#87

Tomorrow is Christmas Eve! It's just possible that you might not have known that and missed it, or forgotten what day it was entirely, or some such trouble. Then it would be on my conscience. I am happy to remind you.

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Christmas is a pretty good time of year. I have never experienced any of these nightmare Christmases so celebrated and aggrandized in the wider culture, nor have I ever felt the approach of yuletide as a groaning doom which my shoulders must bleed under once every year. I know a lot of people really do, and the omnipresence of Christmas is torture, a torture whose chronoterritory expands yearly, like a holly, jolly cancer eating the calendar.

Deplorable as the mass hypercommercialization of Christmas is, and despite the trauma, inseparable from the holiday which afflicts so many, Christmas is a net good. I have been known to speak in a voice progressively more thick with rage to the point of actual spit coming out of my mouth as I talk about it all; the hypocrisy, the greed, the avarice, the out-of-control acquisitiveness. The holiday as it is marketed and often expressed is a twisted nightmare inverse of its rooted intentions: spiritual and physical rebirth, honor and charity for the humble and the meek, breaking bread with loved ones, the rising of the sun and other stars--renewal, sustenance, the promise of ascension.

These are necessary things to act out, even if it's all cocked up practically beyond recognition, even if mostly it's awful. It's because it's taking a shot at it. Taking a shot at it is the only way to get it right even once. Feeling that feeling even once is worth it. Worth it all. Pays for itself and everything else.

The only way to get anything--anything-- out of life is to believe in something that's not real, and making it happen, making it true. Believing in real shit is comparatively easy, still complicated, but easier. The other thing's a little harder, but it makes the real more real and the unreal more real than that, which I believe is sublime. And as human beings, we need an agreed-upon time, a significant time, to remind ourselves of that, to remind each other.

It is possible to let go of what has been, to embrace what is, to become prepared and willing and able to love more than before, give more than before, rejoice more than before, more than ever in your life, in ways you barely dared imagine and some you couldn't have. 

Truly, it is something which will hold you through the year. Truly, it is not about the single day, but what that day can, through the laughably simple spell of belief and love, kindle in your spirit--the transfigurations that begin as tiny moments of love and grow great within us, sustaining and bolstering us, if we are lucky, till next Christmas.

Have a merry holiday, dear readers. Season's blessings upon all of you, and all those you love. May peace reign supreme over a healing world.


--JL