THIS LITTLE LIGHT - 26 December, 2011
26th December, 2011
I haven't written for a few days because a friend called me after she read my last post to say she was concerned about me, that I'd been sounding sad lately. She was right and I loved her for that. Then as it got nearer to the Christmas Day itself and I was still feeling blue I thought, well, who wants to read this shit for Christmas. But then yesterday, the Day itself, the New York Times Magazine gifted us with sad stories of "ordinary" lives, now dead. And today Dick Cavett had a good moan about Christmas, also in the Times, so I figure I'm in good company. Let me just say that today is Boxing Day for this Brit and I'd like to put my mitts on and take a jab: could we please stop with all the expectations, and hype and the awful extremes of poverty and opulence?
The truth is my sadness comes from the privilege of the multi-layered onion I call my life. I am not being blown-up in Baghdad, raped in Syria or having battery acid thrown at my face in India for insufficient dowry funds. I am not homeless, hungry or unloved. Although, while I have not, to-date, been blown up or disfigured by misogyny I have, during the course of my time on planet earth, been raped, homeless, hungry and unloved.
Sadness, like grief, is a solitary experience and sometimes the two coincide, even in the absence of death. My sadness, lately, comes from the inability to be in 2 places at once: I cannot be in England with my sick brother while also showing up here for another relative who is suffering. So I am sad about that. The grief comes from not having shown up as a mother, way back then, when the damage gets done, as it was to my child and before that, to me when my mother gave me up and the one who raised me couldn't mother me.
I guess what I'm getting to here is that while these recent situations would have been difficult at any time of the year, Christmas makes it all worse. The Promise of Perfection that Christmas bears down on us is unbearable. To expect that on the same day every year we will all bask in the glow of a perfect family whilst opening perfect presents by a perfect tree is truly a form of insanity. And talking of trees, could someone tell me why it's ok to butcher, every single year, yet another magnificent, ancient pine, or spruce or fir, in order to prop it up in Rockerfeller Center for a couple of weeks? I walked past this year's on the way to the dentist last week and had to turn away; it was like looking at murder dressed up as joy.
What is wrong with us?
For years we had an artificial tree: no needles on the floor, no guilt, no bagging the damn thing for the garbage. The first Christmas after we moved to this apartment we bought a huge "real" one and brought all the ornaments out of storage, ornaments collected over nearly 40 years, some of them handmade by our kids.
Last year we again bought a huge tree, screwed it into its stand and looked at it for a night, planning to decorate the next day. But when the next day arrived I felt overwhelmed, all those lights, the decorations, those annoying little hooks you hang everything on, the decision as to which side of the tree should face front. I thought oh, f--k it, got the hack saw and spent an hour removing the lower two thirds of its branches, wrapped some white lights around the remaining ones and called it an installation. It received more compliments than any tree of Christmases Past.
We decided to do the same thing this year but the thought of sawing off all those branches was just too much. So we went for this.
Next year I might settle for a pile of pine needles on the floor, or maybe go some place where there are palm trees.
I'm sure...I hope...that many of you were in better spirits this Christmas than yours truly, and that you enjoyed time with family and friends. But I think you might be in the minority. Looking around New York this season I noticed a lot less lights and trees in apartment windows. The economy, I'm sure, has much to do with this. And maybe we're all a bit tired of the pretense, the over-indulgence and the emptiness at the core. Maybe what we'd really like is no more bombing, no more rape, no more corporate greed, less tinsel, more compassion. Isn't that what Christmas was originally about? Taking in a homeless family and letting love shine in the dark?