The Winter of My Discontent

Say what you will about the holidays: at this time of year, the good cheer of the season is invariably at odds with the general mood of the populace.

You hear it as the checkout lines at busy stores; you sense it when one shopping cart bumps into another, or two hands reach for a single, fashionable clearance item -- the last one in the right size.

There is this feeling, first and foremost, that *I* matter above all others. That only *I* am in a hurry, and only *I* need to get home to my family.

It would do the world of us some good, I think, to open our eyes a bit wider. To see the universe around us for what it is, to leave our egocentrism at home before we venture out onto the dangerously unsalted sidewalks and crowded streets.

The hustle and bustle of this season is most assuredly that: and there is no denying a permeating sort of... sadness... in that space between the lines. The girl walking alone, eyes down, with smiling couples on both sides. The paraplegic in a wheelchair unable to navigate any limbs between the aisles, relying instead on the cold hands of a relative.

The mother yelling at her daughter. The kids telling their father that what they really need is...

Oh, let's be honest. It doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter what you think you need because more often than not: you don't.

Not the iPod or the GPS. Not the digital camera or the diamond earrings. Not the epileptic Elmo or Butterscotch the Pony.

These things may distract us, I suppose, from what really ails us. We're stuffing possessions in-between the gaps in our lives, filling our shopping carts with stuff enough to compensate for what we can't find elsewhere.

A meaningful solution to the curse of our existence, a sort of cosmic comeuppance that haunts us from the cradle:

Fears of death, and loneliness, in a world where everyone dies and no one entirely escapes the latter.

But the fact remains that if you allow yourself to give into these fears, you'll spend a lifetime counting the lines on your own face, tracing the ever-changing path with a limp in your voice and a stutter to your step.

So you do what you can to distract yourself. You start your family and celebrate your Holy Days and line your fence with all the colors of the rainbow, too often forgetting that all around you are people very much so stuck in the same trap, the same dilemma, the same existential quandry.

But surely it occurs to you, from time to time, that you are not alone. That the world is full of people caught in varying degrees of happiness, and suffering, and sometimes it's up to you to make their day a little better: to smile when you want to look away. To put a dollar into the cup when your instinct is to ignore that unquestionable jingle of change.

It will come back to you some day, most certainly, when you need -- or fear it -- most.

***
Along with sundry other changes in my life, this Christmas will mark the last day I see my brother for a good while, and I think -- in a way -- I'm attempting to mask whatever it is I feel (or don't) with more gifts than I (or my banking account) can stand.

Intoxicated as I am by this same spirit, I am trying, with all my might, to not give in to the topical depression of this season. I have my Charlie Brown tree up.

And my stockings are hung with care.

And I think, maybe, this December will end more quickly than the long, slow drawl with which it began.

I want somehow to stop it. For the New Year to never come.

***

At work they're having a cube decorating contest; some are designing theirs as a ginerbread house. Others Santa's workshop.

Mine, if I muster the energy, will look a little like the decor I've established at home (see photos above).

I'll give you one guess as to what I'm calling it.