HAVE YOURSELF A MERRY LITTLE CHRISMYTH


Every December I get a lot of Christmas cards from businesses and I throw most of them in the trash. This year I set a few on my table pretending they are from my family. I was thinking is there anything sadder than holidays with no family?

J.C. Penny and Wal-Mart seem to think that everyone has a large family – exuberant, kindly and flush with cash, families that buy extravagant gifts, wrapping paper, ribbon, twinkly lights and huge Christmas trees. Trees go up, lights get strung, presents get wrapped and snugged below the lowest branches of the tree and it all occurs with a Christmas carol soundtrack.

I have a three foot plastic cactus with built in lights, which by the way, I love. But the only present snugged beneath it is cat hair, which my cats would leave, holidays or not.

The majority of my human family is either dead or estranged, and the only Wal-Mart-minded Christmases I remember were when I was single digits (age-wise) and too young to register the adult melodramas that went on all around me right under my nose. I didn’t see the drunken scenes or sexual misconduct until I was an adult and by then I had the pretense of the “happy family myth” down pat and would consistently ignore any deviations from it.

Statistics say that 90% of the families on our little blue and green globe don’t fit the myth perpetuated by American retailers. Personally I’m down to only two people in my acknowledged family; my daughter who paints me astonishingly beautiful pictures, and my cousin who sent me the cactus. (Only she would know I’d love it.)

And though when I started writing this I’d been thinking about how sad it would all be this year, I’m not feeling that way now. Maybe it’s the economic headlines that leave me gasping or the simple fact that I have a roof over my head and food to eat, which I am discovering isn’t all that common these days.

Or it could be that in the last fifteen minutes I’ve remembered too many past Christmases of burnt emotions and underdone turkey, the air crackling with tension that erupted after the guests left, but sometimes before. All was not calm, but it sure could be bright. (Explosively so.)

So, instead of feeling sad, this year I’m gonna plug in my cactus and have a glass of wine and be thankful for the family I have left and the aforementioned roof and food. I may even sing a Christmas carol…who knows?