This morning I woke up feeling weathered and old. I didn’t even look in the mirror, but I had this vision of myself with a sagging face and storm cloud skin. I felt washed up and hunched over. I felt like someone prematurely aged by booze and cigarettes and a graying heart. I don’t smoke but last night I wasted my evening in an empty bar (evening being 5pm to 8pm). I had gone downtown to do some Christmas shopping and decided to stop in at a dark basement bar for a beer. What I really wanted was a dark bar with a roaring fire and a cocktail – maybe a snifter of something warm. I don’t really like cocktails or snifters, and those bars don’t exist up here, but I wanted that type of a wintry vibe.
This is the season of obligations and this morning I’m resenting them – maybe that’s why I woke up feeling the way I did. Scrooge on the inside and even scroogier on the out. Today, I’ll visit some extended family. Tonight, I’m meeting someone for a drink. Tomorrow I’m taking my team out to lunch for the holidays. For the lunch, we’re each supposed to have a gag gift, and I don’t have one nor do I know what to get (and now have little time to get it). Next week I’m supposed to head back to the Philly area to do family things. They’re calling for 6 or 7 inches of snow here on Thursday heading into Friday – I’m supposed to leave on Friday. I also don’t have all my shopping done for those visits. If I’m being honest, I kinda hate Christmas shopping and running around. Last year, I felt the same way. At that time, I told myself that I was going to skip Christmas this year – that I was going to go the islands and sit on a beach and hang with tourists at tiki bars. Don’t get me wrong, when I’m in the moment, I enjoy spending time with friends and family. It’s the time required to make plans and shop and travel that I don’t enjoy. It feels overwhelming and it feels like I don’t get down time… which is ridiculous because last night I spent my evening in an empty bar.
I don’t enjoy grinchin’ and grouchin’ like this. I don’t like how often the word hate pops into my everyday vocabulary. The wind whips my face and I hate the weather. The driveway is iced over and I hate the driveway. I can’t find a sitter for the dog and I hate living in a town with no services. I feel like I should try to have a better attitude towards life (or at least the season) – which, of course, makes me feel bad for not having a better attitude. Everyone has cheer and there’s old man Uhler in a Dickens novel – pulling his coat tight and grumbling to himself as street urchins covered in soot run by collecting farthings for the orphanage. Sometimes, I wonder if I’m one of “those people” for whom “the holiday season can be a tough time of the year.” Sometimes, I want to tell people that it’s a struggle just for me to show up – please accept that as my gift – It took me weeks to find. On these cold, gray, short, dark days, all I want to do is settle in and cozy up. The obligations of the season keep dragging me into the outside world. The dog needs to be walked. Gifts need to be bought. Pies and wine and highway drives.
I didn’t always feel so ungenerous of spirit. For a long time, I had a sense of home or companionship to soften the blow, which might have made it easier to be big-hearted (or at least tolerate this busyness). Thinking back, one of the things I liked most about this time of year was coming home to the glow of my own tree with my family and my cats as my company. It was a safe place, a quiet respite from the crazy and the cold. Some years (the years of first Christmases), it was even exciting – first one in a new house, first one with the cats, first one with a new partner. I haven’t had those feelings of excitement or respite for quite some time and it seems that without that peace or that warm satisfaction, my life feels lopsided or out of balance.
As I try to get at the heart of… whatever this is, I’m considering the possibility that it has something to do with a lack of authenticity. In the span of a month and a half we try to cram in all of the relationships that we’ve ignored throughout the year. We try to get gifts for people who we (or I) haven’t put in the time to really think about – who are they and how we might share something with them. Admittedly, I struggle with things that feel forced. For this very same reason, I’ve never liked Valentine’s Day – those efforts should happen year-round. Many years ago, perhaps in reaction to always being behind on getting gifts, my wife and I decided we would both take a day off from work and do our shopping together. One day, singular focus. And now, as I remember that practice, I’m seeing a hidden wisdom in it. Genuinely thinking about people (in the act of buying / giving gifts) isn’t something that should be squeezed in on the way home from work, or multi-tasked with some online shopping, or fit in between our other errands in the few hours we have on the weekend when everyone else is trying to squeeze in their few hours of shopping as well. Done poorly, the whole thing feels like guilt-driven consumerism – which, for me, is the opposite of what the season should be about.
I don’t know how to reclaim Christmas or if it can be reclaimed. For many years, I knew that once we were done with Christmas Eve at my father’s house, we could breath and relax. Christmas morning could be slow and it felt like some of the holiday was still mine or ours. I guess I haven’t adjusted to whatever this new normal is. I wrote the same thing/sentiment last year and I honestly can’t tell if the sentiment is getting better or worse. Twice, I’ve celebrated on my own, and that felt surprisingly good, or at least non-taxing. At the same time, doing so feels selfish, and I begin to wonder if there’s a correlation between isolation and selfishness. When I had more people in my immediate circle, people for whom I wanted to give and then give some more, giving seemed easier and more fulfilling – less forced. Now, in these in-between states – these divisions of time split between visiting and running around – it begins to feel like I’m not showing up for myself or not giving adequate space and thought to myself or anyone else. And in a season of generosity, I begin to feel a bit more miserly – or at least that’s how I woke up feeling today… grinchy and grouchy and needing to grumble about it.