There's a lot of stress surrounding Christmas, and I think it's time we did something to dial it down a notch. I read the other day that more people die of heart attacks or natural causes during the holidays. The bright boys who did the survey suggested it was because folks having the heart attacks were having too much fun partying to go to the hospital. I've seen 3 people having heart attacks; one at the horse track during the Preakness, one out on Ft Loudon Lake while boating, and one trying to make a flight in Atlanta's airport. None of them looked to be having much fun, and each appeared grateful for the trip to the ambulance.
No, I'm pretty sure it's the stress of the holidays that gets 'em. After all, from Thanksgiving through New Years it's almost all one big blur of celebrations, vacations, and parties. Productivity in the office goes to hell, except for the poor schlub in cubicle 24 who has no social life and winds up carrying the entire office for 5 weeks while everyone else exists in a fog of calories, alcohol, and the never ending orgy of rampant consumerism. Christmas means six weeks of trying to maintain good cheer 24/7 and as if that wasn't hard enough, the stores are working overtime to extend the season.
When I was a kid, Christmas started the day after Thanksgiving. Now, there are Christmas decorations up 2 weeks before Halloween. What's up with that? In October, I'm thinking vampires, skeletons, and witches, not Kris Kringle and snow angels. So now, the holiday season extends almost 9 weeks and therein lies the problem.
The shopping, the traffic jams around the mall, the wads of cash that evaporate during the month of December, dealing with other harried parents with desperation on their faces as they square off over the last Cabbage Patch Kid, or Sponge Bob Electric Door Guardian on the shelf (And no, Patrick is not an acceptable substitute; darling little Annalisa simply must have Sponge Bob! Get it for her Phillip!*) none of that really causes trouble. We're used to dealing with that kind of stuff every day of our lives.
What makes us crazy, and drives poor old Uncle Elmer to a heart attack is the unrelenting pressure on us, forcing us to enjoy all this madness! On any given day, you have a little bit of that pressure. "Have a nice day!" Every clerk, waitress, shopkeeper, even the perky weatherwoman on TV who just informed you that a blizzard is on the way that will bury your car in an eight foot snow drift as well as raise your electric bill to roughly the size of the National Debt of a third world country just prior to a military coup will urge you to have a nice day, burdening you with the obligation to try and fulfill their wish. After all, we’re Americans, that's what we do, try and give people what they want. But that's OK, we all deal with that, and we know that despite our best intentions or their best wishes, into every life a crappy day will fall, and it's no big deal.
But now it's Christmas, and they order us to "Have a Happy Holiday" and the holiday is now 9 flipping weeks long! There isn't that much happiness on the planet, folks, and we're trying to hog it all for Christmas! So I decided that this year, I wasn't going to be responsible for a happiness shortage in Budapest just because the night clerk at the mini-mart wished me "Happy Holidays." I refused to take more than my fair share of happiness.
But that left me with a quandary. I know how to work at being happy; how do you work at being unhappy? It usually came so naturally to me that having to work at it proved to be a bit of a mystery. I tried hanging out at funeral homes, and that kinda worked, until I was arrested for trespassing. Incarceration was a bit more unhappiness than I was prepared to deal with. After all, while I didn’t want to hoard happiness, I didn’t want to run a delight deficit either. Finally, I decided the best way to moderate my misery was to watch the UT Notre Dame game once a week until Thanksgiving. The frustration I felt watching Rick Clausen throw that pass costing us the game nicely countered all the cherry wishes of the minions of mercantilism. (I’m in an alliterative mood tonight!) Fortunately, November 25th eventually arrived, and I was free to be the happy camper you all have come to expect without feeling guilty for hovering happiness. (That was the last one. I promise.)
Now, y’all don’t have to go to the extremes I did; just realize that you don’t have to be happy all the time, and you’ll cut holiday stress in half, which paradoxically makes it more lkely that you’ll actually be happy.
*I’ve always felt sorry for the cartoon sidekicks; while it is nearly impossible to find anything with Sponge Bob on it right now, there's shelf after shelf of Patrick merchandise gathering dust and destined for that mysterious warehouse where unwanted toys are left to decay away in a sad silence.