...
Another holiday I'm not celebrating. I stopped doing them a long time ago, but every time one comes around it strikes me I'm not celebrating it more this time than ever before. And Christmas is [may always have been] one of the most urgent to overhaul holidays ever devised.
I was way into it as a very little girl. It stopped being groovy by the time I was ten and every year for the next fifteen or so I tried harder and harder and harder to make it wonderful. I have tried to get back into it a few times for the sake of little girls and boys and a few times for little big boys. I tried getting magnificent gifts for everyone I loved. I tried making magnificent gifts for everyone I loved. I tried so hard to convince everyone to stop making themselves crazy and run away to some mountain retreat or other together to just be together without all the strain and frenzy and grudging accommodations for others' weirdness.
I ended up always preferring the loooong walk on the beach alone to all of it.
I have been spending this season contemplating the hells we make for each other, the multifarious ways friends, families, lovers, strangers trap us into the wrong lives, the ways we never get to the part about making a better world. I don't like the attendant feelings of defeat and frustration and alienation, so I mostly drop them as soon as they come up. This year I had a short telephone conversation with my mother, and that pretty much ended up nailing me into place for most of a day, but mostly I just ignore that crap when it comes up. It's only there to drag me back into it.
That does not work.
I have worn out the t-shirt.
.
