JEFF: The delusion you’re trying to cure is called Christmas, Duncan.
Community, “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas” (Dino Stamatopoulos, Dan Harmon, 2010)
ANNIE: It’s the crazy notion that the longest, coldest, darkest nights can be the warmest and brightest.
BRITTA: Yeah, and when we all agree to support each other in that insanity, something even crazier happens.
ANNIE: It becomes true.
TROY: Works every year. Like clockwork.
My fondest memory of Christmas – or at least the one that comes most readily to mind – is of leaving midnight mass and thinking I saw Santa Claus flying overhead. I don’t remember much else, anything about the mass itself, about the next morning unwrapping presents around the tree. I was young, obviously, short in a way that made adults feel like giants. The sky was clear, cold, with more stars than you could usually see that close to New York City. The church was towering up along my right; the city lights were glowing in the distance. I can’t recall what I thought I saw, whether it was a blinking light or a shooting star – only the joy and excitement I’d felt. That breathless and bounteous Christmas spirit.
That same spirit I’ve been chasing ever since.
My most vivid holiday memory isn’t nearly so fun. I was 25. I’d had a hell of a year. I’d been laid off, broken my foot being stupid and misguidedly believing myself invulnerable on Halloween, and I’d spent a lot of time, effort, and self-worth pursuing what was, in hindsight, a very toxic relationship. I got pneumonia, too, bad enough that I was in the hospital for almost a month. Bad enough that I really worried this might be the end. It was, at the time, the sickest and the closest to death I’d ever been.
I’m guessing I was admitted shortly after Thanksgiving. With each passing day, each week, I became more and more desperate to be home for Christmas. For the holiday, for family, for all the good or noble reasons, but also for the simple fact that wanting to be home for Christmas seemed like something that would get me out of the hospital sooner. A sob story I could tell to tug on some heartstrings. Plus, it was something to look forward to. Each interminable day in the hospital was the same as the one before, meds and bloodwork and drab walls and grey-skied windows, but at least the festively-adorned morning shows and Christmas specials gave me some sense of still being in the world.
Of course, the more you tell yourself something, the more you start to believe it. The more you start to inflate that thing beyond any and all reasonable expectations. Christmas Day became impossibly important that year, a symbol of quite literally all my hopes and dreams: a return to my regular life, any possibility I had of being healthy, and, in fact, my very future.
I didn’t make it home for Christmas. I got close, there was a lot of talk of my leaving, so much so that numerous nurses believed it to be true, spoke of it like fact – but then someone let the wrong kind of drug run too long and my potassium levels got wrecked. I had to stay in the hospital longer, until my labs were stable. I had to spend yet another Christmas in the hospital.
It shouldn’t have bothered me so much; I’d done it before, after all, as a child and a teenager. Winters had always been rough on me. (New Year’s in the hospital was practically a tradition.) But this time got to me all the same, felt like a gut punch. I didn’t take the news well at all. I yelled at nurses, a chaplain, at a cancer survivor trying to tell me things would get better, that she got past her disease so surely I could too. I wasn’t polite in explaining that there’s no remission for cystic fibrosis, that I couldn’t see the permanent decrease in my lung function as a silver lining. My throat was hoarse by the end of it; I couldn’t talk. Then I cried, and sank into a deep depression.
A few days later, I was back in my empty apartment. I don’t remember who dropped me off, if my brother was still living there at the time. But I know that, in that moment, I was alone. The apartment big and warm, suffocatingly, almost. The green walls and red curtains, the cheapest paint and fabric we’d been able to find when we first moved in. Eclectic on a good day, but, that day, a grotesque attempt at comfort and coziness.
There was a small cardboard box on the floor of the living room. I went over, opened it, and found all of my Christmas presents stuffed inside. I’m not even sure if they were wrapped. I don’t think they were. Something inside of me broke. I felt nauseous. As empty as the apartment. Because this was it, all that was left of the holiday, everything I’d been clamoring for – my life, my health, my future – reduced to a single paltry box. To an afterthought.
Growing up, family Christmases were always big, raucous affairs. Presents were never the focus. We’d have a small morning at home, then, before lunch most times, we’d pack up and head over to our uncle’s place. Stay there until it was dark. Everyone was there: a not inconsequential number of uncles, aunts, and cousins; the other sides of other families; friends my uncles grew up with. Every room of the house was filled. I remember playing chess with my grandfather, pretending to know how to play bumper pool with the other kids, and, if it was mild enough out, going for walks in the woods nearby.
Being able to disappear was a big part of the holiday for me. If not outside, then in some forgotten corner of the house. The cold and the humidity left my diseased lungs in a state of perpetual bronchitis, something that only got worse as I got older, as I got sicker. New Jersey snow might not have the same cachet as a Boston blizzard, but it’s no joke; it was hard to take “dreaming of a white Christmas” as anything other than a pointed threat. I was also struggling with undiagnosed depression at the time, thrashing to stay above the growing darkness without knowing what was happening. And I was a too-serious introvert besides.
Once I moved to New Mexico and started having Christmas with my wife’s family – and only my wife’s family – the holiday became smaller. I found that, quite suddenly, I had to be very present. (And had to radically recalibrate my understanding of presents, too.) But it wasn’t only that. Christmas in New Mexico, it turns out, is vastly different than Christmas in New Jersey.
There’s no snow, no Rockettes or Rockefeller tree, but, as a result, there’s a lot more Christmas spirit, just everywhere, all the time. Everyone trying harder to make up for the deficit of traditional trimmings. Santa Fe was even recently named a top Christmas destination due to, as near as I can tell, sheer force of will. I mean, don’t get me wrong, the plaza’s fine, but it’s barely an ice-skating rink wide; how is it on the same list as Prague, Vienna, and London?
But that, I suppose, is my point. As a kid, our little dead-end street rebranded itself as Candy Cane Lane, affixing big, wooden candy canes to trees and telephone poles. We became something of a minor tourist attraction, got written up in the local newspaper. Here, though, in my current neighborhood in ABQ, we have an annual Christmas decoration contest, hundreds of houses. And people go nuts. One of my neighbors has an entire radio station set up, playing Mariah Carey and Alvin and the Chipmunks and countless other Christmas songs from six to ten every night. Loud enough to be heard from our backyard (and annoying enough that the dogs often make their displeasure known). You can see his house, and my next-door neighbors’ house, from literal blocks away, lighting up the sky. And we’re still not the most festive neighborhood in the city.
There was a certain sense of Christmas whiplash, bouncing from one kind of celebration to another, not quite fitting in to any of them. Add in getting married and trying to start our own traditions, independent of our families, plus the ongoing existential crisis of surviving a double lung transplant and being granted a life I wasn’t expecting, and I was feeling lost. Christmas still had this enormous weight attached to it – the disappointment of that hospital holiday, the guilt of not being able to be as happy as everyone else seemed to be, the confusion that came when I remembered all the childhood joy I seemed to have lost – all of it collecting and crushing me every December.
My go-to coping mechanism has long been binge-watching old TV shows, cartoons usually. For years I watched Futurama in an almost endless loop, on Adult Swim at night or swapping out DVDs as needed. Scrubs and then Community were in there for a while, replaced a few years ago with Bob’s Burgers. Recently, I’ve decided to give The Simpsons a go; streaming all 30+ seasons should grant me a little more variety, if nothing else.
But here’s the thing: despite my dread of Yuletide season, every December I made sure to find the requisite Christmas episodes of my shows and add them into the rotation. It quickly became the first consistent Christmas tradition my wife and I had for ourselves. Maybe I didn’t understand how to celebrate in real life, maybe I couldn’t always muster up the excitement, but something about seeing the characters I knew and loved getting through the holiday was soothing. And, surprise, surprise, it started to help me find that Christmas spirit I’d been looking for, too.
I recently made a list of Bob’s Burgers holiday episodes for Den of Geek, ranking the episodes by Christmas-ness. And, in true Christmas fashion, I checked it twice. (I’ll probably watch the episodes one more time before Christmas, too.) But as I went through them, detailing the highs and lows and differences between them, something struck me: every Christmas for the animated Belcher family was different. But I still understood it as a Bob’s Burgers Christmas. The characters were still the characters, the holiday was still the holiday, even if every other thing around it had changed.
Which brings us back to Community and “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas.” I’ve written about this episode before, but it’s stuck with me. Whenever I start feeling down, or confused, or bad about not being excited about Christmas (or, alternately, bad about being excited about Christmas, about enjoying the same thing as all the evangelicals putting multicolored crucifixes next to inflatable Santa Clauses), or simply overwhelmed, suffocating through the third year of pandemic-based isolation or crushed by that good, old-fashioned seasonal depression – I keep coming back to one quote in particular.
ABED: I get it. The meaning of Christmas is the idea that Christmas has meaning.
And it can mean whatever we want.
Christmas is, ultimately, just another day. I mean, there is a lot attached to it – too much, arguably – and good luck going to the bank that day, but what you actually do with all that too much is up to you. Churches and families and cities have their own version of the holiday, will try to tell you that their way is the right way – but there is no one right way to Christmas. The day is just another day, with the same sun and the same sky, and you can make as much or as little of it as you want. You can see whatever you want to see in the stars twinkling above.
Maybe sometimes Christmas means drunken renditions of “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town,” with a half-dozen uncles all trying to sound like Bruce Springsteen at once. Or maybe it means a small and quiet gathering, with enchiladas for dinner and José Feliciano on the radio. Maybe for you it’s snow-sledding and the Feast of Seven Fishes, or maybe tumbleweed snowmen and red chile biscochitos, or movies and Chinese take-out.
Or maybe it doesn’t have to mean anything at all. Christmas doesn’t have to be more than a bright spot in a dark night – even if that light’s only reruns flickering on a boxy TV as you’re huddled beneath hospital blankets.