Public holidays, in general, seem like a dry run for death – public services are suspended, there are no mail deliveries, places close down... – and Christmas is the most gruesome, and even grisly, of them all. No wonder that I begin to grimace about it in July. The fug thickens, and reaches its most toxic about now.
It’s not just the sham of almost all of it – the gross consumerism; the aping of rituals that never existed, or at least not in anything like the form of the mimickry; the extent of the exclusion of so many that xmas entails and inflicts... It’s not even just the absurdity of the whole basis of the event – the notion that this, the world, is the result of God’s becoming Man to save mankind. If this is salvation, or even just a provisional damnation, our gooses are cooked, xmas dinner or not.
Of course, most of the discomforts of the season are merely mundane, as the events unfold within the quotidian. One year, my Mum’s christmas pudding, the centerpiece of the annual meal of togetherness (typically registered in the tension and heartache that is almost inherent in family), was waterlogged – somehow the seal of the boiler was not tight enough. My dad made a big show of saving the day, scooping the sodden mess back into the bowl. “It’ll be fine,” he fatuously declared. Well, at least that was a rare moment of fellow feeling and supportiveness, for him, however unlikely the idea was that there was anything to save. My mum was most downhearted. Ever alert to strife, I had come from the dining room to witness the disappointment. Never mind; at least there was the christmas fruit cake – the ritual nature of the meal would hardly be sustained by skipping the pudding and going straight to the cake, but still...
The cake, of course, was inedible. After years and years of great successes, my mother had somehow omitted to chop the brazil nuts and walnuts before mixing them into the batter, with the result that the cake was rock-hard. It was not even possible to pretend it was edible, although of course I, ever my mother’s Red Cross Knight, made a valiant effort. Even a burned or too-dry cake can be salvaged by trimming or a little butter. My mum wept quietly – when life is hard, even a small mishap can loom disastrous.
All this was, predictably, enough to lower a thick pall of depression over the proceedings, at least as I registered them. The season was, in any case, particularly trying, that year. My younger brother, then in his late teens, had met a young woman (A) on his post-high-school wanderings about Europe, where we then lived, and had invited her for xmas. Apparently she had at one point in their short acquaintance been sufficiently intent upon him that he was quite intoxicated with her, but she had become, by the time she arrived in Geneva, some vision out of a fairy tale – a proper bee-atch. She tormented my brother with fake, syrupy, distancing sham friendliness, all the time snubbing him. Meanwhile she showered with a grotesque of affection our pre-teen sister, who gloried in the attention. Eventually my father and mother cottoned onto the weird dynamic, and in any case A was intensely annoying in a wide range of ways. Dad asked me – eh? – if I thought we should ask her to leave. I said that she certainly seemed to be making my brother quite miserable, and I wondered aloud why she would come visit, at all, if she was going to be so weird. I, then back in Geneva after my first year at university in Australia, was miserable, too, in empathy with my brother. I felt his pain, knowing it well both from experience and extensive imagining, and self-infliction.
However, my calculation had become quite delicate, because A had brought along, presumably for protection, a friend, R, and she and I had gravitated into a considerable attraction. We had sat up late, after everyone else had gone to be, reading. Slowly we presumed what would now, in the light of greater experience, seem obvious: that we liked each other. She was big-boned, buxom, Oregonian, and rather Rubenesque, although in a thin-hipped way. She said to me at one point that of course she was beautiful; I had said something that suggested, roundabout, that that was not a burden she had to bear – she was very striking, but in a way that would not qualify her as beautiful, in any conventional way, although soon after that, as even now, I recognized that she was completely correct.
In any case, A soon did depart, fortunately before we had to throw her out. In the process of acting as peacekeeper until she nicked off – again, the Red Cross Knight – I was in part self-interested: I wished to buy a few more days for R, with whom I had reached an understanding that that would be quite delightful. She did stay, and when she returned to the coast of France, where she was studying abroad, we arranged by mail to travel to Florence together, for a week.
We did so. It was lovely, although initially traumatic in the way that even small steps in experience can be to the tender-footed, and -hearted. But overall it was a wonderful time.
So, there you have it. Thank you Jesus. ‘Tis the season to be jolly.
And this year, I have three likely warm and assuring events to attend, with good friends old and new.
But I still hate fuckn xmas.
-----------------
By the way, on the subject of mundane xmas memories, how could I forget that when I was about 8 or 9, I discovered where my mum had hidden the xmas presents (in her laundry linen closet, which always smelled so secure and inviting, so that you wanted to stick your head among the sheets and breathe) and found that they included some books of puzzles and connect-the-dot drawings. I had at those, with no plan – even a vaguely formed one – of how I would cover up the transgression. The books were complete two weeks out from the blessed day.
In fact, I seemed to have discovered the hiding places every year, out of some odd insecurity or apprehension. Fortunately, one year, my father issued a relatively low-key shot across the boughs, and that stopped the behavior cold.
Well, not quite – I took, instead, to getting up ridiculously early on xmas morning, to open all my presents carefully, and then reseal them, only to express appropriate surprise when they were dealt to me again, a couple of hours later, after the execrable xmas mass to which my brothers and I, as appointed “responsible boys,” were drafted as altar boys.
-----------------
Let it be noted here that, after 9 weeks of building up slowly, I am now swimming one mile each day – almost half breaststroke, half backstroke, and just a little freestyle, as I near drown whenever I attempt it, although less and less as I get apparent asthma under better control.
Riki has set a goal of a late-summer “triathlon.” Errr... maybe.
It’s not just the sham of almost all of it – the gross consumerism; the aping of rituals that never existed, or at least not in anything like the form of the mimickry; the extent of the exclusion of so many that xmas entails and inflicts... It’s not even just the absurdity of the whole basis of the event – the notion that this, the world, is the result of God’s becoming Man to save mankind. If this is salvation, or even just a provisional damnation, our gooses are cooked, xmas dinner or not.
Of course, most of the discomforts of the season are merely mundane, as the events unfold within the quotidian. One year, my Mum’s christmas pudding, the centerpiece of the annual meal of togetherness (typically registered in the tension and heartache that is almost inherent in family), was waterlogged – somehow the seal of the boiler was not tight enough. My dad made a big show of saving the day, scooping the sodden mess back into the bowl. “It’ll be fine,” he fatuously declared. Well, at least that was a rare moment of fellow feeling and supportiveness, for him, however unlikely the idea was that there was anything to save. My mum was most downhearted. Ever alert to strife, I had come from the dining room to witness the disappointment. Never mind; at least there was the christmas fruit cake – the ritual nature of the meal would hardly be sustained by skipping the pudding and going straight to the cake, but still...
The cake, of course, was inedible. After years and years of great successes, my mother had somehow omitted to chop the brazil nuts and walnuts before mixing them into the batter, with the result that the cake was rock-hard. It was not even possible to pretend it was edible, although of course I, ever my mother’s Red Cross Knight, made a valiant effort. Even a burned or too-dry cake can be salvaged by trimming or a little butter. My mum wept quietly – when life is hard, even a small mishap can loom disastrous.
All this was, predictably, enough to lower a thick pall of depression over the proceedings, at least as I registered them. The season was, in any case, particularly trying, that year. My younger brother, then in his late teens, had met a young woman (A) on his post-high-school wanderings about Europe, where we then lived, and had invited her for xmas. Apparently she had at one point in their short acquaintance been sufficiently intent upon him that he was quite intoxicated with her, but she had become, by the time she arrived in Geneva, some vision out of a fairy tale – a proper bee-atch. She tormented my brother with fake, syrupy, distancing sham friendliness, all the time snubbing him. Meanwhile she showered with a grotesque of affection our pre-teen sister, who gloried in the attention. Eventually my father and mother cottoned onto the weird dynamic, and in any case A was intensely annoying in a wide range of ways. Dad asked me – eh? – if I thought we should ask her to leave. I said that she certainly seemed to be making my brother quite miserable, and I wondered aloud why she would come visit, at all, if she was going to be so weird. I, then back in Geneva after my first year at university in Australia, was miserable, too, in empathy with my brother. I felt his pain, knowing it well both from experience and extensive imagining, and self-infliction.
However, my calculation had become quite delicate, because A had brought along, presumably for protection, a friend, R, and she and I had gravitated into a considerable attraction. We had sat up late, after everyone else had gone to be, reading. Slowly we presumed what would now, in the light of greater experience, seem obvious: that we liked each other. She was big-boned, buxom, Oregonian, and rather Rubenesque, although in a thin-hipped way. She said to me at one point that of course she was beautiful; I had said something that suggested, roundabout, that that was not a burden she had to bear – she was very striking, but in a way that would not qualify her as beautiful, in any conventional way, although soon after that, as even now, I recognized that she was completely correct.
In any case, A soon did depart, fortunately before we had to throw her out. In the process of acting as peacekeeper until she nicked off – again, the Red Cross Knight – I was in part self-interested: I wished to buy a few more days for R, with whom I had reached an understanding that that would be quite delightful. She did stay, and when she returned to the coast of France, where she was studying abroad, we arranged by mail to travel to Florence together, for a week.
We did so. It was lovely, although initially traumatic in the way that even small steps in experience can be to the tender-footed, and -hearted. But overall it was a wonderful time.
So, there you have it. Thank you Jesus. ‘Tis the season to be jolly.
And this year, I have three likely warm and assuring events to attend, with good friends old and new.
But I still hate fuckn xmas.
-----------------
By the way, on the subject of mundane xmas memories, how could I forget that when I was about 8 or 9, I discovered where my mum had hidden the xmas presents (in her laundry linen closet, which always smelled so secure and inviting, so that you wanted to stick your head among the sheets and breathe) and found that they included some books of puzzles and connect-the-dot drawings. I had at those, with no plan – even a vaguely formed one – of how I would cover up the transgression. The books were complete two weeks out from the blessed day.
In fact, I seemed to have discovered the hiding places every year, out of some odd insecurity or apprehension. Fortunately, one year, my father issued a relatively low-key shot across the boughs, and that stopped the behavior cold.
Well, not quite – I took, instead, to getting up ridiculously early on xmas morning, to open all my presents carefully, and then reseal them, only to express appropriate surprise when they were dealt to me again, a couple of hours later, after the execrable xmas mass to which my brothers and I, as appointed “responsible boys,” were drafted as altar boys.
-----------------
Let it be noted here that, after 9 weeks of building up slowly, I am now swimming one mile each day – almost half breaststroke, half backstroke, and just a little freestyle, as I near drown whenever I attempt it, although less and less as I get apparent asthma under better control.
Riki has set a goal of a late-summer “triathlon.” Errr... maybe.
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