’Tis the Season(al Affective Disorder)
Why the Holiday Season and Winter is a Time for Me to Cope
There is a sign, on southbound Route 9D in Beacon, that features a Brad Pitt-looking Joseph tending to a post-partum Mary and Baby Jesus that says, “Keep Christ in Christmas.” That sign is perhaps a byproduct of a certain cable news channel’s once white-hot “War on Christmas,” a nonmilitary campaign still fueling the fantasy among its fear-based, geriatric viewers that dark, secular forces aim to degrade Christmas and strip it of its true spirit. Meanwhile this bogus “war” ultimately just moves Buicks and My Pillows while stoking the Christmas spirit of turbocapitalism and grievance. (Perhaps the greater irony, however, is how millions of self-identifying Christians co-signed on a guy who isn’t just an objectively substandard Christian — he’s a literal perfect human manifestation of every single one of The Seven Deadly Sins.)
What’s ironic for me, however, is that there are inevitably days in December when I wish there WAS an actual War on Christmas. The kind of operation where NO options — not even nuclear — are taken off the table. And that’s because The Holiday Season is my most challenging time of year.
For me, Christmas and winter peaked around 1977, perhaps the last year I fully believed in Santa Claus. I can still conjure up the thrill of savagely unwrapping a Stretch Armstrong — a gel-filled wrestler whose arms and legs could be stretched clear across the room. Also, I just can’t recall ever feeling cold at that age. I loved sledding with my brothers, Francis and Matthew, catching air as we raced down the successive hills of Paterson’s Eastside Park. And when a mammoth blizzard blanketed the Greater Metropolitan Area, canceling school for nearly a week, my brothers and I built an actual igloo that you could crawl into — our first piece of real estate that a predatory lender unfortunately refinanced at nine-and-five-eighths, only to have the whole thing melt.
In the meantime, the Holiday Season and winter have delivered diminishing returns. While I know how to ski and snowboard (at least I did twenty years ago) I’ve never had a religious experience doing either sport, which ultimately felt more like an expensive and uncomfortable exercise in trying and failing to look cool, out in the cold, while further applying traffic. (To be fair, I’ve only ever skied on the East Coast, and believe those skiers who have come to see the Face of God while schlooshing down a foot of powder in Utah.) Meanwhile, I contend with depression that comes and goes like the clouds, although its level and frequency spike during the nasty, brutish and short days of Winter, which means that I experience Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). To make matters worse, I unfortunately possess a low tolerance for the schmaltzy, repetitive music of the Holiday Season. (Back when I ran my old beach sharehouse, I actually implemented a Banned Songs List. It only included a dozen-odd tracks but doing this helped protect my sanity from having to hear “Three Little Birds” and “Margaritaville” every single day. So once we’re in December, I’m already contending with toxic levels of exposure to “Jingle Bell Rock.”)
So the Holiday Season, for me, is a marathon. I generally start off strong with Thanksgiving, despite all of the Black Friday buzz. (And why can’t we instead have signs insisting that we “Keep Thanks in Thanksgiving?”) But once we’re in December, there are days when I’m hit with a punishing combo in which I wake up in chemically negative territory on a dark, overcast day. Aside from feeling exhausted, weak and miserable — as though I’m trudging through a foot of cold mud —my complex autopilots begin to fail, I can’t find things, and then the prospect of performing medium and even small tasks can feel overwhelming. Once upon a time, I’d attempt to combat these ill feelings with the very weapons of the Holiday Season itself — food and drink. But this is a bad idea that once resulted in my logging on to Facebook to “Mark Myself Safe” after washing down an entire wheel of Epoisses cheese and a baguette with a bottle of Cabernet Franc.
My saving grace, learned after years of contention, is that such days just need to be ridden out. These are terrible days for making big decisions, despite my temptation to try to change my mood with a bold move. (A reflex that I suspect may be responsible for a good number of spontaneous military enlistments, marriage proposals and poorly-considered tattoos.) Instead, I’ve learned that these are great days to clean off the filters on my heat pumps, or balance my checking account — tasks that require little thought and bring order and then allow me to feel productive. And then nothing better combats my SAD than making myself march up Mount Beacon, as fast as I can, just before sunset. Perhaps the only part of Winter that I love is the more intense light, so aside from delivering a stunning view on a clear day, I will come down from that mountain feeling different and better than when I went up.
Also, there are some rarer Holiday songs that I actually love hearing. Songs like Band Aid’s “Do They Know it’s Christmas,” the inadvertent British birth father to “We are the World,” a song that I couldn’t be more grateful to have literally not heard, even once, this entire millennium. Another is Darlene Love’s “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home.)” That song’s intro and drum fill always gives me a lift while somehow never getting crisp. (The way I feel hearing these songs makes me wonder if this is how other people respond to ALL Holiday music.) And then every year my downstairs neighbor, Kathy, helps me make a vat of cassoulet, a southern French bean casserole loaded with duck and kielbasa (that I make and smoke myself) and that I give to friends. And then, THEN, I love New Year’s, both Eve and Day, which marks the end, and so my survival, of the whole damn thing. Nevertheless, the bulk of Winter remains and I power through January by planning a scuba-diving trip somewhere warm in the beginning of February, and then being in the sun and the ocean tide me over until March, when I then actively kid myself that March isn’t just another mostly cold and miserable month. Only once the clocks change back — allowing the sun to run around outside until a more reasonable hour — I’m feeling Spring and dreaming about Summer and being covered in the detritus from a dozen and a half blue crabs that I’ve banged open with a mallet and washed down with non-craft lager on the boardwalk in Ocean City, Maryland.
So far this year, I’m doing pretty OK. Although I’ll be spending a good part of January out in the cold, overseeing the replacement of the windows and doors at the three-family I’m renovating over in Newburgh, where a mason will be installing steel headers and then cutting nine-foot openings in the brick for French-door assemblies. (I’d love to have done this work during the Fall, but those windows and doors — in a sign of the supply-chain times — had a six-month backorder and won’t arrive for a few more weeks.) Also, I’ve been working, with decent success, another new trick: Whenever I find myself even driving past the neighborhood of bemoaning Winter, I think about the Ukrainians. I think about those resolute and determined people without power, freezing and suffering for the sins of The Biggest Asshole on the Planet. Their sacrifice bolsters Democracy everywhere (while delivering a swift kick in the nuts to Authoritarianism) and we are in debt to their courage. Because there’s a war going on in this country, too. And perhaps the most supreme irony is that “War on Christmas” is a decent shorthand when you consider that the traditional spirit of Christmas — compassion; charity; goodwill towards all — are ultimately what’s on the line.
Unlike the viewers of a certain cable news channel, however, I’m not worried about the survival and endurance of Christmas, which anyone can plainly see kicks ass up and down the calendar like no other holiday we’ve got. As for our war, we will win so long as those of us who stand on the side of Tolerance, Democracy, and the Rule of Law can manage to Keep Christ in Christians.
OK. I’m off to hike Mount Beacon—as soon as I remember where I left my boots.
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