Channel surfing last weekend we settled for a moment on CNN, and the annual tribute to heroes. “Oh, I hate this show,” I said. “People who are better than we will ever be.”
But it wasn’t just my little bout of jealousy or spite that had me looking to find something else to watch. It was a fast, anxious emergence of memory of a Christmas season almost a decade ago. A Christmas alone.
I had lived overseas for a few years by then, in Ghana where Christmas is a common season for weddings and church obligations and my expatriate friends usually were off on their own holidays, either in more touristy parts of Africa or off with their families in Europe or North America.
I worked through the holidays because I didn’t want to get caught in international winter airports. And the temperature shift from Africa to North America was one I tried to avoid. I took my holidays home in the northern hemisphere summers but this choice meant I was alone on the holidays. And this particular Christmas, I was off a fairly fresh breakup that I was trying to mend in a patch job that would be ultimately unsuccessful and have me, alone on Christmas, while he celebrated with his family and the plastic tree I’d bought and decorated for him.
In loneliness, all that’s left is channel surfing. And I settled that Christmas on a rerun of CNN heroes, where people doing good things in their communities get to shake hands with Anderson Cooper and generally be better than most everyone else on the planet. At least, they were better than I was that Christmas, stuck in the West African humidity to my pleather couch and tearing up at the do-gooders who were spending their lives doing useful, meaningful things.
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I, on the other hand, was taking up the quiet shifts at work to occupy my lonely mind and eating a lot of frozen pizza.
I still don’t love Christmas. I do it, but just like most everything else in my life, I stand at the edges, looking in. I buy gifts, I make and follow through with family plans. I still work to mid-day Christmas Eve to occupy my mind that’s less lonely now, but still skews toward the downside of Christmas cheer. I also give a thought every season to the workers and to the lonely, by choice or chance.
This blog is part of an ongoing challenge among the members of the South Shore Scribes writing group.