'Tis the Season

The Holidays Are Here (And We’re Still at War) - Brett Dennen (mp3)
Who Took the Merry Out of Christmas - The Staple Singers (mp3)

My wife loves Christmas. She loves holidays in general. She’s a holiday person. But she loves loves loves Christmas.

I, on the other hand, am what people might call a Fuddy Duddy. I am generally opposed to the prejudice of treating one calendar day of the year differently than other days. While I happily grant exception to Christmas, I do so noting the exception. Birthdays don’t count, because those weren’t invented to honor some Pagan tradition or to generate higher sales returns in stores. Anniversaries, same deal. These are personal holidays and thus exempted.

(Note: I liked birthdays a lot more when 400 people didn’t wish other people a happy birthday by writing on a wall. Like I said. Fuddy Duddy.)

Seriously, I’m always twice as surprised and pleased by a gift or kindness done to me on a random and unpredictable day than one done to honor some Special Occasion that feels like part of the queue. The unexpected gift doesn’t get lost in the hubbub of the event.

When my father died, I sincerely appreciated every person who came to the visitation and shook my hand and hugged me. But the most salient memories of my friends and their support came during completely unexpected moments. A teacher and I left an evening meeting at the same time, and he asked how I was doing, and he shared his own struggles after the death of his father. An older man from church, a month or so later, came to me crying and saying he thought of my father every time he passed a certain area of our church sanctuary.

They were outlier moments. They stick. But I digress.

Back to my wife. She is miserable right now. Christmas means so much to her that she wants it to be everything. She wants everyone to be happy. She wants to see everyone as much as possible. Everything. Everyone. All. These are dangerous words. They are doomed to failure.

Every Christmas, she loses years of her stress life worrying about her family, worrying about our finances, worrying about the tree and the windows and the kids. For something she loves so much, it sure as heck creates a lot of worry and grief. I pick on my wife, but she’s in a very large boat with millions of people who seem to love these days so much yet find themselves miserable.

Perhaps this makes me a wee bit sociopathic. Don’t care too much, or you’ll be sad. This could be said of many things. Marriage. Children. Jobs. Hobbies. Dreams. But I guess I’m comfortable giving those things my emotions, risking my tears and blood pressure on them. Holidays, on the other hand, don’t feel worth it to me.

I don’t think this makes me a Scrooge or a Grinch, because I don’t hate Christmas. I love it. I love the midnight church service and the presents under the tree and Handel’s Messiah and cards with pictures of our friends and their children plastered all over our fridge and spilling over onto cabinets and other spaces.

But I don’t like piling it up with pressure and expectation. It would only take a couple of times of doing so for me to grow to hate Christmas.

So my wish to all of you this holiday season is to purge yourself of these silly stressors. In all the talk about “remembering the Reason for the Season,” most adults do really well with keeping perspective on the materialistic gobbledygook. But they seem to forget all that Reason for the Season crap when it comes to stress and misery and pressure.

As Sue Sylvester might say, were she portraying Mary in the school play, “You think hosting 30 members of your family for dinner and driving 20 hours to visit in-laws is hard?!? Try riding on a donkey five months pregnant and natural childbirthing into a bale of friggin' straw! THAT’S HARD!!”

Swingers

The Trapeze Swinger - Iron + Wine (mp3)

Sometimes a thing's power is in its subtlety. Sometimes a calm, low tide proves vital to the psychological ecosystem.

My head often feels like a place overrun with tidal waves and tsunamis, with ideas and emotions tossing and turning, with the rare chance to feel settled, to feel at peace. This is not a complaint. I tend to revel and thrive in such a manic mental environment, and it suits my attention span and my passions more often than not. We are the way we are for deep and sometimes impenetrable reasons, right? Personal evolution, right?

Only a few things seem to calm the tempest within me. These have changed many times over the decades, of course. Lately, here are the ones guaranteed to work:

• Reading to my daughters, or singing to them before they go to sleep, one of them sitting on both sides of me, my arms around them, my fingers lightly tracing their upper arms and shoulders, or running through their beautiful hair.
• Lying down on the guest bed with my 1-year-old son when he wakes up screaming in the middle of the night, holding him close and feeling his panic slowly bleed away as he finds his peace and calm in my slight rocking, in my heartbeat and breathing and gentle words.
• Sitting at the kitchen table at my mother's house on Sundays after church, my wife and mom and I talking over sandwiches and sweet tea.

One particular healing activity, however, has withstood the long test of my brief lifetime. In my 37 years, I've never known a time when swinging failed to soothe my soul at least a little.

As a kid, and then as a teenager, one of my trustiest retreats was a playground swing set. My friend Scott and I would feel the pressures and miseries of teen angst building up and hastily bike down to a huge nearby swing set or, later, drive to the swings on my church's property, and we would swing... for as long as it took. We'd go as high as we could, so high that the chains would loosen and then constrict again, and we'd jolt against the seat as we fell back to earth. But that feeling, of leaning back completely, of the air rushing past you, of controlled flying... it released a valve and depressurized the cabin of being a teenager, of being a human spinning madly amongst other madly-spinning humans.

I've since mostly traded in the playground swing for the porch swing, although either still works wonders. Something about the motion, the back-and-forth and the generated breeze and being outside, that calms my mind and stills my emotional waters better even than sleep.

The house where we currently live has a swing on the front porch, and it's a truly transcendent location. We're on the side of a ridge, so my view looks out to downtown Chattanooga in the distance. In the daytime, I can see Lookout Mountain and its Incline and the lush greenery that, from my angle, fools you into thinking maybe downtown isn't just a bunch of steel-and-concrete. At night, I can see the lights of the Chattanooga Choo-Choo and Finley Stadium in the distance, but the lights don't overwhelm so much as help to trace vague outlines into the view.

Sitting on that swing, I feel both alone and a part of something bigger. Our house is the last one on our road, so no one drives past our house. I can sit there for a couple of hours, day or night, and stand a decent chance of never seeing a neighbor. But I can hear the sound of cars and sirens and sometimes even gunshots echoing up the ridge. I can write, or listen to music, or read, or just be. I can sit on that swing and ignore our ringing phones and all of the technology that clogs the pores of our home. (Technology for which I'm 95% responsible, to be fair.)

March and April have been perfect months to enjoy that swing, that view, temperatures in the 60-80 range.

Swinging serves me in the same way I desperately long to serve my children -- first as infants and even as they grow up -- as that magical rocking balm to a world that moves much too fast, but almost never smoothly.

Ironic, no? When the world moves too fast, trying to stop completely fails to help much and sometimes just makes everything worse. But slowing it all down a little, and just swinging, does wonders.