A Pilgrim’s Digression

I sometimes wonder why we call Christmas a “holiday” when few people actually take a holiday at this time of year, from either work or the ordinary stress of daily life. In fact for many people, the stress ramps up over the holiday season, especially if one has children and a large, extended family spread out over the country. At this time of year, I always read news stories about the increased frequency of suicide and depression at the holidays, and these stories always attribute those statistics to loneliness and lack of family. Maybe we should look at other contributing factors to the holiday blues.

Work: more and more people have a briefer holiday on the 25th of December. How many of us know people who have to go back to work the evening of the 25th? For that matter, gas stations and retail stores stay open later on Christmas Eve than they ever did when I was a kid. I remember when I was young, my Dad would go out early on the 24th to fill up the car because no stations would be open from 5:00 PM on the 24th until sometime early on the 26th.

Now, that is no longer a worry. Gas stations are open on Christmas Day. Wal-Mart opens at 6:00 in the evening on the 25th. Additionally, many people who do shift work end up working on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Personally, I think the world would be better off if all commerce and activity simply shut down for two days out of the year, December 24th and 25th.

Money: it goes without saying that people spend way too much money at this time of year, often going deep into debt to acquire presents for every last second cousin and friend of a friend’s child. Gift giving is supposed to be special but too often becomes a duty. Someone gives us a gift one year, and like the proverbial “cycle of violence,” we feel duty-bound to buy them one next year.

Then there is the need to buy the special gift that we believe our child really, really wants. Just today, a co-worker was telling me a story about his search for a Robosapien for his son. Supposedly this is one of the hot toys for boys this year. It took him two weeks of searching and calling stores before he finally gave up and bought it online…and then he told me the price. No matter the specialness of the gift, the child’s excitement is no match for the price of the item. No matter how grateful the child might be, we are always thinking inside, “You’d better be grateful considering what this thing cost me.” And then when we see the toy neglected an hour after opening it, we always feel hurt, don’t we?

Perfection: when you have children, Christmas is supposed to be perfect. What that means, I don’t know, but most of us want our children to remember the holiday as the happiest time of year. Buying the perfect gift is part of that perfection, but so is doing special things that become tradition and are supposed to be memorable for the child. Then there are the perfectionist tendencies of adults who want to impress each other with the lavish holiday parties they can throw. A co-worker was complaining today about the holiday party his wife feels compelled to throw every year on the weekend before Christmas, complete with a holiday wine-tasting and paid child care workers to supervise the Children in holiday games and activities while the adults have their fun.

My family is not quite so lavish, but we do have a family pot luck every year which seems to grow and grow with the addition of new children, new wives and husbands, and new friends of family. There is a Yankee Swap that often takes an hour or more, and a paid Santa Claus to distribute gifts to the kiddies. Then at the end someone passes a hat to collect donations to cover the cost of the church hall and Santa Claus. This has been happening every year for as long as I have been alive, and it has always been a night of dread for me. When I was very little, I used to hide under one of the tables, behind a red, draping tablecloth, just to avoid both the scrutiny of the adults and the awkwardness of being expected to play with cousins I saw only this one time per year.

Even now, with my Grandma suffering with pancreatic cancer, when I called her this week she told me of her preparations for the party on Saturday. “…and then I have to cook for Christmas Eve, too” she concluded with a sigh.

“It’s too much, grandma,” I said. “Why do we have to do this every year?”

She acted almost offended, “We do this every year. It’s our once chance to see everyone in the family. You are coming, aren’t you?”

I said I would come, but mentally I made a note that we might just get too late of a start on the drive on Saturday and would (darn it) miss the party.

These events are hard for me because I feel I have so little in common with most of my family members, other than blood. Even cousins I knew and played with as a child are all grown up with families, and we live in separate states and never see each other socially, and so we don’t really have much to talk about anymore.

Maybe it’s different for the older generation. There is certainly something to be said for tradition binding a family together, but sometimes I question whether binding together people who only have blood in common is such a good thing. This brings me to the next factor in diagnosing the holiday blues:

Nostalgia: Christmas is the most nostalgic time of year. I find myself thinking back to the Christmases I enjoyed as a kid. In retrospect, I don’t look upon how we celebrated the holiday as anything spectacularly grand. It was more the innocent excitement of being a kid at Christmas that drove much of the good feeling I had as a child at this time of year. Everything had a kind of special charm about it, to the child I was: the decorations, the music, the stories, the Christmas cartoons on TV that, back in the eighties, were not endlessly played (or available on DVD), so if you wanted to watch them you had to tune in the one night of the year that they were broadcast.

Adults lose that innocent excitement and feel a strong, nostalgic need to recapture it via their own children.

Travel: many of us no longer live near our families. I sometimes feel the most unlucky of us are those that live just far enough to make travel at the holidays difficult and stressful, but nonetheless mandatory. We live three to four hours from my family and five hours from Lynn’s family, just far enough to make travel at the holidays a real pain in the ass, but not far enough that we can say, “Look, we live all the way on the other side of the country. We’ll send you a Christmas card.”

Most people feel like it is the absence of family that results in the holiday blues, but sometimes the opposite is true. It is the presence of too much family, and the effort we go to inflict this punishment on ourselves, that can cause the most stress. Remind me again why I drive several hours in order to then drive some more between the homes of my divorced parents on Christmas Day, then leave for Pittsburgh mid-day so that we can eat a late dinner with Lynn’s family in the evening?

I’ve always thought that perhaps the best Christmas Day would be spent like the family in the Little House on the Prairie book by Laura Ingalls Wilder. In the actual book by that title (not the series title), there is a huge blizzard that forces the family to stay inside for a snowy, simple Christmas of gift giving, music, and reflection. Mr. Edwards stops by with gifts, but other than that, the holiday is a true holiday in all senses of the word.

Or how about the Christmas Day in the movie A Christmas Story, my personal holiday favorite? The family opens gifts at home (Ralphie gets his bb gun), then goes out for Chinese food after the Bumpus’s dogs ruin the turkey dinner the mother had planned. No one visits the Parkers, and other than going out to the Chinese restaurant, the family never leaves the house. The old RCA radio plays soft, instrumental Christmas music as the kids go to sleep, clutching their new toy zeppelin and bb gun, and Mom and Dad enjoy a nightcap…and perhaps a little something extra, later.

Simplify, simplify…as Thoreau once said. But probably for the majority of people, simplicity would result in too much guilt. What would it feel like if we stayed home one Christmas, instead of traveling? How about skipping the holiday parties? Would the kids notice if they didn’t get as many presents this year, or if the presents were scaled back in cost and size?

Probably not, but then kids have never had a problem enjoying Christmas however it is celebrated. We adults, on the other hand, are always trying to improve on perfection.