The Christmas season is a difficult or unpleasant time for many people. I wrote this as an attempt to air out those unpleasant memories of mine that made it difficult for me…and to perhaps offer insight and hope to those who have not made that connection for themselves.

A Tropical Depression at Christmas?
- or -
The Grinch that stole the rest of the year

- I was thinking this morning about how good I felt…in fact quite excellent, considering it was almost Christmas. Further reflection brought back memories of many past holidays. I have thought for years that Christmas is for kids or for recalling that feeling of being kids at heart. Therein lies the rub…my childhood Christmas memories were somewhat tainted by the rest-of-the-year behavior of my mother.

- There were vague recollections of presents under the tree and acting happy about what was received and given…the operant word here being “acting.” I recently heard an interview regarding how pseudo-medical pundits professed to cancer victims that having a positive attitude about the whole experience and that a positive outlook was helpful for bolstering your immune system. I mean, after all, we all know how stress weakens your immune system. So remaining positive should have the opposite effect…strengthening the immune system. As it turns out, someone finally studied the notion that remaining positive in the face of such a dreadful life experience was beneficial to the victim. Well…acting positive does not help and can even do harm. It is all about acting like your are positive, even when, with very good reason, you are in dire straits. Putting on a happy face and internalizing your angst, simply makes the problem(s) worse and creates more stress on your already over-taxed immune system.

- So, acting like things were great during that special time of year only served to discolor the notion of Christmas. Although I did not appreciate it at the time, I think there was always the edge of a dark shadow just out of view. I knew it was there, but I did not know where or when it would make its appearance. I feared its untimely and random arrival, but my mother and other members of the clan of family and friends were mostly on their good behavior for Christmas…at least for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. There was mostly good cheer and happiness associated with the Christmas festivities.

- My mother and uncle seemed to revel in the liquid forms of available cheer. I remember my mother laughing and smiling a lot during that annual respite from her erratic and sometimes nasty behaviors. My uncle was the most serious drinker of the lot, but he was mostly a happy drunk…I think. I say, “I think” because he was bound by the restraints of familial stoicism. He had a very deep and subtle laugh that he always seemed to restrain. His smile was similarly held in check, but sometimes made a brief appearance with a muted laugh that emerged from deep within his chest. My mother did not exercise restraint in any of those happy expressions. She let it out to the point of happy tears at times. Unfortunately for me, it seems that I inherited (through nurture or lack thereof) both qualities…stoicism and unbridled releases of happiness, but not at the same time.

- Also unfortunate for me, the rest of the year my mother’s Shadow was as unrestrained in its lapses from kindness, usually at my expense, as were her expressions of unbridled happiness…or was it just laughter. Her changeability made me appreciate her times of good humor, but with the degree of fear that grips your reality when watching a horror movie. You know something bad is going to happen. You just don’t know when or what will cause the next fright. You could almost hear the discordant music beginning to swell in the background.

- My aunt and grandmother were opposites of my mother and uncle. They did not drink or smile or laugh about anything. They were stuck in a sour and dour disposition that routinely displayed crankiness and unpleasant behaviors, but even they were on relatively good behavior during Christmas. However, no matter how wonderful things seemed to be, I knew that just around the corner daemons from their respective Shadows would make an appearance. It was my task, as well as everyone in attendance, to act like everything was just fine. I suppose that with all of that experience being around acting that I could have been an actor, except I was a bit dyslexic and could not remember lines.

- Although I do not specifically remember the trauma of being told by my mother that there was no Santa Claus, I do remember a feeling that I would get presents from my Mother Santa. I remember thinking of them as a sort of retribution for her misbehaviors the rest of the year. I must have thought that I would rather not have any presents if it would buy some more even disposition from her. I am sure I did not think of it in exactly those terms, but it was irrelevant anyway. She was what she was…the Grinch that stole the rest of the year and paid for it at Christmas. I suppose that is what the Grinch actually stole…the real spirit of Christmas.

- There was another built-in contradiction. I was clearly a bad boy because of the punishment I received throughout the year, but I got all of those nice presents…assumedly for being “nice,” as the story goes. Another reason for the prevalent disconcerting angst that I experienced was the thought, “when was I going to have to give the presents back because I was ‘bad’ again?” Perhaps when I requested presents as a child I hoped they would somehow magically replace all of the unpleasant memories that had preceded or would follow Christmas. I may have hoped any gifts that I would give or get would make me feel better. Strangely enough, it never worked. Sure, I liked many of the gifts I received (and gave), but they never made me whole and full of love.

- Through all of this, I learned that Christmas was really about some sort of atonement for the guilt acquired throughout the rest of the year. It was not about love or giving. It was about repayment and exchange. There was no real feeling of goodness and love. It was just another tightrope walk past the cauldron of evil that hid within the Shadow of her mind.

- I remember the difficulty of picking a Christmas card that said something nice, but not too much…or not too nice. I could not just let myself be overly nice to someone who was going to hurt me the next week…or some week soon. Then, there was the problem of picking gifts that satisfied the requirement to give something…but not too much. It was a fine balance that had to be maintained. I did not actually know any of this at the time. I just danced the dance and walked the tightrope trying to find some sense of balance in my undulating childhood world.

- It is interesting how this caricature of Christmas spilled into my later life. Christmas was never the happy time it was supposed to be. Although I acted like I felt good at Christmas, I never actually felt good. I associated this sense of uneasiness with being in the tropics. There was no snow. There were no snowmen. There were no sleighs or jingle bells. There was no Jack Frost. There were many things that Christmas was not in South Florida. When I finally made it to the snow for a Christmas some years later, things were not any better for me. I still suffered from the same tropical depression that had arrived during childhood. No matter how happy I acted, Christmas was always a stressful time that made my daemons restless.

- I had to pretend that all of those gifts (given and received) actually made me feel good. After all, Madison Avenue had reached my spirit with all of their marketing efforts. If I did not feel good, then I did not fit into the Norman Rockwell or Currier and Yves scenes of Christmas. I had never seen or experienced anything like those scenes, but it made me believe the rest of the world was experiencing those scenes and the associated fullness of love. The Christmas music that I cherished was another thing that made me feel that I was missing something that everyone else had. I did not appreciate that most of them were acting as well. If I was not getting it, then I was an outcast…even more of an outcast than I already felt at the hands of my mother (ostensibly for being such a bad boy). So I acted happy to cover over the tropical depression that lay just beneath the surface.

- As life unfolded, I picked women that were nice, but not too nice. I may have picked them to make me feel guilty for some reason, so that I needed to give them gifts as atonement for my own ‘bad’ behavior…even if I had not behaved badly. After all, I had learned that gifts were some sort of retribution for the evil deeds from the behavior of my mother. And so I learned to pick gifts commensurate with the degree of guilt or sadness that I felt. Sometimes more…sometimes less, but usually in proportion to some degree of hidden angst that gurgled inside…some that I created and some that I just allowed because it was the way it was supposed to be.

- There are many shadowy associations of Christmas that elude recognition by our conscious minds. I now believe that being able to strip away those shadowy overlays is the real key to success in appreciating the intended essence of Christmas and the hope for happiness that arrives with a new year, a new decade, and the new dawn of a happy life.