Per Annum, Ad Nauseum

Why the holidays bring out the worst in all of us.

As I’m writing this, Thinking Man is approaching its first birthday. I launched this project ceremoniously on the first of January, 2022. I hit the ground running, published nine pieces in the month of January. My output slowed, and by the end of March, I had hit a brick wall. I didn’t write a single sentence in the months of April, May, or June, surrendered a quarter of a year to grumpy self-indulgence, whining, “I just can’t do it anymore.” I never exactly ’gave up’ (in fact, I probably spent more time thinking and talking about writing in those three months than any time before or since). I just kept putting things off until tomorrow. This is a common habit. In fact, I found myself in another ‘rut’ this month, just in time for (or perhaps because of) the holidays. This is not a unique situation, of course. I’m certainly not the first writer to complain about not being able to write. I’m also not the first sufferer of the ‘holiday blues.’ It’s just a fact of life at this point: at the same time each year, I will watch myself fall into the same habits, mutter the same complaints, and sit back, somehow kind of enjoying the madness, powerless to stop any of it.

It’s funny—if you observe any adult celebrator-of-Christmas walking around in December, they’re inevitably donning some type of deer-in-headlights expression, somewhere in between a scowl and a look of surprise. The look’s intensity is directly correlated with the size of the individual’s family, and intensifies exponentially with each week that passes and each gift that they’ve put off buying. I’m not convinced anyone is immune. There’s something stressful in the air during Christmastime. Perhaps it is the consumer advertisements reminding you that no, you can’t afford everything that you want, and that yes, this does make you an inferior spouse/parent/person. Perhaps it’s the shopping, or the cooking, or the anxiety of seeing relatives, or the sadness of not seeing relatives, or the traffic, or the music, or the cars with reindeer antlers on them, or the people walking around with huge smiles plastered on their faces looking suspiciously carefree and irritatingly jolly. Whatever the reason, the first three weeks of December gradually awaken the beast inside of all of us, and then, after the Ragnarok that is the holiday itself, the week between Christmas and New Year’s is a kind of sleepy purgatory made of stale cookies and waning resentments.

And then comes the New Year…

A time of short-lived commitments and the self-loathing that follows. How many exercise bikes are purchased in the month of January to be turned into laundry drying racks by February? How many first chapters of novels wind up in laptop trash bins? I don’t claim to be above this. Thinking Man, during its quarter-year hiatus, was a classic example of a failed New Year’s resolution. It’s human. There’s something in us that constantly yearns for self-improvement. Unfortunately, that same part of us has a short attention span, and rarely maintains its ‘gung-ho’ enthusiasm for something once its novelty wears off. My intent here is not to advocate for the ‘slow burn’ of humble discipline (although this is the only way that you can make any sort of progress). My question is this: why do we keep doing the same thing year after year, always somehow expecting different results?

I’m convinced that it has something to do with the damned Christmas carols. The same nine or ten songs that you’ve heard two months out of the year every single year since birth, remade in increasingly annoying incarnations. Music has a way of transporting you in time and place, completely immersing you in a moment in your past. It turns memory into a living, sensory experience. There are pieces of music that remind me of vacations I’ve taken, of friends that I’ve had, of my childhood. Suddenly I’m there, standing beside the person of whom I’m reminded, at the exact age I was when the song was important to me. It’s miraculous that sounds can do this to us.

So where do we go when we listen to Christmas music? To every year of our life?

It’s inescapable. I’d bet that people who don’t celebrate Christmas are still afflicted by this. Unless you live your life as a hermit for the entirety of the holiday season, Christmas songs are going to be shoved down your throat every time you enter a business, attend a social function, carelessly change a radio station, watch any sort of advertisement. No wonder everyone is in a state of neurosis by the time the holiday actually arrives. We’ve all spent the last two months regressing every time we step within the vicinity of a speaker. And not just to one state, either. To our childhoods. To the best Christmas we’ve ever had. To the worst Christmas we’ve ever had. Relationships and breakups and family resentments and annual frustrations. All of these are coming back constantly, and never in a situation where we can pay enough attention to them to reconcile with them! No one puts on Christmas music to contemplate. It’s background noise, always accompanied by a distraction. So all of these memories are just nagging in the back of our heads, just below the surface, slowly chipping away at years and years of personal growth. No wonder we throw tantrums, become irritated by the people around us without really knowing why. We’re living in the headspace of our eight or nine-year-old selves when we first discovered that Santa Claus wasn’t real.

It’s all just a byproduct of the holiday’s entire point: to force you to remember. You may not remember where you were on a random Tuesday last year, but you probably remember last Christmas. The day is a marker that reminds us of how far we’ve come, and everything that we’ve encountered along the way. It’s a reminder to get together, to decorate, to appreciate the people you love, to appreciate life and its small pleasures.

It’s also a reminder of everything bad that’s ever happened to you in December.

So, as this holiday season concludes, forgive your anxious mother or your cranky father or your sister who comes to your house every year empty-handed and has the nerve to mumble under her breath when you ask her for help with the dishes. We’re all in a state of emotional regression. It’s not our fault. It’s the tradition, the repetition. We eat the same things, take out the same decorations from the same dusty bin in the bottom of the same closet. We buy the same obligatory gifts for the same people. All of this ‘sameness’ brings you back in time. To Christmas morning excitement, gratitude, happy memories shared with loved ones, and also to fifty-yard-long unmoving department store lines on Christmas Eve, hearing the song “Last Christmas” for the fourth time in an hour and swearing that the next time it comes on it will be everyone’s last Christmas, cursing yourself for forgetting just one present and cursing its recipient and the cashier and consumerism and the baby Jesus himself.