Merry Happy Merry

Sometimes I feel like I have to try real hard to enjoy Christmas. I just don’t… feel the spontaneous joy and wonder that I felt as a kid – or, hell as a teenager and young adult. Life gets murkier. Deeper sorrows taint the simplicity of joy and offer a hesitation to let go and merely trust happiness for happiness sake.

Besides, everyone keeps telling us there is a war on Christmas. The evil secular world is trying to steal it from underneath our noses. It’s my Catholic tradition, but I probably belong more to that secular world and… have let my knowledge of history and invasions and cultural suffocations darken my view of Christmas trees and Santa and babies born in sheep troughs. But… everything doesn’t have to be an argument, does it?

Tonight I was driving home from my parents' house, where my sister and I came from opposite sides of the state to decorate the tree. Things are very different from the days when we all lived under the same roof – a different roof, in fact… when circumstances were happier, younger, less troubled by things that seem more plain and obvious to my 35 year-old-self than my 5 year-old self.

We played the Muppet Christmas with John Denver. You can’t decorate a tree in the Brennan/Olson household without Miss Piggy misunderstanding the word figgy. Or marveling how so many ornaments can fit on one tree – even when the collection has diluted to a tree in Newton and a tree in Springfield. Then we had dinner and sat in front of the fire and my sister took the dust and clutter off the piano to play some Christmas songs. And it was… it was… it wasn’t like old times… but it was its own moment in the present, something worth savoring enough to capture in this writing. When all the other drama and tensions and troubles of real life just didn’t matter for a few hours. When we could be together and delight in a tree, a fire, and the company of our little family and our Sun dog, still with us a year after a very near death experience.

The hour grew dark. I have a cold and want to get home to get to bed at a reasonable hour. On the way home, I listened to another CD that a friend made of Christmas music four years ago. I listen to them every year, but only this one month, so I forget the songs he put on there. So I turn onto Shrewsbury Street as the disc turns to Sleigh Ride. We lived on that street when I was a kid. Two doors down from the middle school is a house where a window decorator for some department store lived. For all of my memory, he has a life size Santa and company displayed in a sleigh, or on a rocket, or on a dinosaur… something to which I looked forward since I was old enough to see it. I forgot about that house until I was at the stop light making that turn. And I passed the house with the Boston Pops playing. It was… perfect. Then house after house after house was lit up in arrangements of white and colored lights… and the drive back through Worcester and all along Rte. 9 took a slight variation from the normal dark and dreary monotony.

And really… really… isn’t that what Christmas is? Not the retail headaches and religious propaganda. Isn’t it a collective choice of the human race – around the WORLD – to stop, to breathe, to enjoy family, to make the dark light and pretty, to relish a few precious moments… to decide to be happy, merry, and not cranky, miserable and sour? To say that this is what matters in life? Family and love and seeing the light side?

We don’t permit ourselves to be happy all that much. It’s a scary thing to be happy. But… Christmas is the opportunity to permit ourselves for a day – or the lingering season to just not care about the reasons why not. To just let it go and say life IS good.