The Sheer Exhaustion of Christmas

By now you are beat. You have gone beyond sleep deprivation into the land of  sleep as a moment between doing the million things you still have to do. You don't sleep. You nap and then get up and start buying and wrapping and planning and cooking and attending and drinking and eating. You are so over saturated with food now that it is a drug. A drug of sugar and oil and fat. But it just keeps coming. It seems everywhere you go there is chocolate  and cookies and fried food and those beers and cocktails that seem to keep popping up. Christmas exhaustion is upon you and it is only the twenty third of December.

When did it become like this you wonder distantly. Certainly Christmas is for kids. And they don't appreciate the drive down to see Santa at Macys or the drive to see those windows on State Street or the drive to see the decorations or the drive to get the tree go to he hundredth family get together, the neighbor party, the Christmas movie at the old theatre in the city. And you wonder who you are doing all this for and maybe next year you wont do half of the rituals that bleed you dry of money and time. But you know you will.

And then it is Christmas Eve and you begin the wrapping marathon. You are by now two punch drunk people going through the motions. You have taken to wearing the same clothes. You have gained weight from mega caloric intake. You are slightly hungover from drinking every day. You are exhausted because through all this you are still working! Have to get that last email off to the boss. And now it is the final drive to the goal line of Christmas morning.

And you fall into bed into dead sleep. Six AM and the kids are on you. You stumble out hollow eyed, pasty faced and watch the frenzy unfold. The house is trashed. You sit through it all with a half smile and finally find a cold cup of coffee. You go outside to breathe the cold air and stare at the Christmas day, muttering like that Chevy Chase character in National Lampoons Christmas movie...I did it.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Why Do We Watch Those Old Christmas Movies?

Bing and Fred dancing around on the screen with beautiful women in long gowns while other people sit around in tuxedos and laugh it up. Could anything be further from our world now? But of course around Christmas those old movies sneak out and suddenly we are watching Holiday Inn, White Christmas, It's A Wonderful Life, The Bishops Wife, Christmas in Connecticut. And those people from the forties come out in their black and white persona's and give us a glimpse of a time gone by. The question is why do we watch these old grainy films from sixty years ago?

Comfort. Continuity. Ritual. A curiosity about what people called happiness over half a century ago. Maybe it is all of these or maybe it is because in our own world we have no sense of time anymore and it seemed those people from the forties and fifties had all the time in the world. No cellphones. No texts. No Internet. They were squarely in the moment and even though they rushed around there seemed to be more symmetry to their lives. Even if it was all a fantasy.

And we cannot discount nostalgia. Very powerful emotion. A yearning for times that were simpler and in many ways better. A lot of these movies took place during World War II. Could the time have been any clearer? We were the good guys and everyone else was the bad guys. American culture was at it's zenith squarely in the American century. True there were no minorities but that is part of the American fantasy also, everyone just looks like us and acts like us.

And then there is the one thing about these movies that is probably the strongest reason we watch these black and white shadow plays. They go back to when we were children. These movies played out when we waited for Santa. They played when our uncles fell asleep in their chairs and snoozed the day away. They played when we came in from a snowball fight and drank hot chocolate. They played when we were young.

And that is what Christmas is all about really. The ghosts of the past come back once a year and dance around before we pack it all back up again. And so Bing and Fred and Cary Grant and Babara Stanwyck all come alive again and they are young again too. Just like we were.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/