“Have yourself a merry little Christmas / It may be your last
Next year we may all be living in the past
Have yourself a merry little Christmas / Pop that champagne cork
Next year we may all be living in New York
No good times like the olden days / Happy golden days of yore
Faithful friends who were dear to us / Will be near to us no more
But at least we all will be together / If the Lord allows
From now on, we’ll have to muddle through somehow
So have yourself a merry little Christmas now.”
— Original lyrics to Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas, written by Hugh Martin for Judy Garland to sing in the 1944 film Meet Me in St Louis.
The scene outside would convince you of winter. The pewter sky: low, somber. The barren trees at the edge of the woods. The absence of life/ the seldomness of birds. Dark cars filthy with road salt splatter. Everywhere I look all I can see is the tones of illness. The pallor of death. In time, things will change again. The buds will return and with them will come a freshened sense of air moving freely, of the living uncaged from a dungeon so deep.
This, though, is Christmas. Not the Christmas of Jesus or any of that. Not for me at least. My Christmas is different than that. It rarely even looks up from its drink at any holy people. The bar is crowded, I say, and I have little time left to listen to every wandering drinker’s tale anymore. Instead, I prefer to allow the holiday to blow around me like smoke/ over me like clouds of mist/ and through me if I’m lucky this year/ a hollow wind/ to rake the grit off my sleepy ribs.
I don’t care what the meaning of Christmas is anymore. Your meaning versus mine is a war I will skip. If there is a Lord and Savior (and for your sake, I truly hope against hope that there just might be), well, I don’t rightly mind one way or the other.
Happy birthday, hoss.
Now piss off away from my candle-lit kitchen table/ from my mini cubes of box store cheese. In all honesty, and with no disrespect intended, snowflake, I am flat out tired of meaning and the search for it. Everything is for sale and the live long day is a shim-sham, baby. Give me a shot of wine and a chilled turkey drumstick. Put a hunk of fruitcake in my mouth and watch me spit it out all over the fruitcake haters. Not out of spite, but rather out of the spirit of human kindness.
Because what could possibly be kinder than a tempest raining down candied citron on the people and the land?
In my mind, I am the raging Appalachians rising above this fucking one-horse town. And down here is down there to me as I suck in the cool purple evening and prepare to blow it back out, down upon the valley, as if I were that goddamn God everyone is still raving about.
When the setting sun yolk breaks through that heavy evening grey, let it bleed fading streaks down on my old mountain tits as I spit a slew of hard golden raisins down on your house.
_____
Up on the rooftop, clickclickclick.
Down through the chimney comes old Saint Nick.
_____
It will happen to me as it happens each year. The overflowing sense of a vast colossal love will spread across my body. As darkness creeps down across the twilight fields, so does this appearance of love in my heart. It isn’t, to be clear, that I am void of love during the rest of the year. Not at all. Instead, what I suspect is happening to me when it does indeed happen is that I am opening myself to this quasi-collision of vulnerable spirits.
In the most basic and antique traditional holiday moods, we would each find ourselves dining on roast goose in a country cottage/ the fire burning warm and bright/ the dog asleep in the glow of things/ the children putting sweets to their lips or laying in the lap of a beloved family member/ drowsy from the exhaustion that runs with joy. Ideally, I guess, there is a Christmas deeply rooted in supposed things that matter. And those things have been filtered down through and dredged in the impressions of many who came before us. Paintings, songs, tales from the past: they all talk of a cheery home at the holidays.
The branding has been happening for a thousand years, I bet. There is no way to avoid the sentimental pull of Christmas because it isn’t a choice, you see. Not any more than, say, your biological drive to feel secure and comfortable, to avoid danger and move into the light of whatever seems most promising at any stage of the game.
Christmas has been transpiring forever now. It is more than a single day. And Christmas Eve is also but a drop in the bigger bucket, too. Now we have such build up, don’t we? And why? To allow us more time to bask in the feeling that true Christmas brings? To move through the stages of celebrating our meager lives by slowly observing the ones around us smiling and wishing and baking and giggling at your cozy face through the hot chocolate steam?
Yes.
And no.
The inclination remains, I suspect, for our cultural DNAs to nudge many of us/ almost all of us who were raised with Christmas from the time we were born, towards a continuous embrace of certain values, ideals, and vague foundations. In other words:
I’m dreaming of a White Christmas.
Please have snow and mistletoe and presents on the tree.
Chestnuts roasting on an open fire.
And the bells were ringing out for Christmas Day!
The list goes on and on. So many songs, so much candle-in-the-window-ness.
Irving Berlin wrote White Christmas and he was a Tin Pan Alley Jewish songwriter staring down the barrel of a coming world war.
What’s my point? I’m glad you asked and I’ll happily tell you. The answer is that none of this makes any sense at all or whatsoever.
Unless, of course, you let it.
In which case, the true meaning of Christmas makes all the sense in the world.
_____
There is a miasmic anxiety that drags ass down through my chest. It’s as if there is a burning barrel on the run in my system/ blowing trashy smoke into my lungs/ tripping me up with sudden flare-ups of some kind of heavy thickness/ something lava-like but worse. In the throes of a holiday anxiety attack (or whatever dumb human term we come up with for it) I can feel a seismic shift in my ability to move forward. I end up standing still as a result. Stopped in my tracks by the burst bubble of reality once again.
I get caught up in thinking about the presents I need to buy/ the thanklessness of kids who are given too much/ the dogs’ drinking the water from the Christmas tree stand and projectile shitting all over the house/ the idea of everyone moving around to various houses with various crews and crowds on Christmas morning instead of all of us just staying put in our pajamas, eating bacon and drinking coffee and listening to the classic jams… to Bing and Ella, to Dean and Frank/ the money I don’t have to pay for the magic I can’t afford/ the thermostat being turned up to 68 and I can’t figure out whose doing it! Because oil is so expensive!/ the front porch not lit up like other years past because I have struggled this year with time and dedication and the spirit of the thing as a whole.
I get overwhelmed with the heartbreak of everything I have seen across the last 12 months.
I stumble into chest pains with the very thought of all of the cards I never send.
In an ever changing world where loners are frowned upon and children are looked at as soft angels/ in times of panic’d souls wandering aimlessly across a post-pandemic landscape being presented live in real time on your neighbor’s teenage idiot’s wildly successful Tik Tok channel/ someone/ or someTHING, god forbid/ is down there shoveling scorched heaps of locomotive coals onto my breath in the middle of motherfucking night.
Not because I deserve it, I don’t think. And not because I haven’t been living right or being decent or heeding the call of the voice in the dark calling out to me to sign on to this religion or that cult or to fill out this pointless job application or that obligatory holiday card for a pernicious relative. Not because of anything, is what I come up with. Except maybe the fact that I have always been wrong about Christmas in a way.
I always thought it was automatic enchantment. I always counted on its yearly promise as absolute and true. The Christmas season, I went around telling myself, will cure me.
Pfff.
Whatever.
Just another lie they sold my ass back in the day.
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Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattlling around his noggin.
