dual personalities

Out upon merry Christmas! What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, and not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in ’em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I had my will, every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heard. He should!”

Scrooge in A Christmas Carol

Back in my New York days, I was walking down a street in Soho one sunny weekend with a friend when we passed a man with a cat on his head. The man was charging $1 to take a picture with him. And people were doing it. I turned to my friend and said, “We are such chumps for having jobs.”

This feeling has never really gone away. Working hard, having standards, being responsive to emails, calling people back, it all feels like wasted effort. Few people reciprocate. And certainly fewer people appreciate it.

It is hard to believe Christmas Eve is this Friday, because, boy, I am just not feeling festive at all. And I probably won’t feel any festivity until I get to Kirkwood, crack open the first bottle of the house wine, and put my work phone away. Because it is only when I am away from the internet and everyone else’s incessant opinions about everything that I am able to focus on what is happening right around me. I look back at the year and it seems like it actually went pretty fast. But that’s probably because I barely remember any of it. It’s one long blur of me talking about how stupid everything is (because it kept getting stupider with every passing day).

Or maybe it is that for the whole year what I was being told didn’t match what I saw around me. And my brain is just mush now.

As I look ahead to the new year, facing the daily struggle of finding the desire to continue working hard, be responsive to emails, call people back, have standards and hope that others will raise theirs to meet mine, feels like the manifestation of a heavy sigh. I don’t like feeling like Arthur in The King of Queens all the time.

Each year at Christmas, I try to read A Christmas Carol. I enjoy the language and identifying the lines I recognize from Gonzo’s dialogue in ‘A Muppet Christmas Carol’. But also, the story is a great one for setting one off for Christmas in a good way. It should be required reading for everyone with an opinion on anything.

The temptation to be like Scrooge is a strong one. And giving in is easy. The struggle, then, is not to let that temptation win. To be joyful is important. We need to focus on finding joy in responding with a smile, working hard, and even little things like the UPS driver who says ‘Merry Christmas’ as he drops a package at the door and runs back to his truck.

“There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say, Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round–apart from the veneration due to its sacred origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that–as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-travellers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, ‘God bless it!'”

Scrooge’s nephew, A Christmas Carol