Thursday, January 6, 2011

I'll have a blue post-Christmas

          It took me a few days to pinpoint it, but I realized this past week or two that I have a good case of the post-Christmas blues (not to mention a lovely headcold). For me, there are no two more depressing times of year than the beginning of fall and the end of the holidays. I may identify with the New England approach to life, but I have never been the type who looks forward to the first snowfall of the season and I am certainly not clicking my heels by the end of February when I am so vitamin D deprived that I can't see straight. That's what my "Happylite" is for. (The boyfriend makes fun of the name when I reference it, but that is its actual name!)

          Why do we as a culture need Christmas? Even the non-religious can appreciate its beauty. It can't only be nostalgia. No one seems to need Easter nearly as much. It all must have to do with our primitive fears of dark and threatening weather and a desire to fill an otherwise cold and isolated time with light and closeness. I wish I could say that these are all irrelevant primitive fears, but even in this age of technology, travel is greatly compromised by snow and ice. The aspect that has changed only adds to my sense of disappointment when the holiday is over. The commercialism that adds to the frenetic pace of December only makes me feel as though I have been running around too much to appreciate the season.

          As an adult, the end of Christmas and the New Year can be particularly devastating because of all the stress beforehand. When all the running around with auditions, the shopping, the gigs, the parties and the travel come to a slowdown, one wants time to take in that warm glow that we have created to comfort ourselves as we reach the winter solstice's longest nights of the year and the cold ahead of us. This year I did not get to sit with a cup of tea and stare at the tree we trimmed at my parents' house for nearly long enough before I had to practically fly out of the house the morning after Christmas in fear of the impending blizzard. I look around now that I finally have some time to stroll and appreciate some Christmas scenery and it has almost all been dismantled. When my friend from California moved here for grad school, it wasn't until her first May in Boston that she said: "Now I realize why there are so many songs about spring."

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