Tag Archives: Christmas

Covid Resolutions

For Christmas I received Covid. It even came a little early — in the twilight of Christmas Eve, while watching a holiday movie. I spent the week in between Christmas and New Year’s getting through what appeared to be a mild case of the omicron variant. We all got it in my household, passed around like eggnog. We are all vaxxed and boosted as much as currently allowed, and we all seem to have come through to the other side okay. Thank you for asking. 

It was an odd experience, like a mean cold, not as bad as the flu, but a handful of days that ended in chills, that ended in me banishing myself to the guest room bed where I soothed myself with multiple comforters and Netflix. Though I am not the most diligent or focused of creatures, I hardly ever give myself over to binging shows. In my mind it’s an activity that you only do when you’re sick. Or it’s an activity I only do when I’m sick. (What I do when I’m well, apparently, is scroll through Twitter before snoozing on the couch.) I experienced a scratchy throat, an occasional cough, copious snot and sinus pressure, and the aforementioned chills, which were the most conspicuous element, seeming to indicate a low-grade fever flare up in the nighttime. I would awake in the morning from my comforter cave in sweat-dampened T-shirts. Now, two weeks later, I have been released from captivity. I still have some snot and a lower voice, and I’m tired a lot. This could be from Covid. It could be from the feral hours we kept as a family, trapped at home yet freed from any regular schedule. It could be a window onto Long Covid, that obscure fear beyond fear, just another vista to be anxious about. Is it Long Covid or is it just getting older? Are you depressed or merely sad? The only answer is another question.  

If New Year’s Eve is Drunk Night for amateurs, then New Year’s resolutions are like astrology for non-millennials. The threshold of a new year seems significant. Everyone acts as if it were significant. But it’s not. It’s just another day, another week, another slow roll through the seasons. It’s the beginning of winter. It’s the season when you can see the squirrel nests in the trees. It happens every year. There are some jobs where year-end is important — in accounting, for instance. Cut-offs are important for contracts and insurance policies, where an artificial demarcation of a span of time is necessary and useful. But in your life, it’s just another year. The only true closing of the books is death. 

And yet still, during that week of listless scrolling and watching, I kept thinking: maybe this year I’ll be different. Not resolutions, per se. Nothing that concrete. Only that I would be a better person, stronger, more disciplined, less apt to fall asleep on the couch while reading Twitter, someone who took his vitamins, went to the gym, resisted carbohydrates, lifted with his legs, all that stuff. The truth is I don’t save my life-changing exhortations for year-end. They are perennial, persistent shouts to self. And while I would like to be a completely different person (if just for a little while), I would be happy for one or two almost microscopic changes, if not to improve my life then to prove to myself that change is indeed possible, and that I am not the equivalent of a human locomotive, only moving in one direction when moving at all. 

One thing getting Covid has done is improve my mood. After 21 months, it finally happened. I look at the colored map of the United States on the New York Times website each morning. It’s growing more and more purple as the omicron variant burns through the population. Perhaps this will be the final fire that can move us toward endemicity or normality or something at least different than succeeding waves of anxiety. Emptied of despair, perhaps we can withstand winter. Winter has recently been a season simply to get through. It’s the trudging part of the year. I think part of this attitude was triggered by living in a slightly colder climate with small children. They’re sick all of the time and it’s too cold to take them outside anyway. But it’s hardly ever cold in Mississippi, not really. And the kids are older, heartier. It’s mostly a season of dampness. So instead of projecting — next season will be better! — instead of always anticipating improvement just around the corner, I wonder if I can just enjoy January. It sounds ridiculous. But the panic attack of the holidays is over, we have lived through the plague, or at least the current iteration of the plague, life has continued on, thankfully; perhaps I could burrow into something like appreciation. I know this sounds like a desperate bid for optimism or joy, but I am running out of topics to be worried about. Or perhaps I’m just bored by them. They seem exhausted. I am exhausted. It’s like the websites that you continually visit even though you long ago stopped receiving any thrill by reading them. Why do I keep going there? Is it simply because the browser autofills the URL? Close those tabs of despair! Find something to do with your time besides make yourself feel bad. And don’t wait for astrology — the one true date where your resolutions will be aligned. If you need cosmic order, just go back to church. It’s less embarrassing. 

Note on Advent

Parishioners at my church were asked for Advent reflections, which are being emailed around each morning as we march toward Christmas. The following is my contribution for week three, and in the internet-driven and slightly self-indulgent desire to log every piece of writing published in any way, no matter how tiny, I am posting it here.

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We’ve entered the season of paradoxes. It’s the time of year when we celebrate everything shutting down, the long grey trek before springtime renewal. And though in the South all of our reactions to a potential change in temperature are mostly gestural, the leaves still turn. The change still happens. It’s the time of year when we bring a green tree inside our house and light it up to compensate for the growing darkness outside; it’s the time of year when we celebrate nature’s impending hibernation by talking about a baby being born in a barn; it’s the time of year when we pretend an obese lush breaks into our houses to give presents to our children. It’s beloved but absurd, holy but chintzy, overwhelmed with sacredness and alcohol, equal parts childish greedy joy and adulthood’s cultivated disappointment, an annual season of overdoing it in every direction. And this excess of meaning is embedded within the Christmas holiday itself; it both means too much and not enough. It’s spiritual and materialistic, pagan and Christian. And it annually tests our capacity for ambivalence and contradiction.
 
And I personally am not looking forward to it. This year has already outdone itself in the paradox department, as far as I am concerned. We live in a Bizarro World, where friends you know and love behave in ways totally antithetical to human decency. Where a third of the population isn’t paying attention and the other third has lost its ability to discern good from evil, even in the most cartoonish of forms. This fall I’ve made a harvest of being appalled at my fellow man, and now look at my overflowing cornucopia: rage, disappointment, vague loss of faith in our shared decency, doubt at my ability to effectuate change. These ingredients don’t make much of a meal, or make me much fun to be around.
 
And yet, the paradox of society — of living in semi-steady cordiality with large groups of people who annoy you to no end — must continue. How do I live through not just the paradox of changing seasons but the paradox of this particular season? How do I meet the seasonal obligation to love everyone with my whole mind and my whole heart and not yell at them like the traffic I think they are? Aren’t these people the least in the kingdom of heaven? Or is that me?
 
I can recognize the oncoming paradox of our shared existence, but that doesn’t make it any easier to live through. But live through it I must, because the days are getting shorter no matter how I feel about them. Days are like that. We’re all about to be stuck inside this winter darkness together. Who’s going to plug in the lights?
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In hindsight, my contribution seems a little strained, overdetermined with unseen expository baggage. But rather than re-write it for this blog post, I’m just going to riff a little more, try to aerate the waters a bit.
 
One of the guiding texts of this small bit, and of my thoughts about Christmas these past few years, has been Adam Gopnik’s book Winter: Five Windows on the Season. It’s a collection of speeches he gave for the 2011 Massey Lectures put on by the CBC.
 
The guiding light here is of course the lecture on Christmas, where Gopnik details its modern transformation over the past 150 years. Before reading this book, and generally before having children, I was steadily growing to despise Christmas. I won’t list the reasons. They were not particularly original; feel free to supply your own. This dam of cynicism was broken first by children, whose enthusiasm is irrepressible and contagious. Their enthusiasm is not just for the annual raining down of presents but also for the high theatricality of the whole season. To them, Thanksgiving is fine, family and a big meal and a TV parade, but Christmas is fun. It accrues excitement as it moves along, like a giant snowball of wonder, and the theatricality pervades every aspect of their lives. This moves in contradistinction to my own holiday feeling that Thanksgiving is the grown-up holiday, the logical, rational, mature holiday. If we can dispense with the grade-school Puritan Thanksgiving origin myth and culinarily outmoded turkey, stuffing and cranberry sauce, then Thanksgiving is great. A couple of days to stop time and attempt to appreciate one’s historically absurd first-world bounty. No prayers, no religion to fight about, above all no gifts to contaminate the symbolism, just a shared meal, a brief respite of community.
 
(Of course, if we really want to improve Thanksgiving, we should introduce some restrictions: no stuffing, no travel, and your nuclear family must eat with strangers. No extended sub-family reunions, and you must make the meal with these strangers. The main problem with Thanksgiving, as with all holidays, is the encrusting of tradition, which always kills the germ of fun in the end.)
 
But what Gopnik’s book taught me was how the children were onto something, namely that Christmas feels fun to them in part because it’s such an emotional and symbolic mess. Gopnik unpacks the mess: Santa is a clear descendent of the Saturn figure in Saturnalia festivals from ancient Rome; cultures throughout history (especially in cold climates) marked the winter solstice with trees and lights; our modern conception of Santa Claus primarily derives from Thomas Nast cartoons. Coincidentally, and interesting given our current historical situation, Gopnik points out that the Nast cartoons of Santa were quite similar to his caricatures of Boss Tweed of Tammany Hall infamy. So, our contemporary notion of Santa is also at the same time a caricature of unrestrained capitalistic corruption. Stick that in your war on Christmas.
 
The other bit that bothers me about Christmas is the desperate yoking together of the Christian birth of Jesus narrative with the elf-driven night of debauchery. (One might call this the fundamental bipolar quality of our contemporary Christmas.) This yoking together manifests itself via the relentless literalization of Jesus, which begins with Christmas and reaches its apotheosis with Easter, with people acting out the Stations of the Cross, and passion plays, and extreme, Mel Gibson-style sadistic descriptions of violence. Forget the presents under the tree; this is the childish part of Christmas, this blind heedless baby talk. At times it feels like everyone needs to go back to school: the surface stuff is not what the Bible is about, or not only what the Bible is about. It’s like a quality quiche: the good stuff is what’s on the inside. There are layers of meaning, for pete’s sake. Getting caught up in the literal surface details, in the quality of the hay in the manger, in aspects that are completely unverifiable in terms of history, misses the point. Perhaps my Unitarian slip is showing too forcefully here, but God talk makes me queasy.
 
My other main beef with Christianity — you’ll have noticed by now that I am not a deep religious thinker — is the relentless Protestant emphasis on belief. So much time is spent trying to coerce people into believing all of this stuff. What about the old-fashioned utilitarian value of showing up and doing good? Or just actively avoiding doing bad? Let’s save fewer souls and fill more sandbags.

Anyway, that’s the religious disposition I was coming from when writing this bit, moving away from hating Christmas by recognizing its culturally mongrel and incoherent nature. And then, of course, the Disaster occurred, and you see the result. About that Disaster, I don’t have anything else yet to say, nothing worth printing at least. I’m still looking for someone to plug in the lights, or hoping to acquire the ability to see in the dark.
 
I’m not sure if any of this rambling has clarified my Advent reflection. But nonetheless it feels good to blog about it. Worth remembering, that: blog’s an ugly word but a good feeling.