Merry, Merry, Quite Contrary

I find it difficult to explain - especially to friends with young children and good hearts - that I just don't feel the way they do about family or holidays - especially Christmas.  They fret and fuss, worry about my lack of plans, get  worked up when I turn down dinner invitations and are troubled by the idea that I'll be alone.  This year, our youngest nurse is being particularly determined to include me in her family gathering - at the risk of hurting her feelings, I thank her and gently, quietly, firmly, repeatedly, tell her no.  But she's young with two small children and a third due in February - her daddy, who she adored, died this past year and she's very close to her mother.  It's a great deal of responsibility for twenty-two and she can't be blamed for her Currier and Ives Christmas vision - she simply wants everyone to be happy and have a place in it.  I don't tell her that to me Christmas is not much more than a day I don't have to work.

I suppose it's my history.  I began my holiday withdrawal not long after my second divorce though in truth, I'd always have rather been somewhere else.  With a family tap dancing around a drunk during the Christmas season, it seemed superficial and insincere to pretend all was well.  We were imitators, at best, caught up in the hypocrisy of the season, waiting for the Christmas cheer to turn ugly.  During my first marriage, Christmas was suffocatingly inclusive, as if every outrageous gift proved how happy we were, how intact and healthy and centered and unselfish.  I think I knew early on that it was no more than a different verse of an old story and that it was just  harder to find a place to hide.

In the years that followed, I've tried to overcome this aversion to Christmas and bury the bitterness.  It's a pretty season, a time of wonderful, glorious music - I never get tired of Christmas carols and could listen and sing along all year - but it's not a time of family.  It never was.  And contrary to what some may think, that's not a tragedy.

I like Christmas.  I just like peace and quiet and solitude better.  And no one could ask for a better family than the four footed one I already have, not then and not now. 

The only good reason to look back is to see how far you've come.