The Designated Celebrant: Confessions of a Holiday Hater

December 18, 2012:

It’s a week before Christmas.  Since we’re a mixed religion family and Hanukkah has passed, my kids have opened most of their holiday booty from my husband and me and the rest of the family.  I tried to remain neutral about the holidays, waiting with no fixed expectations for joy, peace, wonder, gratitude, or any of the other feelings that Christmas, Hanukkah, and even Thanksgiving are supposed to bring.  The holidays are tough in one way because my father died 12 years ago on Christmas.  But also, ever since I became a parent, the holidays have become less about waiting for those feelings to wash over me and more about facilitating them in other people.  A decade of being the designated matriarch at the holidays has taken its toll.

And now, a break to buy a cake and invite people over for my mom’s 65th birthday!  (and feign enthusiasm for it all)

December 27, 2012:

Now that it’s a couple of days after Christmas, I want to just say, I never want to feel this way again at the holidays.  No, not “depressed” exactly.  More like enervated before the whole season begins.  My quickie diagnosis of the situation is a form of pre-PTSD, where I remember the ghosts of Christmas past — piles of instantly forgettable, breakable tsotchkes; neverending festivities; the obligations and the rushing around — before the current year’s celebration actually begins.  This year was painless compared to some in recent memory: I didn’t have to send any Mafiosa-style emails begging deadbeat parents for money for a class gift; I went to about half of the normal number of social gatherings; my holiday shopping was done on December 5.

But the memories keep interfering.  Sense memories like these:

of having been the class room parent sending out pleading emails to other parents, begging them to send in their contribution to the teachers’ gift;

of rushing back and forth from a veterinary clinic with my blind, dying dog, stopping off at the mall to speed-shop for small gifts for my kids’ teachers and babysitter and the many others I don’t want to forget: a uniquely schizophrenic holiday experience that might make a poignant short story but really sucks when you’re just getting through it;

of losing track of how many random little toys and books I already bought for my own kids, and where I might have put them between July (when they were on sale!) and December;

of trying not to forget to find some small thoughtful gesture (a cerebral bestseller? a sporting goods gift certificate? a donation to a charity?) for all five of the grandparents, the uncles and aunts;

of racking my brain to figure out something that both makes my spouse smile and yet not dread the credit card bill;

of making myself insane wondering who/what I forgot.

It’s as though I am the Emma Thompson character in Love, Actually, if she were a person who stole time from her writing to be the perfect bourgeois housewife instead.  At times like these I find myself in a Brookstone or a L’Occitane, muttering under my breath, I live the opposite of the life of the mind, goddammit!  I live the opposite of the life of the mind!  (I assume it’s not audible.)

This year I think I developed a stress-related rash between Thanksgiving and Hanukkah.  Either that, or I am allergic to urchin or some other form of sushi I don’t normally eat but decided to try on my madcap 48-hour trip to Washington, DC, going along with my spouse on a business trip in the hopes of squeezing a date in there somewhere.  Or maybe I’m dying of a rare form of cancer that leaves funny little chicken-pox-like welts all over the trunk.  I would have had it checked out at the doctor, but I had no time to call the doctor during business hours, let alone go to an appointment.  Every time I go to the doctor lately (be it endocrinologist or gynecologist), I end up commiserating with her (it’s always a her, always a woman about my age, with kids my kids’ age) about how un-doable I find this whole “being a parent” thing to be.

So here I am in Hawaii, and it’s really gorgeous and quiet and I run every day (an hourlong ritual I call “running my crazies out”).  I love it here — it’s one of the few places in the world where my hapa haole looks fit right in.  And it’s taken over three days not to feel nuts/drained/ungrateful/like a ditz who only thinks about hand lotion.  There was a time when I truly loved the holidays.  I grew up celebrating Christmas in a Swedish American style, with a bunch of corny cartoons and schmaltzy holiday specials, tons of butter cookies made by my grandfather and mother, and presents under our home-grown evergreen on Christmas Eve.  I am not so foolish as to think I can feel like a child again.  I just want it not to suck.

It might have sucked a little less if the horrific Newtown, Connecticut, shooting had not occurred shortly before Christmas.  I have a first grade child and a fourth grade child, and that someone else’s troubled child could walk into a school and kill a bunch of elementary school kids and their teachers, was so deeply upsetting I can’t really put it into words yet.  The only way I put my sadness into any action was to contribute to the Newtown, Connecticut Youth and Family Services for all of the emergency mental health services they are now called upon to provide.

Yesterday I ran across this article on Slate, about a woman whose homeless aunt visited her family on Christmas, and it made me remember that I forgot to pay tribute to my father, a troubled, mentally ill man I loved very much, whose death anniversary/yahrzeit was on December 25.  Like many others who have had a loved one die at the holidays, Christmas was never really the same after my father died 12 years ago.  And when my dog died two years ago just before Christmas, just after a miscarriage (my second in six months — the last time I tried for a long-desired third child)*, that didn’t help the holiday-hater situation.  But I know that the real problem is that I’ve completely lost sight of the holidays and allowed myself fall into hoping that more hand lotion, some nice salmon from the place down the street that caters, and maybe an iPad will make the holidays just right.

When I described my holiday shopping ritual to my therapist recently, she looked at me in horror, and said, “Do me a favor, honey.  Next year, just sit down and make donations in everyone’s name or send them a nice email.”

If I make new years resolutions this year, the top of the list is putting an end to going temporarily insane every holiday season.

* Doesn’t make sense does it?  That I should wish for a third kid and yet find the two I have to be more than a handful?  Doesn’t make sense to me either.  All I can do is answer with some Rolling Stones lyrics — you can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might find, you get what you need.