Stanley Bing
I’ve never been a huge fan of the holidays. I like Christmas as a cultural event, full of figgy pudding and jolly, scabrous Santas hawking redemption on every street corner and then a week of limbo-weirdness in which nobody works, ending with a drunken, hurling crowd assembling in the public square for the change of year that, in the end, means nothing. The music of the season is nice, too, except when it makes you feel like crying. And I don’t mind the savings you get at the major department stores, either.
But starting at Thanksgiving time, I always begin to feel like my life isn’t as good as all the stuff I’m seeing in the popular media. Maybe my mom made a turkey that came out a little less succulent and more chewy than Martha’s. Or the circle around the family table was a little too small, and growing smaller. Or the presents exchanged all around didn’t fill anybody’s hearts with the kind of joy commensurate with seasonal expectations, and in fact occasionally generated whatever the opposite of goodwill among men was supposed to be. “Oh, that’s nice,” the recipient would say, looking at the proffered object with brooding, abject melancholy. And in that moment, what was revealed was not the glowing finger of the miraculous or the omnipresence of a guiding love, but only the amazing power of everyday life to be, above all, its immutable self.
Noel is the time of giving and forgiveness and community and shared warmth by the fireside and true appreciation of all that speaks of the fullness that underlies the mundane. And to the extent that it actually does refract light against that evanescent ideal, it has always been a time of emotional peril, of stocktaking, of unwanted insight into what is not, as well as what is.
Being a wandering stranger in a merry Christian land hasn’t added to the allure, either. My people came to this brave new American world about a hundred years ago, and found the orgy of red and green everywhere and their children totally left out of the whole baby Jesus thing. We were forced, being ever-competitive with whatever reigning culture into which we were being assimilated, to drum up our own version of the deal. Thus a minor holiday on our calendar, one that featured a few coins and nuts and fun games played with a spinning top, was promoted into a major feast of acquisition and gift-giving. This Not-Christmas has its own power to be both more and less than what we want it to be.
In the end, what I am left with when December rolls around and over us is a profound sense of not truly belonging to the game everybody else is playing, of missing… missing something, somebody… and a sense that somewhere, not very far away, someone is having a much better time.
So I don’t always start from a very good place, is the point I’m making.
Which is not to say that I don’t have great holidays to remember. I’m not Scrooge. The shopping part is nice, particularly when you imagine the rosy flush of tiny faces as they tear away the wrapping paper. And the nap after the festive meal is as deep as sleep can get without easing over into coma. And at last, there is, in addition to all the crusty stuff, the feeling, when one has a family, of that little group clinging to a raft against the tide of commercialism, fatuity, piety (both real and faux), and communal materialism that has become our annual Noel.
It may not be perfect, we think, but it’s ours. And also, there is this thought, in the midst of it all—what if there was no Us? How terrible would that be? To see it on a midnight clear so starkly that there would be no way to deny it?
Would such a life be worth the living?
At the beginning of the new century, which did not spell the end of time, in spite of all predictions, I left my home of twenty-five years. I’m not the only guy of my age to do so, but there is no community of such people. We are alone, each and all, and never more alone than when the rest of the world is wrapping itself in one giant embrace.
It was some time in coming, this departure, and it represented, in its way, a simultaneous death and birth. The birth, unlike our genuine entry into this vale of laughter and tears, seems to be a somewhat protracted affair. The labor is still under way, at any rate, some years later. The death, on the other hand, like the actual moment that each of us will inevitably share, was short and brutal, even though the process leading to it was as long and as messy as that which attends the real thing. One minute I was in the world as I knew it. The next, I was not.
This took place in early December, when the Thanksgiving pumpkins had already begun to deflate on our porches, their grins rotting away from the bottom, turning to smirks and leers. It was cold. I had already secured for myself a small place in that most stereotypical location for men embarked on such a journey—an apartment on the marina. This was perhaps two miles from my old house, and as distant as the moon.
Christmas Eve arrived, as it inevitably does, whether retailers are ready for the end of shopping days or not. All the people with places to go went there and nestled into the bosoms of those closest to them, however capacious those bosoms might be. Those of us with no bosoms to go to were thrust out into the night.
There aren’t many places open on Christmas Eve. Some restaurants are lit, their tables shoved together to accommodate entire clans tearing up some poor bird or other. The occasional convenience store glimmers like a cheap toy, open for thoughtless, last-minute gift-givers, manned in my area by turbaned employees who presumably do not feel the misery of working on a day of comfort and joy. But the sidewalks are rolled up, all other stores dark. A few bereft individuals lurch here and there beneath the starry firmament. There is no traffic.
I was scheduled to go out of town the next morning, so that would be all right. But that evening, the void that underlies all of existence yawned wide and threatened to suck me in. Gooey treacle and pompous rejoicing oozed from the television. If I stayed indoors, the only solution would be to drink myself into a somnolent torpor, and I try to do that only when I’m happy.
I drove. No, I didn’t want to go to my local bar, full of sad, empty losers whose lives echoed my own at that moment. No, I didn’t want to play glow-in-the-dark miniature golf, which, for some reason, was open at that hour. And I didn’t want to drive anywhere near my old house, full of warmth and light and, quite possibly, turkey that did not come packaged in its own microwavable gravy.
I went to the Thruway Diner. As it has been every day, 24-7, for the past fifty years, it was open. I went in, and was amazed. Quite a few people were there. The stools at the counter were relatively full. The tables, both in the fast-turnover front room and the more high-tone, less casual dining room out back, were not full to bursting, but there was life in them under the tinsel and felt caps festooned with fake fur that hung from the doorways. A little seasonal music driveled from the speakers, but a game of some kind was on the TV sets around the room.
I chose the counter, because I saw that it was fully loaded with lumpy dumpsters like myself, men in their prime, as I am, whose hair might not have been sufficiently combed for the evening, dressed in ski jackets, heavy shirts, and boots, each bent over a plate of something to their liking, food not determined by the propriety of the hour, the day, the time of year. The guy to my right was reading a three-dayold paper. He had waffles and sausages. A more studious individual to my left was reading a book in a language I couldn’t guess at. It had no pictures. He was eating bacon and eggs.
I looked down the counter and saw the lineup of dishes selected by my brethren this Christmas Eve. There were perhaps ten of us. All but one was having breakfast at an hour when the rest of the world was staggering away from a table full of dinner, groaning with the strain that all that festivity was placing on their overloaded systems.
I don’t know about you, pilgrim, but for me breakfast at dinnertime has always been the most comforting of meals. Some claim meatloaf with potatoes for that privilege. Others swear by turkey with all the fixin’s. But for me there’s nothing like a stack of buttermilk flapjacks with three kinds of carcinogenic meat to make me feel like there’s a home someplace to which I just might be headed.
I had the flapjacks with bacon, ham, and sausage. Coffee, too. Not a word passed between any of us at that place where we shared our simple meal. In that silence was all the community that we required. Anything more would have been too much and far, far too little.
The next morning I took off for the coast. In a week, it would be the New Year, an enforced day of merriment I usually detest more than any other. On that Christmas morning, however, I found myself looking forward with a tiny flicker of cheer to the end of one twelve-month cycle and the beginning of the next. Some things are hard to leave behind, even when you have to. Maybe once that ritual is done, it doesn’t hurt to rejoin the rest of the world to celebrate all the Noels that just might lie ahead.