Here I am criticizing myself because I haven’t even written about Christmas,.
“How can you write a blog at Christmastime and not even mention Christmas?” I ask myself. “What is wrong with me?!”
Is there such a thing as ‘Holiday Trauma?’ Because if there is, I have it. In my mind everyday is just like the one before it and the one after it. I recognize seasons, equinoxes, and solstices, but that’s about it. Everyday is another day to battle against the universal force of disintegration. And I am so occupied with that battle that I do not have any energy left over to romanticize any day or period of days as more joyful or significant than any other.
I know, people will say that that makes me at best a heretic, or at worst an A-theist.
Well, to that I’d say not at all. I MUST believe in a God, or else what would give me the will to keep going? I MUST believe in a loving parent who accepts me as I am, with my disengagement or is it perhaps disassociation about Holidays?
You see, when I was little, the Christmas Holiday was extraordinary. It began just after Thanksgiving (and the build up to Thanksgiving was pretty remarkable too, since I believed the mythology about how my ancestors, who had been saved from famine by the First Americans, sat down peacefully, at a row of three or four 72-in Brown Southern Yellow Pine Rectangle Picnic Tables, with turkey, squash, corn, and beans; to give thanks with those very First Americans for their mutual survival) and it lasted until the second Day of January. My grandmothers, ‘Zelma’, and ‘Little” and my great Aunt Mona (Whom I most resemble today) saw to that. Everything was decorated with lights, tinsel, fake snow designs stenciled onto the windows, Christmas trees, presents galore, endless homemade Christmas cookies on the sideboard in the hall, and all kinds of rituals. Rituals getting out the mechanical ‘roaring lion’ who, when plugged in and the proper button pushed, would walk three or four strides, and then stop and open his ferocious mouth and ‘R_O_A_R!’ There was my mother’s old bedroom with the musical revolving lighted Christmas tree that would play silent night as I was tucked snuggly into my mother’s childhood bed. Things like that.
But After my mother died in that car accident, all that Magic just went away. ‘Little’ Grandma just tried to teach me how to be a lady (have good manners) and a mother (Play with dolls), and grandma ‘Zelma” started telling me the secrets; Like, that when my grandpa Syd was alive, she and Syd would work together to make that ‘endless supply’ of homemade Christmas cookies.