The Ghosts of Christmases Past
Having reached an age where, when I think back on the Christmases of my youth, it’s somewhat stunning to consider all the ghosts that would of necessity be gathered around the dinner table were I to try to assemble them again this Christmas. More than half that original contingent of beloved (and sometimes slightly less than beloved) family members are now gone. Of course, new faces in the form of children and spouses have arrived to take their places, but the sense of growing absence tends to become difficult to ignore.
There’s a common metaphor for life of keeping a campfire lit on a beach at night. All of us around this fire eventually wander off into the outer darkness. Before we go, however, many welcome new, young people to warm by the fire-light and learn to tend it. The tending of this campfire has gone on since our species first showed up on this quite weird space rock.
Christmas in childhood is—for most kids whose families celebrate it—a time of almost uninterrupted glee: time off from school, expectations of gifts promising limitless awesomeness, snow and snowballs (where it’s snowy), decorating the tree, whimsical tales of elves and Santa and flying reindeer, classic songs that have not yet grown annoying, the orgy of unwrapping stacks of wildly promising goodies on Christmas morning.
This all endures right up until the common childhood hangover that is Christmas Day itself, after the gifts have all been opened and proven themselves to be just more stuff, and all the magic has evaporated like some nocturnal, candy-floss daydream exposed to the harsh winter sun.
Then, years begin to go by. Then decades go by.
Ghosts of Christmas Present
Till today, where you start thinking of going bye-bye yourself.
It’s hard not to notice those gathered around the metaphorical campfire are having a harder time these days keeping it lit, choosing to remain rather than striking off into the inky outer darkness, or enthusiastically welcoming new people to it. The game, after all, has got to be worth the candle—or the campfire—and the game is proving not nearly as enjoyable or inviting as most had hoped.
My favourite Christmas special has always been ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’, though it’s only as I’ve gotten older that I began to truly appreciate Charles Schulz’s genius in building the story around Charlie Brown’s inexplicable (certainly to children) depression during the Christmas season.
It’s well understood the holiday season for adults runs concomitant with major increases in depression, stress, loneliness, and general gloom. This tends to be papered over in the culture inadequately and vaguely hysterically with songs and vows of “good cheer”. Each Christmas I find slightly more difficult than the last to merely survive, and the threat of some sort of major depressive episode hangs like a bleak spectre over the increasingly forced and hollow festivities. You can even find lists of suggestions for making it through as a lonely person, which more and more people all the time are finding themselves to be. Here’a quick cheat sheet:
Put Something to Look Forward to on Your Calendar
Even Brief Conversations Have Important Benefits
Invite Others Into Your Life
Enjoy Your Community’s Holiday Offerings
Call or Text People You Care About
Volunteering Can Change Your Perspective
Create New Solo Traditions
In an age rife with deaths of despair, seasonal gloom isn’t merely a curious phenomenon but is rather a clear threat to one’s health, or life. I received the news yesterday that one of my (college-aged) daughter’s closest friends killed herself, at age 26, in Northern California. This young woman, let’s call her Kay, I knew to be a kind and sensitive artist (a painter). She was also extremely poor, which is hardly unusual for a Californian American twenty-something artist these days.
Still, I found myself getting quite angry when I heard the news, remembering this quiet and reliable and sweet person and her tiny room in a communal house, who uncomplainingly spent weeks helping my daughter make her films, doing every sort of gopher job one can do on a set. And all of it for nothing, just to help. This church-mouse poor artist, aged 26, could find no hopeful place for herself in her culture. You would be hard-pressed to find any culture more actively hostile to gentle, unassuming young artists than America.
The cruelty of hitting young people with both living costs they cannot hope to meet and an awareness of the obvious lack of a habitable future in which to one day have families of their own is wholly immoral, not to mention an unreasonable and unacceptable burden to heft onto their shoulders. Neoliberalism is designed to duck responsibility for this scandalous state of affairs in two ways: first, it’s your fault for wrecking the planet, kid, and second, capitalist realism insists there is no other way to live than this, which is self-evidently the greatest possible way even if suicidal losers don’t get that. So find some way to survive it—physically and psychically—or die. Your choice.
What are deaths of despair other than deaths from an excess of broken or missing relationships? Relationships are the first thing thrown overboard in this culture when the merest hint of advantage appears to offer a more promising path (typically, to more stuff). If once those gathered around that roaring metaphorical campfire typically included many dozens of people you could expect to spend your life with, now the campfire you warm yourself by is meagre, dim, and almost entirely unattended. Often, there is you, the outer darkness, and the flickering embers.
Forebodings of Christmas Future
There is a widespread, near-ubiquitous sense we live in dark times. Perhaps part of this has to do with how crazy the “optimistic” have come to seem when they speak of the future. Ultra-billionaire Jeff Bezos posits a future where a trillion humans “live” in huge, rotating cylinders in space. They might visit Earth once in awhile for a vacation, as presumably the planet would be entirely gentrified and priced out of sight for the teeming hordes of humans left spinning pointlessly in space.
Bezos very obviously believes any old place with some air, food, potable water, and survivable temperatures makes for a fine habitat for humans. Just look at any Amazon warehouse and the desperate, miserable humans employed within to see how much Bezos thinks about the experience of being alive for anyone other than himself. That these trillion cylinder-dwellers would be severed of their final, most fundamental relationship of all: to the earth they grew out of, never occurs to the likes of Bezos, to whom the lack of such would represent a kind of inscrutable absurdity. “What do you need that for? Here is your food, and your water bowl…”
And it was from a world overwhelmed by this sort of thinking that gentle Kay, the young artist who found no place for herself here, quietly stole away, into the outer darkness. Not even waiting for Christmas Day.