Merry Christmas

A Christmas card from your favorite newsletter

It gets dark early in Buffalo these days. The wind blows hard and the air is sharp with cold. Every once in a while, there is a brilliant and cloudless day. But most of the time, the sky is uniform, gray, and dim.

candid scene from my living room—my cat caught, red-pawed

The darkness of winter brings on sleepiness and listlessness and a general drab funk, right as a bunch of dull end-of-semester paperwork with strict deadlines appears. I start to peel and crack in a number of places. It’s harder to wake up in the morning, and I naturally sleep more. I often don’t feel like doing much—after a day of work, I often just want to brew a mug of tea and watch television or read. The winter blues hit, although I eat vitamin D gummies, and I work with a device called a “HappyLight” that simulates sun on my skin as I sit at my computer.

So, despite the cheery insistence of the Christmas carol that says this is the “happiest season of all,” winter is, let’s be honest, a bit of a bummer, especially in cold and windy climes. And if it’s a bit of a bummer for me, I often think how much worse it must have been 150 years ago. More bitter cold, less insulation. No furnace, perhaps the firewood running low. And so on. No wonder it’s the season that’s always symbolic of death, discontent. “Earth stood hard as iron/Water like a stone; Snow had fallen, snow on snow,/snow on snow.”

Christmas originated as a holiday for the winter solstice, which, as it turns out, is a common sort of festival. Strange that so many cultures would celebrate the darkest time of the year—so far from the “happiest season of all”—and yet so many do. What determination! I imagine some ancient time, when old-time pagans were coming up with Yule, and when winter really did mean death and privation. If anyone had an excuse to grump about humbug, it would be them. But what did they do when it is darkest? Ate and drank together, and maybe thought about those who suffer in deeper darkness or colder cold. Light a fire, and sit around it together. When it’s darkest, turn a light on.

Driving through my neighborhood, I see Christmas lights, inflatable Santas, some sort of inflatable Christmas dinosaur (or dragon?) with a lolling head. These kinds of displays might bring many thoughts to our heads. We might see them as tasteless, garish, a motley collection of lopsided and flimsy bits of corporate intellectual property strewn about the neighborhood. We might think about the plastic decorations that, faded and torn, that will fill landfills, about the fragments of some decimated Santa tangled in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch ten years in the future. Or we might imagine that our neighbor across the street, who has been taking lots of testosterone supplements and yells at his dog now, is covering his house in lights to compete with Bill next door, who just bought a fancy car. Or we might wonder about the working conditions in the factories that make all of this plastic crap, and what those factory workers must think of the people who buy the things they make. All perfectly reasonable thoughts to have. It is, after all, a dark, dark world.

But there will be plenty of dark and cold in the new year. You never run out of darkness these days. So for a few weeks, I’ll suspend my disbelief. When I look at the lights, I’ll think of good people, struggling in the cold to string up lights, fumbling with frozen fingers to make these dark and bitter nights delightful for their neighbors and enchanting for their children. I’ll choose to think: that’s still the sort of thing people are. When it’s dark out, we turn a light on.

With warmest wishes for the holiday season, with sincere gratitude for reading my stuff, and with excitement for a year of reading, writing, and discovery ahead—Merry Christmas.