The lights shine brightly from the time I awake until days end. I don’t even have to go outside to turn them on, which is perfect for a lazy bugger like me. And our Christmas tree? It isn’t real, not because I don’t like real trees (I do), but an artificial tree can go up sooner and therefore be enjoyed for longer. We put ours up and decorated it before December 1st which pre-pandemic would be seen as far too early. COVID changed all that though, didn’t it? All that isolation and darkness was depressing, so collectively as a society we decided to do something about it and we lit up the night. I loved it! Why not? Let’s get this Holiday Season Shit Show rolling! Yeah, you may have already guessed but I really like Christmas! Whoa! I know, eh? Who would have thought? I probably should have outgrown this a long time ago but there’s still a lot of the little boy in me, God damnit!
Does anyone remember thumbing through one of these? Pre-internet, we are talking the Holy Bible of Christmas shopping, the Sears Christmas Gift Catalogue! I’ll be honest, it breaks my heart that it’s no longer in existence because The Wish Book was so much more than just a catalogue. As a child I would get lost for hours inside its covers; lists were made for future reference, items were marked out in coloured pens and particular pages became dog-eared if an item was especially wished for. Much of what was dreamt about never materialized under the tree Christmas morning but that’s life. It’s not about having it all right now though, is it? No, we find the real magic wrapped up in a world of anticipation where you have no clue about what is going to happen next but the uncertainty churning inside you is sugar coated with heaps of fucking awesome!
Do you remember? What happened? Okay, who did shots of Double Jack (Jack Daniels and Yukon Jack) from the tailgate of a Chevy pick-up in the parking lot of your high school before going into the Christmas Dance? Come on now, don’t look at me like that! Liquor swilling while “Lick It Up” pounds through the Blaupunkt sound system? You never did that? well, if you didn’t, you damn well should have! Remember the excitement and anticipation of what was going to happen when you got inside? You can argue that this kind of thing could happen at any time, right? True, but it didn’t, it happened at Christmas! It was an instance in your life never to be repeated. Then the next year, Grade 12, a snowstorm blew in so bad that at the last minute the dance was cancelled. Nobody at the pre-dance party cared; all splendidly attired in our Holiday finery, young and beautiful, we got on with the celebration our magnificent selves. It now appears to be an unknowing commemoration of a concluding epoch, because “out there” was indeed waiting for us. Not that night though, oh no! Yeah, Christmas in High School was still pretty cool!
Did I mention hockey? Santa obviously knew of my love of the game and was kind enough to leave me a net under the tree pretty much every year. We would literally wear those nets out dragging them around town playing the real national sport of our time, road hockey (it’s not street hockey okay, don’t ever call it street hockey, its ROAD HOCKEY). Anyway, it was a beautiful gift that gave my friends and I countless hours of enjoyment, especially when we actually got to playing. There were frequent flair ups of violence, I won’t lie. Blood was spilt, and we did swear A LOT! Random question: Where were all the adults when this carnage was taking place? We were in full view of everyone, in the middle of neighbourhoods, F-bombs flying, fists and sticks crunching on bone, children bleeding – hey, it must be a GEN X thing, we were raised a bit different lol! If we were beating on each other, then we weren’t breaking other shit, a good deal for everyone, except maybe us kids!
Don’t get me wrong, taking a frozen tennis ball in the nads while a group of monstrous, snot nosed savages mock your obvious discomfort is a wonderful, good time but age forces you to move on, jump into that scary new world of old people and attempt to grow up. Christmas however was still banging; it was a time of excess, of big hair, BIG ROCK, bad drugs and bonging beer. Yeah, we rocked Christmas!
But, and there’s always a but, things changed. “Bright Lights, Big City Christmas” morphed into a monotonous, montage of melancholy! How did this happen? Simple answer to that, we got old! Not “OLD” but you know what I mean, not young. Christmas never changed but how we viewed it certainly did. Personally, I had to make my own peace with this new, more responsible way of being. I’ll be honest, it was far from an overnight transformation. For few years my perfect Christmas was being alone with a stack of new books, a few tins of Copenhagen and unlimited coffee. There were no lights, no tree and no Jingle Bells, just me and my reading and a huge Chesapeake Bay retriever laying at my feet ripping ass. God, I miss that dog!
Anyways, just when I had accepted a slightly anti-social, non-domesticated lifestyle, along comes Lady Hurricane, family, house, hosting Christmas dinners and yeah, well…this fucking shit is awesome! Slowly but surely, Christmas has become fun again. Not like in the BIG ROCK, boozer badass days because seriously, I’d never survive that (I have no idea how I did the first time), but in a deeper, more complex manner. For me, it’s no longer about the full on, steady smash in the face stimulation of earlier times – fuck, who even wants that, Mart needs his naps! No, it’s the small snapshots that I cherish now, like when we first put up the tree and shut off all the lights in the house before plugging in those on the tree. Wow! For the briefest of moments there was just “simple joy”. Or how about this – Do you know that each and every night I go outside and look at our Christmas lights; there’s nothing at all special about them really, but I stand out there in the mind numbing cold and think about how lucky I am to be alive and happy to have these red, white and blue lights to look at. For the back balcony lights there is a timer and every night they come on at dark and just about every night I am right there waiting for the multi-coloured magic show to begin. The timer is set for 7 hours which means the lights don’t shut off until midnight. Why? Well, because going to sleep to the faint glow of red, yellow, green and blue reminds me of when I was a little fella snugly tucked under my down quilt. I could look up and see the glow of our Christmas lights through the curtains and frosted window. I remember the anticipation of the magical night to come, sleep becoming harder and harder the closer and closer we got to Christmas Eve. I remember Christmas concerts and Christmas plays and I remember being happy! Happy is good! I like being happy and yes, absolutely, I like Christmas!
Happy Holidays to one and all!!!!