The hard Christmas
Last night I was supposed to be at my brother's house. We've gathered there for going on a decade for Noche Buena, after we all decided that it was too much for our mother to cook. We get catering from a local Cuban restaurant, we all bring assorted booze, and we spend the night eating and drinking and reconnecting.
In 2020, due to the pandemic, we didn't get together. And this year, due to my brother recovering from prostate surgery, we also decided to skip the night.
One would think I would be devastated. I'm a stickler for tradition. I guess, in that sense, I'm conservative.
But this Christmas is the first one I've been able to spend with my wife in four years. She's either been in Indiana, or, when here, working on the holiday. Rather than getting something from Havana Mania, we had charcuterie and wine. We enjoyed each other's company. It was us and the Hounds of Love.
I know this is a hard Christmas for many of you. It's a hard Christmas every year for many people. The holiday, rather than being a respite from worry, brings those worries crashing over you. The trauma is accentuated. The darkness takes over. Not a festival of light, a holiday of birth, but a reminder of failures and what should have been.
I have no reason to complain. No, not even with what happened on November 5th. I have a wife and family and friends who love me, and whom I love. I know that I'll never be abandoned alone on the street. So many don't have that comfort.
But even with all that, it's been hard for me. This year, with what happened last month when the country again chose madness, Christmas has been absent in my soul. The religious nature of the holiday I shed long ago. As I wrote here, I try to hold the meaning of Christmas—goodwill towards all, fellowship to men and women—in my heart all year long. But I'm not going to lie. The past two months since the Calamity have made me harder. My heart has calcified to a degree which frightens me. My reservoir of empathy is empty. It's almost impossible to see the humanity in those who refuse to see it in me.
Normally I would have been listening to sacred Christmas music since, well, after Halloween. (Yes, I'm one of those people.) I love this time of year. I revel in it, and look forward to it all year long. It is a time of hope and possibility. It is a time when we are reminded that the most humble among us—a little babe in swaddling clothes—can change the world and move mountains. It is a time of humility and joy and wonder.
But I've barely listened to Christmas music. Christmas cheer has absented itself from me. I'm not Ebenezer Scrooge, but neither am I his nephew Fred. I feel at a loss, adrift, wondering what this world is for if not pain and disappointment.
I think of all those who will go to Christmas services, and how little they inhabit the message of the Galilean carpenter. How absent his humility, his love, his gospel of acceptance are from their understanding. I think of their hypocrisy, and it both breaks my heart and induces inchoate rage in me. But I can't hold myself above them, for I too feel that rage now. Rage against a humanity which always chooses the hard way. A humanity which always chooses the expedient over the wise. A humanity which all too often doesn't even attempt to listen to the better angels of their nature. It serves for a bleak midwinter.
It is at times like these where I have to wrench myself out of my stupor. I have to make a conscious choice to elevate hope.
By "hope," I don't mean a belief that things will turn out right because they always do. By hope, I mean that my actions will engender something. By hope, I mean that I will continue to act, as hard as it may be, in a way which will lead to something good. I may not see that something. I may perish before my hopes are realized. But that doesn't matter. Hope isn't just for me. It's for those who surround me. It's for those who come after me. It is the thinnest gossamer wing which keeps humanity aloft. Without it, we are doomed. With it, well, we have a chance.
This is going to be a hard Christmas for me. It will be a hard Christmas for many of you. But in the end, there is still hope. And it is what we make of it.
May you all be blessed, and a Merry Christmas to you all.