It was…a lot

“Happy New Year” starts every conversation the first week of January.

“How was your holiday?” I noted, following the standard script.

“Good.  It was good, but a lot.”

“A lot?” I wonder. “Santa Claus went overboard?”

“Not Santa Claus.  In-laws.  And kids. It was just…a lot. Of people”

I get it.  We needed some recovery too. This brief conversation happened, well, a lot this year.  Several friends and colleagues noted the overwhelming sense of the season.  What shifted this year was the tone of deflation that accompanied the new year.  The Christmas season is busy: extra events, parties, celebrations, dinners.  It’s these traditions that make the season special.  It can also be quite tiring.  The afternoon nap on Christmas Day is something I look forward to as a parent — a celebration of completion: the presents are open, the surprises are revealed and I’m spent, empty from giving.  But the sense from friends this year was something quite different.  A sense of ‘empty-by-taking.’  It’s one thing to nap because everything has been given away and another thing to need a moment (or a day or a week or a month) to regroup, as if Uncle Leon were one of those wraiths from Happy Potter that sucks the life out of people.  

But what changed?  Am I just growing older and this is just the work of adulting I’ve been blind to?  Are people more terrible than they were a few years ago?  Are we less resilient in our ability to handle increased activity so we have less margin for people?  

The answer isn’t simple.  And you’re right, I don’t know your Uncle Leon. He’s undoubtedly much closer to the anti-Christ than you’ve described him, so thanks for toning it down.  Still, the magic of Christmas is the pageants and the caroling, but it’s also sleepovers with cousins and grandma in her bathrobe until noon because she’s making cinnamon rolls and playing Candyland.  Again.  The people are the point aren’t they?  

I’d suspect that this partly informs the trend of ‘Friendsgiving;’ spending holidays — holy days, sacred days — with those that make me feel good and go back to their own homes instead of those with whom I am connected by by blood or decree.  

And look, ‘Boundaries’ is mandatory reading in my house.   We can often be too good at keeping out the crazy, but doses of crazy help us calibrate loud from wrong. I do wonder about maintaining healthy boundaries with unhealthy people?  I wonder how we find holiness at the Bazaar.  This is the essence of holidays — holy days, set apart from the rest as sacred days to be cherished.  Grandma’s bathrobes and cinnamon rolls and Uncle Leon and his new ex-girlfriend are the point.  It’s at the Bazaar that the holy is most needed.