To arms and to Xmas

Not a word of a lie here: I’ve grown into Christmas ambivalence. This is a significant step – neither up nor down, simply away – a departure from Christmas gloom.

I used to be eyebrow-deep in Christmas despair. I had it all: why-is-everyone-happy-except-me, depression, sense of isolation.

And then, in an even darker realm, I had the privilege of trying to cope with those feelings while dealing with the expectations and responsibilities that come with being a part of my family.

All in all, it was a fairly meh situation. Year after year after year.

Christmas is not like Divali. You don’t get a pass when someone close to you has died.

With age (because this year age has caught up with me in the manner of the Bajan vagrant who once threw a rock at me), that is to say, only in the past few months, I’ve decided that if Christmas won’t give me a pass, I must do what I can to give it some space.

If you listen to the radio at all, you’ve probably heard Frank Kelly’s Christmas Countdown. I think it’s billed as a song, because the term “spoken word” was not in popular usage when the Irish actor and singer came up with it. It’s the traditional 12 days of Christmas, physically delivered to the character in the song and his aged mother.

Think for a second of having a whole pear tree delivered to your doorstep and in it, a whole partridge.

This is already bad news, since partridges like the ground.

Now work your way all through the other 11 days. The humble home is now an aviary (and why is the original song so bird-centric?), milkmaids and musicians scattered about, every creature wanting a bed and to be fed. Vet bills are piling up.

It’s absolute bedlam. The old mother takes to the drink and the recipient of all the gifts is having something of a meltdown.

It’s funny if you take your disasters dry and with wit. Every time I hear it I wonder how they managed to capture the spirit of my family so well.

We probably have more room to take on the band and fauna, but I dare not put it to the powers that be lest they take me seriously. (See, we knew Anu would come around one day.)

Christmas in my family is just that. It is about family. As a raised and largely still-practising Hindu family, it is not a religious time for us.

Unless you count family. For me, family is a sort of religion. Duty, belief, love, obedience, blind-faith are all part of my relationship with my blood kin. I wholeheartedly blame the parents.

Frank Kelly apparently knew my parents and composed a sort of hymn just for us on the theme of “more Christmas.”

This is where my feeling of isolation fades. I know others wish to flee some of their family rituals as much as I do. I wish we could form a support group. Anyone know how to do that?

Do you not want to have nine meals together? Would it be nice to have time to see some of your friends? Or be alone? Or sign up to take care of some birds?

If you’re anything like me and a lot of people I know, some of the time we just can’t people. We get raw-nerved and edgy. Some of the time it’s the number of people and we feel like we can’t breathe. Sometimes it’s about who the people are or what the combination is.

Is that the lesson of Frank Kelly’s riot-of-the-gifts-song? Is it a serious joke about complex family dynamics and how we are forced to deal with them at certain times? Do we have the equivalent of six geese and seven swans? They are bound to raise hell and try to kill us, our pets and each other.

What about ten drummers? Drummers are always of the too-cool variety and will definitely not help with any chores.

Then there are the pipers. What they call pipers or what we call pipers?

Christmas is serious not only as a religious observance or family time. It’s very serious for people who feel alone or depressed or falter under its many pressures. We need to pay a little more attention to them. It’s not a choice we made. It won’t hurt to ask what the person in your life who’s like that needs. And to respect their answers.

Give the gift of listening. It’s better than birds.