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.

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Christmas Olympics

There is part of you that wants it all just to go away. The sheer amount of work and money to put on the Christmas holiday is nothing short of titanic. You don't want to even add up the costs and the only thing you know about the work is that there simply is not enough time to get it all in. Getting the tree and decorating are just the starting gun for the Christmas Olympics that starts Thanksgiving weekend and doesn't officially end until the New Year. And like Chevy Chase at the end of National Lampoons Christmas movie, all you can mutter at  the end is, I did it.

And yes kids up the work load. There are the mountain of presents that have to be bought. And these are not cheap gifts. You are talking high tech presents with hefty price tags. IPODS, phones, notebooks, IPADS, laptops, speakers, televisions, plasmas. Yeah ok. This might be a little over the top but not much. Throw in the XBOX's and video games and GPS and the Kindle Fire and you might as well file for bankruptcy now. Underwear and sweaters have been replaced by 4G Smart phones. The low tech Christmas simply doesn't exist anymore.

And then you have the activities. Seeing Santa. Seeing the lights. The windows, the stores, going to the parties, throwing the parties, entertaining extended family and not so extended family. Talking to the friend brought by the friend who ends up at your kitchen table because he or shes parents are in Aruba. The long lost relative who drops in and then disappears for another ten years.

But really it is time that is in shortest supply. That the money runs out is a given. What you don't have enough of is time to get it all in so the Xmas cards take a hit with seeing A Christmas Carol or going caroling or making cookies or putting up those extra lights on that one pine tree that you always said you would decorate stupidly five years ago.

Because then it just ends and you are taking down the tree and stowing the boxes and facing the long slog toward spring with a few memories and fewer dollars, as the countdown begins to the next Christmas Olympics.

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A Christmas Story

"There is a scene at the end of the movie A Christmas Story that has always stayed with me. It is after Ralph finally gets his BB gun and goes to bed. The camera then breaks for his father and mother by the Christmas tree watching the snow fall. The camera pulls back even farther, back outside onto the street, and now we see a small bungalow with an old Hudson parked next to it. The street is quiet and snow covered. That is what I always imagined my childhood should have been: a Hudson parked outside a modest home on a city street with everyone safe and warm, asleep in middle-class slumber. So it does not surprise me that we ended up in the small town of Riverside. "
Rocket Man

This final scene of Christmas Story I used at the end of my novel resonates more than ever today. In my book, Rocket Man, the main character realizes that what really made him happy was behind him in his own childhood. Rosebud for the Orson Wells fans. It is the same theme, our avarice appetite has done us in and we look back to a simpler time. Now we as a nation are looking back to simpler time and wondering how everything got so mixed up. Dale Hammer, my character, decides that going to the smaller, simpler, life is the answer. When we watch A Christmas Story, it is essentially the story of a working middle class family in 1940's America. The father is a salesman and the mother is at home and the children are left to wander in the land before computers, internet, Ipods, Gameboys. So were we. The father and mother, while harried, are living their life and seeming to have an ok time of it. They have their moments of distress as do the kids. But is in the final scene that the true poignancy of the movie rings home. They become one and take in a simple moment in the middle of the night as we see the house from the outside with the Christmas tree in the window and the Hudson in the side drive. Maybe what we see is a life in balance with no claim to something greater, but something in hand. Maybe contentment. Who knows, maybe this Christmas, when money is tight and we can no longer reward ourselves like children gorging on too much sugar, we can find that contentment again. Merry Christmas.
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