Hacking Christmas

I like angiegarner's notion of hacking the holidays, extracting whatever kernels of personal meaning there are from the frenetic commercialism and the institutionalized exhortations meant to pacify the masses who are struggling to survive.

For a number of reasons, Christmas and Thanksgiving have always been my two least favorite holidays. The first is a celebration of gluttony; the second, a celebration of greed. Were I to be scrupulously honest, I’d have to admit my distaste springs from my own social isolation. I don’t really have a tribe to hang out with on these two most tribal of holidays, so I’m kind of like a kid with my nose pressed up against the bakery window, alternately sneering at and longing for the frosted cupcakes stacked up on the pastry shelves behind thick plated glass that I’ll never be able to reach through.

When the kids were young, of course, I celebrated in style. Hosted Thanksgiving dinners for half a dozen or so at a time, and always did the tree, the gifts, and the drive out to Aptos to hang out with Cousin Alicia’s family on Christmas Day. Didn’t want to inoculate the kids with the weirdness that’s characterized so much of my own adult life. I don’t float on the periphery of social groups, by the way; in fact, I’m very good in social groups. I just don’t like being part of them. I can never be sure how much of that is temperament or the fact that I was raised by wolves on the ruined foundations of the House of Usher. My idea of a good time is listening to wolves howl.

This year I’ve been very fortunate to live in close physical proximity to someone who has tremendously good vibes (as we used to say back in my hippie days.) L is just a tremendously positive life force. She’s not particularly creative, witty, or profound; she’s just extraordinarily upbeat, and I can feel the difference that makes as though she’s projecting a radiant force field, and I’m within its circle of protection.

So this year, I decided not to revile Christmas.

This year, I let myself enjoy the Christmas lights, the miniature Christmas villages, the Christmas trees. I spent time searching for just the right gifts for the half a dozen or people who are closest to my heart. I went for hikes – the weather has been absolutely spring-like. I read Nancy Horan’s Under the Wide and Starry Sky, a cheesy but highly entertaining novel about Robert Louis Stevenson’s unusual marriage to Fanny Osbourne. I did some drawing. I played with the cats. I saw Exodus: Gods and Kings at the mall, and went out afterwards for a hot fudge sundae with strawberry ice cream.

I played endless hours of The Sims, a game I enjoy but that I usually go into paroxysms of guilt when I play – because isn’t it an alternate lifeline? An alternate lifeline filled with happy groups, where it’s as easy to make money as plucking platinum bars off the greensward, where the grievous disappointments of death and love are reduced to ephemeral moodlets that last two days at most, where it doesn’t matter whether I carve my initials on the coral reef or not?

I didn’t do a single productive thing. Nor am I likely to do a single productive thing in the days to come since the week between Christmas and New Years is always a week outside of real time, something that takes place between the 12th chime of midnight and the 13th chime that never comes.

I suspect I’m recharging my batteries in some major fashion. About to embark on a generative phase.

But being a person who lives so exclusively in the present tense that it’s hard for me to imagine that I’ve ever done anything else besides what I’m doing at this very moment, naturally part of me thinks that I’ve used up the last part of my creativity, that the Muse has quietly gotten up and tiptoed out the room while I’ve been playing The Sims.