The C-word

My wife said, “you’re a cynic.”  Christmas Cynicism in the 1st Degree.  This was the charge, and she handed it down over the tapas goodness at the Iberian Pig on the evening of the 23rd of November.  We’d gotten a babysitter and were out for the night.  A fuel-up and then a concert.

“What?  What’d I say?” I answered.  Can a man be cynical in the way he dips a finger of fried eggplant into a red pepper aioli?  Is it cynical to bite sideways into a pork cheek taco?  Though my feelings were bruised, I managed to have one more of the savory wild boar albondigas.  But despite the hints that I no longer cared to share in the conversation - cloth napkin tied around and holding hostage my eyes, tea candles driven deep to deafen my ears – she pressed on.

“We need to talk about our Christmas plans,” she said. 

If I was guilty, then why would she want to know my preference?  Wouldn’t “go jump in a humbug-hole” be the Christmas Cynic’s universal response to any Kris Kringle query?      

“You realize we haven’t done Thanksgiving yet?” I said.  My wife gave a wince, as if her tongue had changed into pine bark, and I knew that I had confirmed for her what she already believed.  Still, I thought it was a fair point.  As I looked around the restaurant, already decked with string lights and holly, I felt it was perfectly reasonable to ingest one holiday of excess before moving on to another.  To THE other, no less than the granddaddy of them all.  The Rose-Sugar-Cotton-Orange- BCS Tostitos Fritos Taco Bell National Championship Fiesta Bowl, all-in-one, one-stop-shop, Seven Deadly Sins “gone wild,” all under a big top, Christmas!

I tried, mildly, to defend my character, to explain myself. But the conversation soon drifted into the rest of the evening.     

Then a few days ago I prevented what I thought was some jerkwad in his black Volvo trying to cut me off before I turned into the small parking lot of my kids’ school.  We both pulled in and got out of our cars, and I saw that the jerkwad was a woman, a mom refreshed with smiles.  She immediately called to me over the roof of her car. 

“Oh, I’m so sorry. I wasn’t trying to cut you off. I thought you were pulling over to park on the street.  I was just trying to go around,” she said.

“Oh, no problem,” I said.  She was very apologetic, maybe even embarrassed.  It was an honest mistake.  But unable to leave well-enough alone I added, “even if you were trying to cut me off, ‘tis the season, right?”

Despite what you may think of me by this point (oh, another of those bah-humbug types!), I don’t want Christmas to be eradicated.  Nor do I think that December is when people exhume a special selfishness they’ve kept buried for eleven months.  Nevertheless, this sarcasm comes from somewhere. 

What I know is that I don’t feel like a Christmas Cynic.  I watch holiday movies, the same ones year after year.  I get sappy at the same scenes, my face a river of tears, a bubbling cauldron of nasal congestion, when Kevin’s mother finally gets back home and apologizes to him at the end of Home Alone.  I listen to the album Christmas with Robert Shaw and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus and know that my mother is one of those Grammy-winning voices.  These are private, personal things.  Things I experience at home with my family and can turn on and off as I please.

The Christmas I’ve grown to dislike is the public one.  The wild, thoughtless selling and buying, market-driven Christmas.  The reports from Black Friday and Cyber-Monday given out as weathercasts, as if their earnings are yet another Groundhog Day, something to decide whether I take my warm happiness outside or keep my chilly gloom in.  The everywhere Christmas where fans, religionists in secular clothing, complain about a simple phrase “happy holidays.”      

“Eh,” some say, “just ignore Christmas.”  Even if I wanted to, this would be impossible.  It would mean not paying attention to anything outside my own half-acre of life during this ten percent of the year, ten percent of my life, that is “the Christmas season.”           

It seems I’ve developed another type of the dreaded disease.  This time a Christmas Cancer.  In small amounts I can handle it, just as my body tolerates and disposes of cancerous cells quite regularly.  It’s this larger, metastasizing growth that I find difficult to live with. 

In the end, maybe the only real solution comes from those who say, “it’s the spirit of Christmas, man! The spreading of cheer and goodwill.”  And I agree that it should be this, and maybe only this.  Without the buying and selling.  And it sounds like a pretty good model for all fifty-two weeks, not just five or six. 

Photo Credit:  20th Century Fox