Each year, in an effort to bolster potential commercial gains during the shopping season, retailers roll out the holiday displays well before Thanksgiving. (This year I saw things at my local Target even before Halloween!) So why is it that the selling of Christmas comes earlier every year, yet my own spirit of Christmas stumbles in the door with increasing lateness? A seasonal paradox? Possibly. More likely, I think, is that I'm suffering from a spiritual desensitization -- holiday paradise lost.
It's something akin to holiday lead poisoning. I've spent almost 30 years of my life eating delicious Christmas-y paint chips, and now I've developed adverse mental effects.
Let me illustrate;: I used to get myself in a jolly mood by listening to Christmas Carols. This just doesn't work for me anymore due to an occupational hazard of being a professional musician: it's really hard to avoid "caroling gigs" where you get paid to go and sing for private parties or at local malls and festivals. I did a whole run of these starting in my later college days, and after about six straight years of it, my enthusiasm was spent -- and so was any deep emotional tie to many of the season's carols and hymns. (Extra note here: for three years I did caroling at the Victoria's Secret corporate headquarters and saw exactly zero hot models in holiday getup. I might be a little extra jaded because of this.) Thankfully the emotional bonds have gradually started to heal over the last several years, but even so, it's pretty much been Christmas Eve before singing carols has done me any measure of good. I've tried to offset this with "non-traditional" versions of songs, like buying holiday albums by Barenaked Ladies or jazz artists, but that experiment hasn't yielded the most positive results either. Although it did bring forth the fruit of finding a $4.99 Christmas album by Air Supply, which is another kind of magic altogether.
The acts of decorating tree and home likewise fail to fill me with delight. Christmas specials and movies on television leave a saccharine after-taste. Drawing parallels to A Christmas Carol becomes something of an obvious point -- guy has Christmas spirit, said spirit withers and fades, guy gets visited by other spirits and has a spiritual revelation (surprisingly without the help of alcoholic spirits). My condition certainly isn't a modern retelling of that story, but it may very well be that to recharge my seasonal batteries, I'm going to have to get seriously Dickensian.
A good friend recently observed that "nobody does Christmas like the English." Damn straight. One of the most enduring images the 20th century American Christmas is that of 19th century Victorian England. History paints with a broad brush, but we loved the idea of snow-covered cobblestones, the brisk air blowing through the candle-lit streets, the carolers (although these are the kind of carolers that sang to collect money for charity, not to see Victoria's Secret models), and of course all those gentlemen dressed in top hats and scarves. It's all about mood.
The problem with mood is that it can be broken. In our Christmas house we've got that wonderful notion of Victorian Christmas and its younger brother, Norman Rockwell Christmas (who can bring to mind everything from 5th Avenue in Manhattan to the adorably crying child in Santa's lap). These two holiday personas are exactly what we all want, but suddenly here comes commercial Christmas, who is the relation who always gets really drunk and ruins the mood by spewing bitter comments about the goings on. But that's not nearly as bad as the recent addition of Politically Correct Christmas, who is so uptight that nobody has any fun for fear of making waves. Then there’s the Christmas Pundit, who so loudly complains that no one is paying attention to Victorian and Rockwell that everyone just wants to give up and go home. So in an effort to escape all of this madness, we often find the best thing is to turn on the TV and find out which channel is airing A Christmas Story, because if there's one thing that we still appreciate, it's laughing at a leg-shaped lamp an unending litany of "you'll shoot your eye out." Even the traditionalist Christmas pundit -- the one who complains that the TV is on instead of the family interacting -- will sit and appreciate watching this movie.
It's a propaganda problem in that too many people are trying to sell Christmas in too many ways and discount it in too many others. Christmas in the modern era has become a house full of dysfunctional people. (Granted, you could make the case that Christmas has been about houses full of dysfunctional people since 4 B.C. but nowadays it's loud dysfunctional people arguing about pie.)
Those of us that need that grounded feeling of something like a Victorian Christmas to get us in the spirit find it harder and harder to navigate these times. Somehow we've got to isolate that one peaceful, wonderful moment on Christmas Eve where it all comes together, a snow globe moment, and carry it with us back through the month of December without it being jostled and broken. No more eager retailers, no more speaking quietly of Christmas to avoid offending others. Let's get back to basics. Christmas can only truly be about what we personally want it to be -- not what everyone else wants it to be. If you stop buying into somebody else's vision of Christmas and find your own, that’s where you'll find a rekindled feeling for the season.
If that doesn't work… well, there are three spirits over here that would like a word with you.
