Here they are again.
I don’t know about you, but for me, the time between Thanksgiving and New Year’s is fraught. It arrives with not only our aspirations for joy and celebration, but also multiple layers of stress, memory, hope, and grief--to say nothing of the work of decorating, tree trimming, present buying, candle lighting, card writing and sending, shopping and feast preparations.
The “full catastrophe,” as Jon Cabot-Zinn would say.
The holidays hold so many expectations for pleasure and satisfaction, when so often the opposites are truer. When I was working as a psychotherapist, it was the busiest time of year for my practice. My clients often tried to measure their own experience against the Hallmark card paradigm, and for so many it came up short, causing anguish, self-questioning, and confusion.
“Why do I not have the kind of family I see on TV, or on the many photo greeting cards I receive?” many ask themselves. The “shoulds” operate in higher gear than in the rest of the year; the pressure ramps up to meet both real and imagined demands, of ourselves and of the others in our lives.
My mother always insisted on happiness at holiday time, especially at Christmas. I was never sure whether or not hers was real or forced, but in any case, the expectation was that my sisters and our families would all follow suit, even in the years following our son’s death.
That was hard.
One of the best Christmases I remember was the one a few weeks after Geoffrey was born. We were living in a small apartment in Philadelphia, where my husband John was a medical student at University of Pennsylvania. For two reasons, we could not travel to our parents’ homes as we had always done, bundling up to drive north in our heatless VW Beetle. I’d been diagnosed with viral pericarditis, a more serious disease than I then realized, and was told by a compassionate physician to stay home and rest instead of being hospitalized. And there was a giant snowstorm a few days before Christmas, making travel impossible.
John had a several-week vacation, which allowed him to be fully present and take care of all of us. With what delight I remember seeing he and year-and-a-half-old Matthew walking amidst the waist-high snow to get a $3 tree, small and already shedding needles, and their excitement in dragging it up the stairs to our second-floor apartment. My mother sent some ornaments, and a bolt of red felt from which I cut out stockings, stitched together with green yarn, weaving our names on each. I still hang them every year.
My sisters and parents sent some lovely gifts; we had already known we could only buy one present each for each other. Geoff got little red corduroy booties, and Matthew a plate, bowl, and cup set. John gave me John Updike’s “The Music School,” (which I noticed recently is now a valuable first edition), and I gave my neighbor $10 to buy him Merton’s “Confessions of a Guilty Bystander.” John cooked a goose, and our downstairs neighbors brought up dessert, carols playing on our record player.
It was perfect. There was such delight and warmth as our new young family celebrated its first Christmas together. We had each other, and that was all that mattered. No other Christmas since then has held such simple joy.
We had Jewish neighbors upstairs from us in the third-floor apartment, and I became close friends with Sandy, the wife of another med school student. Growing up in a Catholic world, I’d not known any Jews and was eager to learn about their customs and beliefs. Hard to believe, I know, but it was the first I learned of Hanukkah. Since then, my world has been deeply enriched with many more Jewish friends and how I ache for them especially during the current holiday season. while war is raging in Israel and Gaza. What could they be celebrating, with so much terrifying antisemitism going on, and all that has happened since October 7?
And as I read of the increasing deaths in Gaza, now close to 15,000 I think, I feel the horror that many of us must. It’s hard to feel celebratory, seeing all those terrified bloodied children, the heaps of dead bodies, the knowledge that now the Gazans in the south have nowhere to go to escape the bombing, that Israeli families are traumatized and frightened.
There is so much suffering in the world right now.
I considered not sending cards and my annual letter at all this year, given the world situation and my anguish over it, but I love this way to reach out to all our friends., and connection seems more important than ever. It’s what we should do in every small way we can, a bulwark against the despair and pain that can threaten to overtake us. But when I searched for a message to put on this year’s holiday card, nothing seemed right. Not even the anodyne “Season’s Greetings,” certainly not “Merry Christmas.”
I settled on one word, “Peace.”
And that is my wish for all of you. It is a tall order, maybe even impossible, knowing that many of you have your own issues with aging, poor health, family problems, and agony over the Mideast conflict, but aspiration can perhaps move us closer to finding it in our lives.
May we all have the strength to bear what we must, to find pockets of peace amidst the holiday noise, and share that peace with those around us.
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Thank you so much for all for the amazing responses I received to “Radical Empathy,” possibly more than I’ve received for any other post. There are so many opportunities to continue trying to embrace it during the current and continuing nightmares in Ukraine and the Middle East as well as in our country. I continue to try and hope you will too.