Out of the Cold

There is a bittersweet moment when shopping for my loved ones. Especially at Christmas.

I am a Christmas grouch. Life never runs smoothly and there’s never enough time and to have this demanding season thrown in the middle of it annoys me. I’d rather just keep to routine. But beneath the commercialism and consumerism and short-lived attempts at recalling some ancient Middle Eastern mythology there is some real cheer and eventually it finds me and I start to enter into the spirit.

I’m not sure what the spirit is. As described in the Dickens story, it is the happy fun pagan element of Yuletide, which Scrooge, the atheistic grandchild of dour Puritans who regarded Christmas as un-Christian, could not in his coldness abide. The Spirit of Christmas was the new unfolding merging of ancient traditions of social order reversal –- a-wassailing we will go -– treat us or else –- with the post-Puritan Victorian sense of sentimental Christian charity. Not a bad thing altogether, but I don’t know how much of that applies to Christmas today.

Gawd, I think way too damn much.

Anyway, so I go to the stores and I start casting about for material ways to show my love. This is a sickness but so many of us have it there’s no point seeking a cure. Not really knowing how to show my love in earthy daily ways that forge strong bonds, I reflexively, and probably as a typical male and/or consumer-culture citizen, put store in the giving of gifts or more precisely, the focused providing of wealth. I give not just things, but things the person given to will really enjoy having.

And in that moment of acquiring some desirable object or other, of imagining the moment when it becomes a part of and enriches the life of someone I love, my heart fills, and I’m standing there in an aisle at Best Buy surrounded by clamshell-encased technology with a water balloon in my chest about to explode and pink edges forming in my eyes.

But it passes. Suppression of emotion must be a survival trait: It happens so readily and without a thought.

It’s followed by a sort of peace -– mission accomplished but to a much greater degree, a general thankfulness that I am in a position to celebrate the season more or less as everyone else does, especially if I don’t struggle with it. My heart goes out to those who cannot – the poor, and the unloved, and to those who are losing their jobs. Sure, you could say that’s the spirit, or part of it. But that isn’t seasonal, really. I can afford a day off and an extra meal and a shiny gizmo or two. That isn’t seasonal either. I’m thankful all the time. Maybe a little bit more now, because I can duck out of the cold. But I still think of children who never really get presents. It all makes for a complex emotional cocktail. What do you do with it?