Winking lights and prayers to Santa

For some people, these days are hard.

There is something desperate in winking lights and prayers to Santa. So far as I can see there is no war on Christmas; it is Christmas that lays siege to us, haunting the year’s final month with unreachable expectations and bad music that sets up shop in your head like a tumor. This is the guilty season, when we fail to measure up to all the cloying movies and sweet breathed platitudes, when we try to bury our sorrow in carbs and iPads.

And this is how it is if you are well set up, with no real troubles. This is how it is if you know that you are loved and where your dinner will be served. This is how it is if you have achieved a measure of financial security most Americans will never reach, a place where you can see beyond the next paycheck, where you can think about such things as the stock market and interest rates and maybe someday stripping off your armor and laying down your shield. No wonder people dread it.

To cope, we have our rituals. My buddy flies a Scrooge flag at his house, but he does not mean it. People leave little Christmas trees and bottles of whiskey on his porch.

At my house we string lights and hang ornaments, drape stockings here and there. We make special meals, we drink better wine than usual. We go to parties. We take a picture and send it around to friends with genuine wishes for joy and success in the coming year. We have Snoopy in a wicker sled, “the ChristMoose” and a tiny robot snowman whose eye slit flashes red or blue when he’s plugged into a USB port. We have adopted a ironic distance from the holidays of our youth, but there is something fond and genuine as well.

We will have friends over. We will make phone calls. We will strap our dogs into their harnesses and walk around the neighborhood, exchanging greetings with whoever we encounter. And we shall call it Christmas.

Karen remembers how her parents gave her the same doll for Christmas three years in a row. She thinks it started when she was 3 years old. She’d run downstairs on Christmas morning, tear open her presents, and play with her new doll for maybe half an hour before wandering off to pursue other interests.

And then her alert parents would snatch up the doll, return it to the original packaging and stash it away for re-wrapping. It took a couple of Christmases, she says, before the doll started to look familiar and the jig was up.

You might think that was a mean trick to play on a little girl, but it’s a nice memory for Karen. Her delight in the doll was renewable—what mattered to her little-girl self was not the toy, but the having of a present. Someone loved her enough to prepare a little boomlet of transitory joy. Would that we were all so easily, so sweetly deceived. Would that we all had people conspiring to delight us, to make us giggle and coo.

Similarly, when I was growing up, my family was not big into gifts; for us Christmas meant midnight mass and a feast—a reprise of Thanksgiving. My father liked going out on Christmas Eve, not to buy gifts but simply to soak up the energy of the last-minute shoppers. (He did his Christmas shopping in October; we knew not to disturb the boxes in the back of his closet.) We were never deprived, but we were never encouraged to believe resources were unlimited. I cannot recall ever being disappointed by whatever gifts I did receive. I remember quite a few of them—a big metal Texaco-branded firetruck, a Daisy BB rifle, an authentic NFL football. Lots of genuine cowhide wallets.

About the most extravagant gift I can ever remember receiving was a set of Wilson Staff irons when I was 13 to replace the hand-me-downs I had been using. (Made by a company called Shakespeare Sporting Goods, best known as the manufacturer of fishing equipment, they had shafts made of green fiberglass. Shakespeare’s most famous rod—the world’s best-selling pole—is called the “Ugly Stik.” That would have been a more fitting name for their golf clubs.) It was an utter surprise, and those clubs are long gone now, but that Christmas remains.

Most of us understand that anticipation is often more pleasurable than actually having; I don’t know that there was anything more enthralling to me as a child than browsing through a three-inch-thick Sears catalog (both my grandmothers infallibly referred to it as “the wish book”). That’s probably the thrill we miss as adults reconciled to reality—the sense of possibility of being surprised, the delicious anticipation that attends the weeks before the event.

“Seeking” is one of the most pleasurable activities we can pursue; our brains reward this activity with little spritzes of dopamine. We like it so much that a well-wired brain is set up so that fear will interrupt the feedback from the nucleus accumbens (which scientists used to think of as the brain’s “pleasure center” but which actually produces a “wanting” emotion when stimulated) lest we might seek ourselves to death. Like the Buddhists say, you have to regulate the wanting if you want to be happy.

That’s easier if you’ve got what you need. And maybe if you remember that you’re relatively lucky if you can concern yourself with something as abstract as the holiday blahs. That’s what they call a First World problem, chief.

When I was younger I always seemed to work on Christmas; I did the usual newspaper stories. I went to the homeless shelters and the jails. I talked to a lot of modest, selfless, gentle men and women who couldn’t imagine not feeding strangers. The sort of people who give us hope for our kind.

People who follow Jesus Christ’s example, whether or not they believe in miracles.