Mostly I ignore it. Or laugh at it, which isn’t hard to do. For years I sang all the gringo Christmas carols with the worst possible Puerto Rican accent. “Jingle bells” became “jinger bears;” the “one-horse open sleigh” became the “one-whore open sleigh.”
A few things helped. I didn’t have kids, so I was spared having to do the whole thing—the shopping, the putting up the tree, the pretense about Santa. And in Puerto Rico, Christmas is an entirely different affair.
“Why are all the Christmas carols so sad,” asked a student. I knew what he meant, and tried to explain. “Imagine a time of year so dark, so cold. You’re outside, trudging home, the wind is slapping snow in your face. At last you can see the house. It’s totally dark, but you can smell the wood smoke from the chimney. Your legs are tired from the effort of pulling through the snow. Finally, finally you can see—there’s a single candle burning in the window. You’re home.”
“I don’t get it,” he said.
“It’s all about a light, a single light, that you see in the darkest time of the year. And there’s no reason for that light—in fact, it’s miraculous. You stare at it, this one tiny flame that at any moment can sputter out. It’s infinitely small. Yet it may become larger, grow, warm you and your family and your neighbors. You can cook. You can see. It’s this small, miraculous, filled-with-potential flame that has no reason, no reason whatsoever, to be in your life. You stare and stare, full of wonder.”
“Silent night, Holy night,” he sang. Or rather, parodied. You could have gone out for a cigarette, come back, and still not have gotten to the third line….
“Look, it’s just something in the culture.”
“But it’s a birth, it should be happy, joyous….”
I never convinced him, of course. He left thinking that we celebrated the birth of his Savior with increased and renewed fits of melancholy.
“Christmas is just the time of year when happy people make the rest of us feel more miserable,” said a depressed patient to me, years ago.
I knew what she meant. We were hanging out by the TV, trying not to watch anything about Christmas. We were ignoring it as hard as the rest of the world was shrieking it at us. Oh, except for that afternoon, when family and friends weren’t visiting.
Who wants to go to a nut house on Christmas day?
So occupational therapy had thrown the “Christmas dinner” two days before. We were on marginal staffing. Anybody who had less than a fifty-fifty chance of harming himself or anyone else was discharged.
I worked a lot of those Christmases, operating under the theory that I wasn’t going to celebrate it any way—why shouldn’t I let someone for whom it meant something have the day off? Let some woman be with her kids.
That seemed reasonable up until a couple days ago. When I looked at a guy whom I had first seen as a kid holding his own kid.
And realized for the first time—I didn’t have that.
And I wish I had.
It’s about how you define it. Kids didn’t come into the equation—they were rigorously excluded. So of course I was working those Christmases. Why sit at home and listen to the sounds of joy and delight—presents under the tree!—that weren’t there? Better to go hang with the depressives in the madhouse.
In just the way that generations of Blacks accepted Jim Crow for years, we accepted that we’d never have kids. We squared our shoulders, lifted our chins, got on with our lives. Some of us got kids into our lives as teachers or pediatricians or uncles and aunts. Some of us pretended we didn’t want parenthood. We had better—or at least more expensive—vacations.
That same exclusion worked for God. For most of two millennia, the Christian churches had some news for us gay people, and most of the time it wasn’t stuff you wanted to hear. So now, in the last 20 years, I can find a church that accepts me, embraces me.
So?
Well, yesterday was Christmas Eve, the big holiday here. All of the family was gathering. I got sick.
Was it psychosomatic? Can you really bring on severe diarrhea just by wishing to be anywhere else?
My doctor might say yes. My stomach says no.
Whatever. It was going to be very loud in a very small place. People were going to sing, play the typical percussion instruments, dance, tell jokes. It would be five or six hours of forced gaiety.
I am, by a definition that got redefined, childless and godless. I cannot see that little flame, that flicker that may die, or may grow and warm and transform and reform us.
I’m outside, looking in. But I leave the following, for those inside.
