Bah Humbug Lite

I’m not sure how it got to be December already. But November seemed particularly greedy, gobbling up the days getting ready for Thanksgiving, then afterwards a few more days getting bed linens washed and my head rearranged. There was travel and there were medical tests (all normal, thank you), both of which tend to take up more than their space on the calendar.

Travel reaches out on both sides, before and after.  Before, with all the tiny bottles that have to be fetched. Afterwards with the dissipation of I'm-still-somewhere-else while trying to get through the piles of all that got postponed so you could leave, plus all that blew up under the door while you were gone.  

Medical tests take up a different kind of room.  Anxiety is a mental narcissist, how dare you pay attention to anything else. Days can go by in a scratchy blur.  Then the tests.  Time suspended.  Then the results and a new place to stand.

A deep outbreath.  It is December.

The first of the month, for a few days, ordinary life can reassert its importance.  Until you turn on the radio, or try to shop for something innocent, like cotton balls.  Then you realize: it has already begun.

Pa rum pa pum pum.


But the Thanksgiving guests have just left.  I don’t even have the sheets back on the beds. 
It doesn’t matter.  It is December. . .

Even if you put your foot down and give goats instead of cologne, Christmas has its own momentum.  Even if you put up a few subtle white lights instead of a yard full of electrified plastic, Christmas takes over.  Money leaks out of your wallet.  There is an irresistible urge to have and to go to parties and eat tiny food.  Even to break out platters of tiny food for gatherings of people you see every day, those people redecorated in red hats with furry balls on the end.  

If you are a believer, now is the time to get disgusted at all the crass commercialism, Jesus is the reason for the season.  And if you are a nonbeliever. . .well Christmas takes over anyway.

Here's a secret: we kind of enjoy being overrun, no matter how many donations we make to worthy causes, no matter how many oranges we put in stockings.  Despite the train wreck we make of the notion of abundance, there is something liberating about the whole hog scattershot that the season seems to endorse.  Spend!  Eat! Put a bow on the dog!

As much as we complain, and declare ourselves above it all, there is something in us that unlocks at this time of the year that doesn’t have permission any other time.  We arrive at the shores of the New Year spent, exhausted, buffeted by the repeated waves of holiday demands. Budgets and diets blown.
Making nice with relatives we don’t normally see, those members of the family whose job it is to help us realize we're doing pretty well by comparison, pretty well indeed.

And then there are those opportunities to intersect with lives we didn’t know existed, people with whom we share ancestry we know not when, maybe as far back as when humans were invented, people whose potentially whacky personalities we don’t have to be exposed to, people who just desperately need us to help them to have a meal, or to make a living with that goat.

Yes, its crazy, these holidays.  Norman Rockwell expectations; Debbie Downer reality: boredom, fatigue, too much dessert, too little exercise, too much Uncle So and So, too little sleep.  But maybe down the middle is something that stretches us a little on both ends.  Maybe when we slowly come back to the center, which is what January is for, our vision is a little wider, our heart, if also our pants, just a little big bigger.