I take long “walks” in my wheelchair most days – long as in 5, 6, 8. 10 miles. Yes, in a wheelchair. True story.
People seem happy to see me – inspired maybe, surprised mostly. They say hello, good morning, nod, wave, sometimes comment, offer encouragement. Guy in a wheelchair, out here doing this? Show some love! Way to go, guy! I don’t mind. I smile, greet them back. People out here, enjoying this wonderful trail through the woods along the river? Way to go, people!
A few times lately it’s been “Merry Christmas!” I’m always surprised. “Oh yeah. Christmas. Merry. Right.” Seems the Merry doesn’t still go ‘round so much for me nowadays – hasn’t for several years, actually. For me, that’s not just 2020, when the Merry didn’t go ‘round for hardly anybody except the extremely annoying, apparently excused from reality few. I’ll leave them unnamed.
Christmas for me used to be… well, Christmas. I was self-righteous about keeping the commercialism out of it and Christ in it – also seriously deluded. Back then the kids were growing up and I had a career that paid (remember those?), so I loved to pull off commercial extravaganzas. Like the year the entire American Girl Dolls assemblage – clothes, furniture, stuff, stuff, and more stuff — flooded out from under the tree and across the living room, and no one had seen it coming.
I loved the art of Christmas – especially the places that had the quality gifts and the best gift wrappers – the way they filled their beautiful shopping bags – the big ones, with the handles – with works of art in ribbons and bows. Plus the lights – nothing visible from space, just enough cheer – and the Solstice bonfires and all the greenery and goodies and the you name it. If you’ve done it yourself, you know.
And yes, we kept Christ in those Christmases. Christ was still the reason for the season – observed in everything from schmaltzy bedtime stories and movies to the annual stately Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from Cambridge and the packed candlelight Christmas Eve service in a church thick with incense. But then the light started dimming, eventually faded and died –the way potted plants die – not tragic so much as well, that’s over. Things end, we move on.
A couple days ago, I was trying to remember when exactly the Christmas Merry started to quit going ‘round. It think it was somewhere around the time we painted the basement and bought some mountain lodge furniture and a cool rug and put up surround sound and a wall TV and it was going to be a place for friends to hang out. Nice idea but a couple poetry slams and that was about it. But the first year we had it, I thought wow, I can watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade, so I camped out in one of those comfy leather mountain lodge chairs and watched it, and there was plenty of Merry the whole Christmas season that year. But then a year later it was a little less oh wow, and by the third year it was, hey wait, this is just a big commercial launch – one long extended infomercial in praise of buy, buy, buy. Creeping cynicism. Peter Pan finally starting to grow up.
That would have been… what?… 2009 or so? Right after the crash of 2007-2008, which I had observed by making possibly the most badly-timed, badly-conceived, and badly-executed Go-For-It, Live Your Dreams! launch in the history of life. (But I’m giving myself way too much credit – lots of people have of course done seriously dumb things in the name of living the dream. No way I cornered that market.) My big leap into dreamland bombed, of course. I deserved it. But the good news is, it changed everything forever. Mostly it changed me, But until we all had enough space to be philosophical or resigned about it, the family became post-Crash Okies, rambling toward being poor with all our belongings piled in the back, toward me being disabled with a crappy neurodegenerative… thing… and all of us trying to figure out what happened back there. It was somewhere around then that the Merry quit going ‘round. And it was also about then Christ either fell out of the back of the truck or we didn’t wait for him at a rest stop, and either way it took a long time to notice.
It’s hard to explain how it took 20 years to go from being a Christian – not just a “nominal” one (as we used to say, arrogant as hell) but a true believer hallelujah! – to an Atheist. Or to explain how one day I just sort of noticed that’s what happened and I was just kind of well okay then, would you look at that, I guess that’s what happened, and I guess I’m good with it. The Merry was gone, and so was Christ, and then came a few years when everything church went from normal to cringeworthy to annoying to revolting. I can’t explain it, but I’d see billboards and marquees and hear conversations, and I would shudder. Not quite gag, but my whole self would cringe and tense up and shudder. Writing that, I can just hear what the faith I left would have to say about it.
Fast forward to this year, to Christmas 2020, which you would have thought would have been the most run-screaming-from-the-room Christmas ever. But then – way more surprising than hearing “Merry Christmas!” from random strangers on the bike path – it wasn’t. Christmas 2020 was the year the Merry came back. Who could have seen that coming? Not me. But it did — Christmas without the baby Jesus in a manger – God the Father’s great idea for how to introduce his son to the world by putting an infant in a cattle feed trough, so we could all celebrate the maudlin reality of our crappy lives and prepare ourselves for what signing up for that whole story was going to be like. Also no shepherds or wise men from afar, being uncanny and insightful, and especially no angels trumpeting (have you noticed how hard it is these days to use the world “t-r-u-m-p” or any word that has “t-r-u-m-p” in it?) one of the biggest lies ever told (the Bible has a lot of those in it):
“Peace on Earth, Good will to Man!”
Seriously. We still get that every year.
And since you can’t go anymore in a pandemic, almost none of that endless and endlessly wretched Christmas music everywhere you go, except for where you can’t avoid going, like the grocery store, but especially not like Starbucks, which starts its Christmas soundtrack of dismal creativity on exactly November 1st so I have to boycott it for two months every year (not like that’s so hard to do). I could rant on, but I’ll struggle to overcome.
And I thought I was over the post-Christian shudder reflex. Maybe not.
Anyway, Christmas without any of that.
This year there was just some cheese and fruit on Christmas Eve, and fresh donuts Christmas morning, simple gifts opened and shared digitally on both occasions to account for different time zones here and on the other side of the globe. And then on Christmas Eve there was Klaus, which I read in my Medium feed on Christmas morning we shouldn’t have watched because it’s racist because there’s a hangman’s noose in it. (I’m sorry, I get it, but nooses weren’t always an icon for racism. Humans have been doing horrible things like hanging each other for a long time – a lot of them in the name of Christ.)
And somehow, after choking back the tears and loving the movie and then heading for bed without visions of sugar plums exactly, more like a sense of maybe pretty lights once a year in during the dark days around the Winter Solstice might not be such a bad idea… and then waking up on Christmas morning and finding that the Merry had come back.
I never saw it coming. Any more than I saw the big Follow Your Dreams crash coming. Any more than I saw 20 years of losing my faith coming.
Today is “Boxing Day” – and if you’re non-British like me the first time you heard about it you were like, what?! — so “Merry Christmas” is over, and I’m grateful that there’s a new Merry on the scene: Merry without the shudder. Maybe Merry like that will be okay next year – which is surely another year in another time in another life. If another Christmas manages to arrive, which these days I’d rate about 50-50.
Merry like that.
Iconoclast 