It’s the Most Horrible Time…

Of the Year

NOTE: The following originally ran in the online magazine Covey Club several years ago. I think some of you are sick of me complaining about the holidays. But I persist in my message both to console others who suffer greatly during the holidays, and to gently but firmly ask that those of you who do enjoy the holidays not make it your personal mission to try to force those of us who do not to change our ways. No thank you.

Christmas in America is like the desert sun. Regarding the latter, you can take as many measures as you’d like—from slathering on SPF 500 sunscreen to having a beach umbrella surgically implanted in your skull— but ultimately the heat and light will suck you dry. Regarding the former, in my experience, no matter what techniques one employs, one can never fully outrun or block out what I count as the single greatest, most reliable annual nightmare in our culture. So well known am I among my friends for my holiday loathing that often their December rituals include checking in on my mental state.

Perhaps the only thing I find as annoying as boisterous tales of Christmas joy are stories with Grinchian underpinnings, accounts in which people such as myself are at long last convinced to embrace the festivities. Let the record reflect this: I will never, ever, ever buy into Christmas.

I have my reasons. The main one is this—Christmas, without fail, triggers my c-PTSD, a condition I suffer courtesy of a wildly abusive childhood. The everyday tension my eight siblings and I endured living with a mentally ill parent at the helm ramped up every Thanksgiving. My father’s state worsened as he began his slide into what I now know (and also experience) as Seasonal Affective Disorder. Invariably, by Christmas Eve he was explosive.

Adding to the stress? We all wanted stuff. How could we not? Because that is what Christmas in America is about for damn near everyone: creating gluttonous lists which in turn foster unrealistic expectations which then yield hopes dashed and the attendant disappointment. Even if we hadn’t been living below poverty level our desires could not have been fulfilled. But poor we were, and that just made things worse.

The emotional fallout of a childhood riddled with Christmas torture means that every year, no matter how old I am, an unstoppable gloom descends upon me beginning in late November, and crescendos on December 25th. Often, I lock myself away and cry.

Compounding my distress are unbidden recollections of how my pain and my attitude ruined more than a few Christmases for others, chief among my unintentional victims my son, a man now, who, I am embarrassed and sad to say, had to endure my yearly breakdowns as surely as I had to endure my father’s. When he was little, I’d try to just skip the whole thing, rationalizing that we were neither religious nor did I wish to lie to him about that fake entity, Santa, too often trotted out to coerce children into “being good.” But then, feeling guilty for depriving him of what his peers had, sometimes I’d make a mad dash to try to give him some semblance of Christmas, these sorry efforts never enough to mask my depression.

As the decades wore on, I endeavored with genuine effort to ease my December discomfort. I discovered that traveling to foreign countries where I did not speak the language and where the holiday is less blatantly commercial worked relatively well. In particular I enjoyed several Christmases in a small mountain village in Mexico where people don’t have much money at all and the focus really is on celebrating the arrival of the Baby Jesus. Their beautiful rituals never lured me back to the religion I abandoned at nineteen, but I appreciated that the focus was on the alleged original point of the day instead of crass commercialism.

One year, I was lucky enough to spend Christmas in Paris with my then-boyfriend, an Israeli. Being Jewish, he didn’t give a rat’s ass about the holiday or trying to get me to enjoy it. We partook in his cultural tradition of getting Chinese takeout. During that time, so relieved was I to be so far away from the over-the-top celebrations back home, I didn’t even recoil when some dude dressed up as Père Noël hugged me at the Eiffel Tower.

For a couple of years, I combatted my angst by utilizing social media to mock both the holiday and myself. I took selfies standing before Christmas trees and other symbols of the day, like gigantic gaudy inflatable snowmen and obscene displays of light. In these photos, I emulated Edvard Munch’s The Scream, simultaneously embracing and parodying my disdain. Sometimes this helped. Other times I’d find myself wasting precious time arguing with commenters who urged me to quit being such a sourpuss and “just cheer up.”

Once, wildly affronted by a nativity scene on display at the State Capitol building in Austin, I managed to convince a dozen or so friends to join me in protest. A popular musician friend agreed to lead us in song. We assembled at the appointed hour only to find the crèche had vanished. Had government officials caught wind of our plan and ceded? Nope. Turns out it was the day the capitol was closing down for the holidays and they simply had put the decorations away. Undeterred, I scooped a poinsettia from the trash, placed it where the manger had been, and declared this to be a symbol for us to rally against.

There we stood in a circle, singing John Lennon’s Imagine. I took comfort in our solidarity but also noted the irony. Passersby surely mistook us as run-of-the-mill carolers, there to celebrate Christmas, not rail against the mixing of church and state.

And then finally, last year, I stumbled into my best solution to date. The foundation for this fix was laid several summers ago, during a broiling Texas July, when I received a message on Facebook from a woman I had never met in person. She explained she was dying of cancer and had very little time left to live. Chemo kept her in a fog that denied her the pleasures of her beloved knitting. Furthermore, her third grandchild was about to be born. It was her dying wish that I, whom she knew also to be an avid knitter, make a Christmas stocking for that baby, one to match the stockings she had made for his siblings. My desire to live a life of service overrode the instant recoil I felt at the prospect of taking on this holiday-themed project.

As I knitted, I noticed the stocking looked rather odd. I double and triple checked the pattern. I was following it precisely. Still, the result was weirdly scaled. I sent it anyway, along with a note saying if she agreed it looked funky, I could try again. I received a reply full of gratitude and clarification—the chemo fog had resulted in error-laden instructions and she was so sorry, but could I try again. Which is how I came to dismantle the original stocking and rework it until I got it right. I’m happy to say I was able to complete this task shortly before she died. A few months later, on Christmas Eve, her daughter-in-law sent me a picture of the newborn snug in that stocking. And I wept.

But I did not, thank you very much, allow this to turn me into a believer ready to give Scrooge a run for the money in the attitude change department. As noted, I have entirely too much baggage to ever go that far. Still, it was the spirit of that project that spurred me to undertake another knitting-related cure last Christmas. I’d been volunteering for a while at a recovery center for low-income addicts and offered to spend Christmas Day giving knitting lessons to anyone interested.

I mentioned on social media that I would be doing this. My fellow knitters were so stoked that they began donating supplies. Tons of yarn and needles poured in. My friend Denise made beautiful project bags to distribute. I knew I seemed like the selfless heroine of the day for “giving up” my holiday to help newly sober addicts. But that was not my goal, nor was it the truth. The act was far more selfish than selfless and, as in a tear-inducing Lifetime Network movie, you better believe I received far more than I gave that Christmas day. How grateful I was for a distraction from all the holiday hubbub going on outside the walls of that center. By the time I was done teaching, the day was nearly over. Such sweet relief.

Christmas will always be my personal desert sun, blinding me, cracking me, compelling me to run for cover. It will never be a minor inconvenience, a thing some still wrongly think I can simply ho-ho-ho my way into enjoying. The holidays will never be a time for joy for me. But at least I have come to understand that vocal protests—even when issued in an allegedly humorous fashion—aren’t serving me. Instead I will continue to seek and explore the distractions to get me through the day.

NOTES:

Thank you so much for being here. If you aren’t yet a paid subscriber I hope you’ll make the leap soon. That’s a $5 monthly commitment on your end. Such a bargain! You can also help by sharing my substack with others.

For those of you who groove on the holidays, I wish you much joy. For those of you who are on Team Uncle Spike when it comes to holidays, I wish you much peace.

I’ll be back next week with a brand spanking new installment to wrap up the year.

Oh, and if you haven’t yet, please buy my new book, Grok This, Bitch. $10 gets you an e-copy, $30 gets you a signed print copy shipped right to your door. Venmo me: @spike-gillespie and please include your email/snail mail address. Thanks!