December 23, 2023

And so we reach another Christmastide. I’m not ready for it. Between work and rehearsal/performance obligations I’ve just not had the energy to do some of the things I had every intention of doing this year like put up a Christmas tree. I do have tomorrow morning free so I suppose I could schlepp down to the basement storeroom and pull decorations out. It’s not that I don’t have a choice of six trees down there. If I do put one up, I think I’ll put up Tommy’s Teddy Bear tree. The Teddy Bear was his symbol and he had quite the collection. Our traditional souvenir from our travels together was a Teddy Bear representing the city/country/region. He worked out a way to get them to sit on a Christmas tree and – voila. It’s actually a fairly quick assembly and looks impressive. Or maybe I’ll just download a photo of a tree and print it and stick it on the front window with Scotch tape. At least, if I do it, I will be liturgically correct. Christmas decorations are supposed to be put up on Christmas Eve and taken down on Epiphany.

I have more or less finished the work year. Everything is wrapped up for the VA until the second week of January. I still have a few things to deal with for UAB. I volunteered to do the call for the long holiday weekend so all of my colleagues with children and family obligations wouldn’t have that hanging over their heads. I’m also behind on progress notes and am steadily working my way through the backlog. They should all be done by Monday morning. Which is a good thing, as I am heading out for NYC on Tuesday. I have a Christmas Eve service to sing at church tomorrow late afternoon and I have a couple of ideas for Christmas day that I’m kicking around. Although there’s a part of me that sort of wants to hibernate. The loss of Tommy has fundamentally altered my relationship to the holidays as our marathon of holiday shows/church pageant/Messiah/family Christmas/annual open house was so much a part of who we were as a couple. It took the two of us to pull all of that off as we could support each other/cajole each other/fight with each other and give each other the energy necessary to cross the finish line. Alone, I just can’t do it.

Of course, the pandemic has completely upended my being able to lay down any new traditions for my single state. And retirement is going to do yet another major shift. I’m thinking that ultimately, some sort of travel at the holidays might end up being the best solution. Perhaps an exploration of the Christmasmarkts of Eastern Europe – or escaping the cold altogether with something in the Southern hemisphere. The pandemic is not exactly over, but it’s certainly in a very different place in terms of our societal relationship with the virus which is why I’m not writing about it nearly as much as I once did.

(The exotic Christmas Market of Cullman, Alabama, about an hour up the road)

Speaking of the pandemic, for those who do not follow public health news, the numbers continue to increase – both in terms of hospitalizations and in terms of presence of virus in wastewater samples. We have a new variant, still omicron, known as JN.1 which appears to spread more rapidly than some of the other omicrons we’ve had as it is more efficiently transmitted and clings tighter to the ACE receptor molecule once it enters the body. It will be the dominant strain by New Years. Does this mean much of anything? In theory, because of the tighter binding, long Covid symptoms might become more frequent but there’s no real way to know in advance. The booster that came out this past fall seems to be quite effective so, if you haven’t gotten it yet (and something like 85% of adults have not), you might give yourself a Christmas present down at your local CVS.

This will be my first trip to New York since the pandemic. I was last there in 2018. And it’s also my first trip during holiday season since 2004. I have a little bit of trepidation in going as I am well aware of how many people you have to share too little space with. I will pack a few masks. I’m not that worried about Covid as neither of the two cases I have had has been particularly severe. But urban America is having a banner year for all sorts of other respiratory viruses as we’re all making up for the lost time of the last few years and busily trading our biomes with each other. And I have a long tradition of getting one in January which usually morphs into bronchitis with a cough like a seal for six weeks. And I would rather not deliver my most famous line as ‘The closer to the family bark bark bark the closer to the wine’.

American cultural Christmas developed during a time when there was usually at least one and often more than one adults in the home who could do the baking and the decorating and the corralling of the overexcited children. Now, when most adults must work outside the home to survive, doing all of that stuff has to happen in many fewer hours. And no one can keep up. We’re fed these images of perfect holiday season through Hallmark movies and other cultural tropes and then we look around at our lives and feel inadequate as it doesn’t measure up. Perhaps its time for us to reevaluate the expectations for a new millennium.

As I’ve grown older, my favorite part of the holidays is Christmas Eve service. I’m not explicitly Christian so it really doesn’t have anything to do with Jesus, but rather the much earlier mythos of light and hope springing from darkness and how each new child, no matter how low they are on the social pecking order at birth, has the potential to be a savior in some way as they mature. And we celebrate this hope with music and traditional carols that have been sung generation after generation and singing those songs, at least for me, helps me feel connected and part of a much bigger story than I can ever comprehend. Angels We Have Heard On High dates to the 12th century. That’s nearly a millennium of ordinary people belting out ‘Gloria in Excelsis Deo’ together – and I find magic in the community of choral singing. We need to do more of it.