The Suffering of Holidays
I love the holiday season.
I love the decorations. This year, I had three Christmas trees, all of them decorated since early December. I have an advent calendar. I have a wreath. I have outdoor lights. And I love seeing others’ decorations. We made our yearly pilgrimage to Disney World to see those.
I generally hate shopping but love trying to find presents for loved ones and the happy feeling of when I get it right.
I don’t much like cooking on a daily basis, but I love making special meals for Christmas Eve (risotto, this year), Christmas (lasagna, this year), and New Year’s Day (Mom’s mac and cheese, cabbage, and black eyed peas every year because it’s a Southern thing; eat as many black eyed peas as possible for good luck during the new year).
I love creating and sending a Christmas card every year.
I love Christmas movies and shows and lost track of how many I watched this year.
I love Christmas carols, both listening to them and playing them on the piano, singing along all the time.
Yet with all of my cooking, movie watching, decorating, and singing, underneath each Christmas carol has been a sad melody reminding me that this happiness is temporary.
It’s not so much that I’m a kid at Christmas but a kid cartoon duck, as in Huey, Dewey, and Louie, the nephews of Donald Duck.
One of the shows I streamed as I decorated was Mickey’s Once upon a Christmas, which features the three ducks living a Christmas version of the movie Groundhog Day. The boys wish upon a star on Christmas night that Christmas will never end. Their wish comes true, and it is Christmas every day, until, at last, the boys realize that daily Christmas isn’t so fun after all, learn their lesson, and break the cycle.
I get the lesson, and I’m not going to wish on a star that it would be Christmas every day because, of course, what makes Christmas special is that it is, in fact, special, a once-a-year event, not daily.
But I’m still a bit sad.
To a mild degree, I’m experiencing anticipatory grief, which is not the loss of something but the anticipation of loss. I’ve lived it in a much deeper and more painful form as the daughter of two parents who had dementia. For those us of who care about loved ones who slip away from us slowly, the grieving is prolonged and projected into the future as we know the end is inexorably coming.
This is what the Buddha meant when he proclaimed the first of the Four Noble Truths: life contains suffering. Life always includes loss.
Fortunately, the third noble truth teaches us that there is a cure for suffering. Yes, there is loss, but we can learn to let go without making ourselves suffer more deeply.
Having lived with anticipatory grief in its much heavier form, I can channel the second noble truth, finding the source of my suffering, and recognize that I tend to create suffering for myself during the holidays as I dread their end, marring my enjoyment of their presence.
The cure for my suffering is to be present with holiday cheer entirely and stop projecting ahead to when it will be over.
As I pass the discarded Christmas trees in my neighbors’ front yards and see fewer and fewer decorations, it’s okay to feel a little sadness, but I’m going to keep my trees decorated a little longer, drink one more eggnog (though, let’s be honest: that stuff is too sweet), sing a few more Christmas songs, and revel in the knowledge that Christmas will come again, that I can keep enjoying it a tiny bit longer, and that I need not make myself suffer unnecessarily through clinging to happiness.
