By Myles Ludwig
’Tis the season of anxiety. Freakouts are in full bloom. The Christmas craze has descended upon the land and the shadow of New Year’s Eve neurosis is coming back again along with feigned resolutions and February’s bills.
The other night, the Costco parking lot in Lantana was ablaze with the blinding colors of taillights and I couldn’t find my car for about 23 minutes. I was riding around the parking lot in one of the basket-equipped scooters that make everyone feel less-than. I’m sure I looked bewildered when an old friend leaned over to say hello.
I felt as if I’d been caught doing something criminal, as if I had eaten more than my allotted share of Costco cuisine, those toy-sized free samples of brie and red pepper jelly that don’t make any taste sense, especially after the green-flecked kale-and-cucumber chips and Brownie Brickle (If every piece was a bite of the edge, where was the rest of it?).
Everyone in Christendom has been ordered to be happy and to prove their worth by spending as much money as possible. It’s a duty. A social command.
I don’t mean to disparage this period — certainly I have close friends in different parts of the world who can hardly wait to haul out the family jewels, wrap and unwrap, sit on Santa’s lap … even go to midnight Mass. Some people really do love this time — God bless them — and I’m hardly one to resist a bit of trickle-down joy. Neither Grinch nor Scrooge am I.
I’ve passed some pretty fine holidays: snapping phone shots of my daughter in front of the massive Rockefeller Center tree; watching the ball drop while standing in Times Square; burning my lips on hot chestnuts in the street; sipping a nip of Jack Frost in Detroit before it flamed out into bankruptcy; riding in a one-horse open sleigh packed with friends through snowfields in Vermont; doing a little dance with family at the Kennedy Center; reveling in a Classic 6 on Riverside Drive; flirting in Park Avenue apartments; going much much too far at office parties; holding hands with a fading star at the Savoy. These come quickly to mind.
Lovely memories, some poignant.
There’ve been bad times, too. Paradoxically, it seems to be the perfect time of the year to break up a romance. Probably, one couldn’t feel lonelier.
I’ve been ambiguous about Christmas since childhood. While my family and friends observed Hanukkah, lighting little Pez-colored candles and spinning the plastic dreidels of fate, some neighbors were hanging fragrant pine bough and holly wreaths on their doors — something like the reverse of Passover, if you know what I mean.
I was a little kid when my mother slipped me a child’s wristwatch with a red plastic band, saying it was a secret Christmas gift and admonishing me not to tell my father. She meant well, though I doubt she was thinking about how I could wear it without him seeing it.
She wanted me to feel included, to be part of the wider world I guess, a gesture of inclusiveness, but it set up a lifelong subconscious conspiracy, the effect of which still lingers, though my father breathed his last the day after Christmas not so long ago.
There are places where the holiday seems incongruous. Certainly, Florida is one of those. It’s a balmy day today and on the street below my balcony, marathon runners in tank tops and shorts are panting by on their way to the beach while a few yards away, a neighbor has put his decked-out plastic tree in front of his door as if to ward off evil spirits. I used to live in Hawaii where Christianity had been imposed by the embryonic oligarchy of the missionary-mercantile complex, and the closest thing to snow we got was rain, yet everybody followed the holiday rules.
Few have an opportunity to see what the holiday looks like through the eyes of someone from another culture entirely. Westerners rarely get a chance to catch a glimpse of this exuberant irrationality unless they’ve spent a few holidays outside the boundaries of Christendom.
I remember a year in Hong Kong with my girlfriend from Thailand rushing to buy her gifts for a holiday that made no sense to her, just as throwing flour or water on passersby to celebrate the New Year made no sense to me.
Ah, well. Deck the halls.
Myles Ludwig is a media savant living in Lake Worth.