This Carbon Based Life

By David Glenn Cox

Yon can’t really call the holiday blues depression. It’s not the bad memories which haunt you, but the good ones. When you are young, just the excitement of being out of school. The anticipation of gifts of playing in the snow and ice skating. Our little town had a public ice rink. A quarter acre depression in the park flooded by the fire department every year. A place where social life was free and easy. Before the guns and the drugs and the gangs took over. A place where a kid could be a kid and meet the guys and better still, the girls.

Walking home with that strange feeling in your feet after hours of skating. The house would smell of baking, as my mother would make dozens of batches of cookies. To be placed in tins and exchanged with friends and associates. Coming in from the cold to a warm house and a hot meal. Wishing and hoping for a BB gun or a baseball glove. It’s the reason Charles Dickens “A Christmas Carol” is still relevant because the three ghosts are real and do come to haunt us all.

As the Christmases pile up, they all begin to change somehow. A collection of dated Christmas ornaments. Including Baby’s first Christmas and Baby’s second Christmas. The first year without Mom or the first Christmas without Dad. Instead of anticipating Santa Claus, becoming Santa Claus myself. Hiding bicycles and putting together wagons. The fractured Christmases A.D. After divorce. Where you become a temporary tolerated visitor in your former home. Giving Christmas gifts to children you would never be around to see used and wouldn’t even see opened on Christmas morning.

Starting life over again with new Christmas memories as the old ones were put away like the decorations or tossed out like the old dead tree. Sending gifts to children without even a thank you in return. Children too young to understand but old enough to hold a grudge. Punished for things beyond your control, and punished to this day. Excluded in a generational wound and unpacked anew every year at Christmas.

Even attending Midnight Mass was joyous, if only getting it out of the way and freeing up all of Christmas day. Then the world would stop and the only stores open were a drug store filled with people looking for batteries they’d forgotten or film for their cameras. And then maybe one gas station near the highway would be open. The world would stand still for just a minute or two. Visiting relatives and thinking how peculiar their trees looked when compared to our own. My mother was meticulous in putting up our tree. Putting it up one week before Christmas and coming down on New Year’s Day.

My job was getting the boxes from the basement and testing the lights. I could help installing the lights, but the ornaments were my mother’s sole prerogative. The small ones towards the top and the larger ones towards the bottom. And then the tinsel added one strand at a time. Added lightly at the top and growing heavier towards the bottom. Leaving an object of art in our living room. Compared with the artificial plastic trees of today. It was glorious. The house smelled of Scotch Pine, giving us a subliminal Christmas sensory experience.

While living in the South, we had a nice man in town. Who had built a life-sized Santa’s workshop. The week before Christmas, he would sit in his sleigh in his Santa Claus outfit and parents would bring their children to meet this kind local man and ersatz Santa. There was only one slight problem. Santa had a thick Southern accent. “What chu want Santa Claus to bring you for Chrismas, little boy?” Department stores and malls still had Santa’s to visit with. Now all washed away by corporate bean counters crunching numbers.

Being a baby boomer, when I was small. I lived on a baby boomer street. All the families were the same age, and all had kids the same age. The neighbors all pitched in and  bought a Santa Suit. Then a large rotund neighbor would visit each house on the street delivering the gifts the parents had left in their cars. Don’t try to tell us Santa wasn’t real. It was the same guy every year, and he always knew all of our names. Santa would be rewarded at each house by a cup of Christmas cheer. The last house on the street, The Westinburgs were certain their house was Santa’s last stop. Because Santa fell asleep on their couch. Imagine, being a kid and finding Santa sawing logs on your couch on Christmas morning.

But as time goes by, those memories drift away from you until they are almost imaginary. My first Christmas with the love of my life. We were so poor that we couldn’t even afford gifts to exchange. We had a tree and a roof over our heads. We had a twelve pack of beer and a snack tray. Warmth, love and the purest Christmas experience of my life. A true Christmas experience, without any gifts or wrapping paper. We watched YouTube videos of Christmas home movies from the 50s and 60s. Brutally kibitzing about the clothes and the gifts. Making jokes about the people. “That was the year before Uncle Mike went to prison!”

But even though the movies weren’t from our own families in a way, they were. They were all the same. All the same experience shared by everyone. All wearing the same period clothes, playing with the same period toys and period furniture. Someone clowning for the camera and some shying away from the camera. Waving goodbye as they got in the 1960s Ford or Chevrolet. Each of us experiencing the transient experience of Christmas without ever really understanding the gravity of it. Not discovering the true beauty of it all until decades later, after they are all long gone.

One year, my mother fed the dog table scraps from our Christmas eve dinner. And as we gathered in the living room to exchange gifts. The poor little dog had the worst case of gas you could ever imagine. He would sit in the corner and then all of a sudden, this horrible smell would erupt from where he was sitting. We would all call out his name and he would wag his little tail, not understanding why everyone was calling his name. You can’t make that up and even thinking about it now decades later, still makes me smile. I can still see his bright little eyes and his little tail wagging.

But that is where the holiday blues originate. Those days are long gone. The kids are grown and the wife has passed. Christmas only reminds of the things which I once had but are now gone. Plastic trees and no more home-baked goods, no more Santa’s in stores. And the ever-present feeling that it will never be quite the same, ever. My Christmas wish is that you savor every moment to the maximum. Quickly, before those moments are all gone. Before you find yourself adrift from Christmas present. Haunted by Christmas past and resigned to Christmas future.

“I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.” ― Charles Dickens