Last Friday, I was leaving the newsroom and walking to my car in the back of the huge gravel lot behind the building, thinking over some solid angles for my Christmas column — hoping to hammer down all the happy and Hallmark elements of a cheerful, feel-good story.
Then I hit traffic.
It was a grueling hour-and-a-half skid over slick, snow-covered backroads winding from Lynn to Methuen — a whopping 33 miles from home. The whole ride was a roll of the dice on whether or not you’d swerve off the street and ram right into the guardrail. You just prayed you’d make it back safely while the fear of your brakes jamming as you eased to a stop jabbed at your brain like a woodpecker gnawing at your skull.
Indeed, it was a long, rough drive home that night. And it brought back to mind the ugly underbelly of the holidays — everything from the snowy, slippery roads to the mind-numbing exhaustion that eventually comes from hearing Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You” every time you turn the radio on or stop at the grocery store to buy some milk. The chaotic crowds clutter the aisles of the mall. The bitter chill of the wind stings your skin like the tips of a dozen needles every time you step outside. The fact that the sun sets by 4 o’clock.
What a long, brutal fall from grace. It’s a far cry from the days of counting down the days in a euphoric angst until Christmas Eve finally hits. Or the feeling of electric excitement that comes with knowing the TV channels all play great classic films. I can still remember lying in bed and staring straight up at the ceiling, thinking that every creek or pang of noise was the Big Man himself, stomping his way along my slate-tiled roof.
Never mind that I never even consciously considered the fact that my house has no chimney. I was too lasered in.
All of it acted as a kind of slow crescendo for the Big Moment the next morning (which pretty much always kicked off as soon as the sun started rising through my bedroom window). It was an adrenaline-fueled stampede down the stairs and straight to the Christmas tree.
The memories are still branded onto some softer, more sentimental part of my brain. As I drove home that night in a paranoid panic, afraid that each turn down those long, narrow roads would launch me into some fatal spin off the road and into the woods, I realized that it didn’t feel like Christmas at all.
Not because I thought I was going to die but instead because I realized that I seemed to have stumbled into some weird state of limbo.
I had the strange and unsettling notion that even though Christmas is right around the corner, it seems farther away than it ever has before. It was the ugly realization that I feel less like a kid who’s hysterical for Christmas and more like Gatsby, grasping for the unreachable pearl of light that shines in the distance.
You can walk down Exchange Street and see Santa’s fat, rosy face plastered all over the place. The multi-colored glow of Christmas lights ignites the houses in neighborhoods across the country. Every coffee shop in sight has some sort of a gingerbread-flavored concoction.
Even still, as Christmas lurks around the corner in this wild and foul year of 2024, I couldn’t seem to shake the fact that something feels off. It feels like something’s missing.
Maybe I’m just too ignorant to truly accept the fact that things change—indeed, everything has changed.
Now I spend my days writing and racing from Methuen to Lynn and coming home to the house I have spent my entire life living in, with my fiancé and two cats (who still cannot seem to grapple with the concept of a Christmas tree). And it isn’t until I’m forced to sit down and write about it that I can finally find the silver lining of this cruel bummer of a story.
Let’s cut to the chase and face the facts, shall we? That sense of magic finally seems to have tapered down for good— and even between all the bills, the morning commute, and the unique thrill of writing for the newspaper — another lesson sprouts to mind. It took a sobering splash of adulthood and reality to make it obvious. But now it seems clearer than ever.
It wasn’t until I was able to experience my fiancé sharing the same sense of joy and excitement last Christmas morning that I finally managed to ring some distant bell in the bellows of my mind. Seeing the huge smile on her face as she hung tinsel over the house, as we put the tree up in the dining room — and that sentimental sense of passing on the fun as she opens her gifts.
Then, it finally started to make sense.
Maybe Christmas isn’t just some nightmarish exercise of insanity. Maybe there’s more to the wild madness of the holiday season than a senseless rush against the clock. Maybe I’m just jaded from dealing with the cynical nature of the journalism industry. There’s that glint of hope that all is not lost and that maybe Gatsby can still grasp the light.
