Other holiday emotions are available

When Christmas is more than just happy...

I’ve recently started to learn Biblical Hebrew with a Rabbi who is the epitome of the phrase ‘a gentleman and a scholar’. He is erudite enough to indulge in delightful diversions from our texts, wandering into Persian, Indo-European and Romance languages. He is also kind enough to wrap his intellectual wanderings in bucket loads of patience with me when I can’t remember any of the basics of grammar I haven’t had to contemplate since I wrote my last German exam when I was seventeen.

It is quite the brain exertion and even though I keep lowering my expectations of myself, the only hope I have of getting anywhere is to think about the structure of language more than I used to. That is how I came to be sitting on my dressing room floor wrapping presents for my interfaith family, listening to the radio and thinking, ‘I’ve never noticed before how often the jussive or imperative forms of verbs are used in Christmas music so much.’ Or at least, I think that’s what they are … The commands and encouragements are what I mean: Come all ye faithful joyful and triumphant! Deck the Halls! Go tell it on the mountain! Have yourself a Jolly Holly Christmas!

All around there’s an awful lot of exhortation to be happy and merry, to have a good New New Year, to celebrate. Why do we all need so much chivving to adopt this communal upbeat set of emotions if this is such a wonderful time?

Image by garten-gg on Piaxabay

The reality is that whether you celebrate this festival as a religious one or purely as a secular one, (or indeed choose to try to ignore it completely) happiness may not be the emotion that is most immediately accessible to you in this season. Being surrounded by all this glittery cheer, all the lights and jingling sleigh bells can certainly lift our spirits in the dark Northern Hemisphere winter days. But it can also isolate and induce loneliness if your inner mood does not match the unadulterated bonhomie of the season or of it is not your festival at all. It is now proven that manipulating your mouth into a smile, even if it’s fake at first, will help to elevate your mood and that generosity and service also help to counteract the blues. But that does not mean that acting happy or spontaneously experiencing it causes all the other emotions to fall aside.

I know there will be many of us who will spend this season holding a pile of emotions as tall as a bedecked tree. There will be pain and grief, frustration, annoyance, fear, as well as love, pleasure and gratitude. There will be moments of family laughter and of private tears, days of abundance and hours of emptiness.

If you are caregiving for an elder there may be moments of tenderness and of ennui. Introverts may both delight in being included in the party invitations or the family gatherings and simultaneously crave getting the hell out of Dodge in favour of a PJ-and-good-book party for one. One friend reading this will be revelling in the wonder of their adult children and simultaneously desperately missing their mother.

The season highlights financial differences so alongside the pleasure of giving to others you may be experiencing worry about bills or a regret that you could not buy what you wished your children or grandchildren to have. Those of us with plenty may feel an exhilaration in the shopping process but also a shame or revulsion at the commercialization of the holiday. ( When did advent calendars start being expensive packaging for samples of luxury goods?)

Those without close family may feel a delight at the rest and cosy fireside solitude the shutdown of society brings and still have that tainted with pangs of desire to be a parent or to have parents back. Mental health may mean that there is a real desire to be happy but it simply cannot be accessed right now. If you are an interfaith family there may be some internal conflict about the celebrations or a need to compromise and self-deny preferences.

As it happens, this year I am miserably full of chest infection, enthusiastically celebrating my husband’s recently confirmed recovery from ill health, delighted at the perfect presents I found for others, sad at the increasing limitations of my father who is staying with us, happy that I am together with my Christian family, but still wishing I could be with my Jewish friends at the vast learning festival that is Limmud…

Christmas is a complicated time. The week ahead may be wrapped like a game of pass-the-parcel in layers of feelings so that you never quite know what will land in your lap when the music stops. To feel emotions other than happiness is not to be a Grinch or to be muttering Bah Humbug at every turn. It is to be human.

I am not going to wish you only a Happy Christmas then, though of course, I do hope that the forthcoming days contain a cornucopia of joy and delight for you. I am going to wish you a complete Christmas, one in which you feel able and supported to honour everything that comes up for you this season. I wish you a time of being able to be fully present for this Christmas just as it unfolds for you, I hope that you can use the darker moments as a contrast to make the lighter ones brighter still and can use the sparkling moments to illuminate the black velvet corners of life.

I wish you the gift of being seen in your wholeness.

May Santa bring you not only the physical gifts you have been hoping for but the grace to accept the beautiful complexity of who you are and the wisdom to see what is temporary and what is enduring, what is worth keeping and what can be let loose.

Shalom and Feliz Navidad (click for the Christmas song I play on repeat)!

Helen