. Imagine if you will a group of paleolithic warriors—men and women—dancing around a great monolith to appease a mystical being who might or might not allow the plants to again flower, the water to melt, and the bison or mammoth return to roaming nearby. “Where, by the way,” they undoubtedly wonder, “have all those birds gone?”
No wonder they were grouchy. Being hungry and cold, they were depressed, lethargic a good part of the time, lacking much motivation—except of course when it came to trying to appease that god who controlled the cold wind blowing down from the north.
If we can identify with those hungry, scared cave-dwellers, we might be better able to appreciate what the holiday season could mean: a last-ditch effort to reassure themselves that the world wasn’t going to end, that they weren’t going to starve, that the forces they could not understand would not abandon them.
We all of us, even in these “modern times,” need that reassurance. We turn to tradition so that we know what to expect—albeit now a turkey and canned cranberry sauce instead of the return of the geese. Some of those traditions might still involve a god or two. But, let’s be honest, are people any more enthusiastic about singing Come All Ye Faithful than they are when belting out Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer?
I have no quarrel with our human need for hope and reassurance. I, too, like to glance into the abyss and hope that something will pull me back. Perhaps we speak here of the umbilical cord of the soul. I just don’t displace that basic human need into rooting for my college football team, who may or may not win or even play in a holiday bowl this year. I do not pin my hopes for salvation on a package left under a tree that has been cut down simply to be decorated and discarded in distant memorialization of the logs that ancestors once burned those long and fearful winter nights in the dark wood.
No, in darkness I search not for tokens of religions, nor for their sacraments, not even for the still small voices of their gods. Neither is it the assurance of science I seek, not even a cosmology based on astronomy, the third law of thermodynamics, or the uncertainty of quantum mechanics. At the moment of the abyss, I know that science offers no more certainty for the next moment than faith.
I can, perhaps, turn inward. I can allow my life to flash before me and with a deep sigh perhaps reflect that I have done it my way. Yes, at that moment, I can decide that I have indeed blown out the sun, that perhaps madness makes the most sense after all. Well, if I have to spin another dreidel, sing All I want for Christmas one more time, or even admire another belighted and star-bearing tree resplendent in gaudiness, I will go mad any way.
So, let’s hear for the holy days of psychosis when we realize that it’s all over and doesn’t matter because, well, because we are humans and can make believe that depression is joy and that the ever-shortening days demonstrate hope that tomorrow might just be sunnier.
Are the holidays here already? Sometimes this season reminds me of the difference between a normal person, a neurotic, and a psychotic. Come morning, the normal person says, “I’m tired. I really don’t want to go to work.” But they get up anyway and off they trudge.
Come morning, the neurotic says, “It’s morning. I really don’t have the energy to live.” And they pull the covers over their heads and go back to moaning sleep.
“Ah,” but the psychotic says, “It can’t be morning; I blew the sun out yesterday.”
It seems it was just yesterday that we dealt with this season. I remember it clearly: smiling through gritted teeth, wishing everyone a happy something while not remembering who they were or why on earth I was speaking to them, and worst of all giving and receiving gifts that were destined for a landfill in some country with no need of more plastic.
No! No! I know what you’re thinking. I am not Scrooge! I do not begrudge others their happiness. Please, feel free to watch all those movies once more, even the ones that were never intended to celebrate the holidays, even the ones that use farcical chipmunk voices and those that save depressed fools from drowning themselves. Make believe that you are home alone, if you wish. Just don’t invite me over to share that mock loneliness. I have better things to do, and they do not include shopping, especially not shopping in crowded malls the day after Thanksgiving.
Holidays shouldn’t be about shopping and spending money anyway. Nor about eating too much or drinking too much. By the way, when are there the most drunk-driving incidents? Wednesday evening before Thanksgiving. Yep. People getting drunk so they can tolerate being with the people they’re supposed to love.
“Well, then,” you might ask, “what should the holiday season be about?”
Gosh, I’m glad you ask me that. Let me start my answer with a big shoutout to seasonal affective disorder. Yes, Virginia, lack of daylight makes us depressed. It especially made our ancestors depressed because they weren’t really sure that winter would pass and that brighter, better-fed times would come. Imagine if you will a group of paleolithic warriors—men and women—dancing around a great monolith to appease a mystical being who might or might not allow the plants to again flower, the water to melt, and the bison or mammoth return to roaming nearby. “Where, by the way,” they undoubtedly wonder, “have all those birds gone?”
No wonder they were grouchy. Being hungry and cold, they were depressed, lethargic a good part of the time, lacking much motivation—except of course when it came to trying to appease that god who controlled the cold wind blowing down from the north.
If we can identify with those hungry, scared cave-dwellers, we might be better able to appreciate what the holiday season could mean: a last-ditch effort to reassure themselves that the world wasn’t going to end, that they weren’t going to starve, that the forces they could not understand would not abandon them.
We all of us, even in these “modern times,” need that reassurance. We turn to tradition so that we know what to expect—albeit now a turkey and canned cranberry sauce instead of the return of the geese. Some of those traditions might still involve a god or two. But, let’s be honest, are people any more enthusiastic about singing Come All Ye Faithful than they are when belting out Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer?
I have no quarrel with our human need for hope and reassurance. I, too, like to glance into the abyss and hope that something will pull me back. Perhaps we speak here of the umbilical cord of the soul. I just don’t displace that basic human need into rooting for my college football team, who may or may not win or even play in a holiday bowl this year. I do not pin my hopes for salvation on a package left under a tree that has been cut down simply to be decorated and discarded in distant memorialization of the logs that ancestors once burned those long and fearful winter nights in the dark wood.
No, in darkness I search not for tokens of religions, nor for their sacraments, not even for the still small voices of their gods. Neither is it the assurance of science I seek, not even a cosmology based on astronomy, the third law of thermodynamics, or the uncertainty of quantum mechanics. At the moment of the abyss, I know that science offers no more certainty for the next moment than faith.
I can, perhaps, turn inward. I can allow my life to flash before me and with a deep sigh perhaps reflect that I have done it my way. Yes, at that moment, I can decide that I have indeed blown out the sun, that perhaps madness makes the most sense after all. Well, if I have to spin another dreidel, sing All I want for Christmas one more time, or even admire another belighted and star-bearing tree resplendent in gaudiness, I will go mad any way.
So, let’s hear for the holy days of psychosis when we realize that it’s all over and doesn’t matter because, well, because we are humans and can make believe that depression is joy and that the ever-shortening days demonstrate hope that tomorrow might just be sunnier.
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