The original date of publication for this essay is Sunday, December 6th. It is the 21st of what’s intended to be a year’s worth of essays, published on Sundays. That intention, like everything, is subject to change.
Last week’s essay: On the Light in the Window, and Participating in the Beautiful
When I was a sophomore in high school, I became overwhelmed by classwork for one of the first times. I think it was a chemistry lab—the one Mr. Foerster called The Light Lab, the one he hyped up the whole year to that point then unleashed on us with old, hard-to-use spectrometers and talk of hellfire and brimstone (it was also the lab that begat one of the greatest moments in my good friend Wasif’s significant history of high school cheekiness, but that would take us too far off course). Whether it was or wasn’t the light lab, it happened in December, and I remember coming home from a gingerbread house-decorating competition (a fundraiser—I was not a competitive gingerbread house-decorator, though how I wish I were!) to a daunting assignment of indeterminate duration, one I was not prepared to do and felt great pressure to perform well on (I was in the midst of a rather spiteful, four year-long battle concerning class rank, one that brought out some of my most impressive competitive performance and some of my most profound jackassery, but that’s a matter for another time). I was rattled, to put it lightly, and not just by the assignment. I was rattled that I could feel so overwhelmed in the month of December. I could not remember ever feeling so bad at Christmastime.
Growing up, my family spent every Sunday night in Advent seated together in the family room. We’d read from a devotional—one from a Christmas years and years prior, with the creases and the brittle pages and the unevenly disintegrating corners that magazine paper grows as it ages. We’d light the Advent wreath. We’d each pick a Christmas carol to sing (for whatever reason, this was a jubilant experience for me in my preschool years—perhaps my favorite part of the ritual, or of the entire Christmas season). Then Mom would read one quarter (or one fifth, depending on our Christmas Eve plans) of either A Christmas Carol, The Other Wise Man, or The Best Christmas Pageant Ever (we employed a three-year rotation, and it was with some sweetness his senior year of high school that one of my brothers, I forget which, noticed that luck had made it so we’d each hear A Christmas Carol in our last year “doing Advent” with the family). We sat in pajamas, hair wet from baths or showers, Barnaby—our well-fed and luxuriously handsome tuxedo cat—keeping an eye on the happenings as he awaited his dinner. We took turns, week to week, extinguishing the candles, and lighting them when we were old enough to be allowed this thrill. It was magical, and warm, and safe, the way Christmas is at its absolute best.
The feeling Advent gave me as a child was just one of many Christmastime brought. There was the majesty of the lit tree in the dark. There was the comfort of the soft glow of the icicle lights just past my bedroom blinds as I fell asleep. There was the merriment of Christmas music on the radio (93.9, WLIT). There was the pride of placing a Velcro/felt “ornament” on the Velcro/felt Christmas tree Advent calendar on the refrigerator. There was the stomach-buzzing anticipation of Christmas Eve, and the euphoric release of Christmas morning. Life was good in my little world for a kid at Christmastime.
Which is why that December, at the age of 15, I was so struck by the weight of Chemistry lab-induced anxiety. I’d felt that anxiety before, and feelings like it—bottomless feelings, feelings with no map through them—but I could never remember feeling that way around Christmas, and even the times when I was mad, or sad, or worried, there’d always been that underlying magic of the Christmas season, sitting in the background, holding the line against the dark.
I suspect I’m not alone in having had such a reckoning, or of being struck by some shock of unhappiness around the holidays. It’s hard to come up with anything more exhilarating than Christmastime for a child, but as all childhood things fade, I suspect the constancy of the magic fades too, for all of us. I wonder, thinking back to those Advent Sunday nights, whether my parents were ever consumed by stress on those evenings, or by anxiety, or by some sadness left imperceivable to our young eyes. I wonder if it was as perfect for them as it was for me. And as I wonder that, I suspect it still might have been, even in the face of adulthood. At least in pinches of moments.
Because there’s a thing about Christmas. Whether immersively religious or entirely secular, Christmastime has a special ability to grab those who care for it. Of all the phenomena in the world, it’s hard to think of one with more visual cues, more audial cues, more emotional cues to the present. And in that present, those cues bring with them a joy, and a peace, in the form of a command to stop swimming in ourselves and let the unimportant be unimportant. Perhaps I’m naïve in this. Perhaps I’ve only seen an unrepresentative slice. But something about bells ringing and red kettles; garlands and oversized ornaments on city streetlamps; a Christmas tune on a loudspeaker; a lit tree in a quiet, dark room…these moments, these cues, these manifestations of Christmastime: they grab us, they pull us up from the pool of what’s to be done, they call to us and tell us, ever so kindly, that just for a moment, we can let all be well. Just for a moment, we can let the world wait. Just for a moment, we can allow ourselves to feel the magic, even if we can only manage just a brush.
It’s popular to decry the way our society treats Christmas, and it comes from more than one side of the culture war. The War on Christmas. The evil capitalists elevating a silly, pagan-rooted holiday for their own gain. Decry if you wish. Some decrying, I’m sure, is deserved.
But one of the great lucks of this saturation of Christmastime—the music, the cards, the cookies, the decorations, the gifts, the candles, the trees, the travel, the special cups at Starbucks, the NORAD Santa tracker—is how earnestly, how constantly it reminds us of itself. Just for a moment, all is well. Just for a moment, the world can wait. Just for a moment, it’s ok to feel the magic.
Because, just for a moment, it’s Christmastime.
Next week’s essay: On Jacob Marley, and Hell
