The Undecorated Truth

If there is one thing I really, really hate doing after the holidays it's taking down all the decorations.  It's not just the hassle of packing away everything - taking down the outside lights, the Christmas tree, the ornaments, the Santa figure who is dressed in gold and ready to golf (I got that one at a 75% off sale the day after Christmas) and putting it all in the attic.   It's that the holiday season is really, really over.   No more anticipation of presents or buying things to make everyone else happy, no more pressure (okay - so why am I missing Christmas, again?).   I guess when I was a kid at Christmas time, anything was possible, things were sparkly, and the time leading up to December 25th was so much fun.  The school parties, the car rides to see Christmas lights, and the Sears Roebuck Toy catalog where a child's fantasies could come true.  You had a only few presents to buy as a kid  and the weight of Christmas was not on your shoulders - it was on your parents.   Putting up decorations was fun and seeing Christmas lights (back then it was the big bulb kind not the little twinkly lights kind so they were extra bright) made me feel really secure.  I remember being able to see the Christmas lights outside my bedroom window and falling asleep happily because I was sure that nothing bad could happen as long as they were up.   When Christmas was over, I would close the shutters on my windows because the lights were gone and now my eight year old brain could conceive of robbers claiming through my windows - somehow the glow of the holiday lights or the possible burns they might receive from the bulbs kept them away.    

I guess the thing that strikes me most as I put those decorations away that get used from year to year is how different things will be the next time I get them out.   Last year when I put them away, I was still unemployed with no real job prospects on the horizon.   I had only been out of work for two months so my spirits were still pretty high.   I wondered then as I wrapped up the angels in newspaper what my life would be like in late November when all of it would go up again.   Would I be working?   What would I be doing?   This year I am lucky enough to have a great job that I enjoy going to rather then a job that used to give me a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach because my ex-boss made me feel like nothing I did was good enough.   What difference two Christmas seasons can make!

There were the milestone years when I had put away the ornaments in January 1995 when Max and I had been married for three years and I found out that I was pregnant.  I knew that I would have a baby to buy presents for by the next Christmas.   I remember how stressed everyone was during Christmas 1999 wondering if the Y2K would bring down everything we knew  in just a week.   When New Year's 2000 was rung in with barely an interruption, I was able to put the decorations away knowing that the world as we knew would not descend into the chaos that you see on a show like Revolution.  I knew that Max and I would try for another baby, but had no idea if that infant would be on the way in November 2000 when everything would go back up again.   December 2000 brought with it a bouncy baby who was three weeks old when Christmas arrived that year. 

I guess for many people, Christmas more than any other holiday brings about those milestone moments.  It's different than an anniversary or birthday because all those are celebrated at different times of year - it's not a  mass experience.  It still means so much to you personally but not everyone in the world is taking part in it.   For better or for worse, Christmas comes on the same day every year - it never varies and that deadline is always there.  You have the same amount of time to get everything done that everyone else does and how you deal with that holiday pressure is up to you.   You can be the sobbing mass on the floor certain that you will never get your projects done in time (okay, so maybe that's just me) or the person who has it together and all their presents wrapped and ready by the first week of Advent or those that go shopping the a day or two before Christmas and still get it all done (for the record, both those types of people are irritating!)  

But there are the good things too.   There's the ornaments that your children make in school, or an art class or Sunday School that will forever be part of your decorations.  Those imperfect little ornaments with the paint splashing inelegantly all over the place because their little hands or minds were not able to stay within the lines.   You remember their faces as they put their latest creation on the tree - facing out for everyone to see.   It was messy, it was uneven, it was theirs and it was beautiful.   There's baking with your kids and trying to keep their fingers out of the cookie dough.  The smell of banana nut bread which was the same as when you were a kid because you're using the same childhood recipes that your mother used to.    You sit back and think - "Okay, for all the hustle and bustle - this right here is the good stuff."   

What makes Christmas more special then any other time of year is that the world is awash in red, green, blue, silver and gold.  The world is brighter and shinier.   I can also tell you as a person who has worked in non-profits for over 20 years, December brings in a ton of donations both cash and in-kind.   People want to carry that holiday feeling forward and help others.   It's not that they aren't generous at any other time of year, it's just that at Christmas you feel for those that don't have what they need and in your own little way you try to help even if it's donating $20 worth of board games to a toy drive because that's all you can do.  

Then the bleakness of January sets in.    Yes, it's a New Year, full of promise but all the pretty lights are gone and you're left with the starkness of your resolutions.  It's generally cold, overcast and unless you live in a warm climate, not very sunny - wearing shorts is a non-issue.   The lacy tapestry of barren trees paints the sky - their limbs naked for months before spring brings back their light green leaves.   So you're left in a bit of a funk.   Valentine's Day is near, but it's just not as much fun as Christmas.   The momentum of the Halloween-Thanksgiving-Christmas-New Year's train comes to a dead stop - three months of holidays gone for another year.   It just goes by too fast. 

Last night, exactly 18 days after Christmas, Amber and I took a drive from our house all the way to Downtown Duluth which is about 2.5 miles.  Our lights were still on as one of the last die-hards in the neighborhood and we wanted to see who else were still holding onto the holidays or were too lazy to take their decorations down.   We found just four homes in those miles rather than the dozens that had lined the streets in the weeks leading up Christmas.   By next week, I imagine those three other houses will be out - tonight our house is back to normal.  The mantel has the family photos back up and the burgundy and gold have been replaced by blue, yellow and white.  The cats are upset that the tree is not a permanent fixture.   The decorations are down and things look ordinary again.  

I guess this stuff hits me harder now because eleven years ago, my parents came up after Christmas to visit after staying with my sister Kathy.  It seemed like any other visit.  I was starting a new job and was glad to spend New Year's Eve with them, to go out to lunch and ring in 2002 with my husband, six year old daughter and my year old baby.   The lights were up, my parents were visiting and absolutely no one could climb through the windows and try to rob the place (we lived in a third floor apartment so that robber would have had a very long reach).   They left to go back to Miami and as per tradition, the decorations would stay up until after January 6th which was my father's birthday and the Feast of the Three Kings.   Then on January 7th, we got the call that my father had a heart attack and had died suddenly.    I remember going to the airport and passing those houses with decorations still up on the way and crying.   I remember the blur of those days afterwards, being with my brothers and sisters together in the same place for the first time in years and crying.   I remember flying back and seeing still more of the diehards with their outside lights still up and crying.   The worst part was coming home and taking down our decorations because when they went up, my father was still alive.   Now, I had to take them down.  The world seemed very dim, gray and sad.   There would be no bright bulbs to make it better.      

I always feel so sad when the lights have to come down.  I seem to relive that every year now which is why I dread doing it so much.  This year though, I didn't cry as hard and I did not seem as heartbroken.  Maybe it's because life goes on, and that little infant from 2002 is 12 years old and makes me laugh everyday.  That six year old little girl is a teenager who is smarter than she gives herself credit for.  My husband is kind, brilliant and uses his strong arms to give me hugs when I need them.  Right now, life is good.   So who knows what the next 12 months will bring.   I know I will always miss my dad - that's a given.   But maybe it's finally getting easier to let go - to miss my dad but not feel destroyed at the the loss.   The ornaments will come out next year with all their imperfections and those stupid animated deer will probably not work the way they are supposed to.   It's those rituals in life that keeps us going, living and remembering those we loved and have lost and holding those we have closer then ever.   For whatever it's worth, that's my undecorated truth.  Sometimes it's great and sometimes it hurts - but now,  I'm finally okay with that.  

 

It's the End of the World as We Know It

About three years ago, my son Daniel came home from Karate and informed us that the world was going to end in 2012.  He was certain about this because his karate instructor had told him and the rest of the kids in the class that that world would cease on December 21, 2012.  The Sun would be replaced by Venus and that would essentially destroy the earth.   Max and I looked at each other and tried to reassure my young son that the world was not going to end even in light of the fact that he had heard this from what you would assume was a responsible adult who we were paying good money to teach our son self-defense.  I quickly retreated to the internet to look up doomsday predictions to debunk what he had heard so that he would be able to sleep that night and not feel scared.   I looked up the end of the world prophecies and found that since the beginning of time, there have been over 200 doomsday scenarios and yet miraculously the world is still here admittedly with plenty of scrapes and bruises but none too worse for wear.   I told him not to worry to because no one could really predict the end of the world and that mankind was not far enough along to have God call us all up to heaven.  I had him read some of doomsday prophecies that started as early as the year 44 A.D. and mentioned for all the predictions of Hell, Fire and Damnation, we’re still here.   I put my little man to bed and let him know that he was safe and sound and that 12/21/2012 would come and go with little fanfare. 

I closed the door to his room and cursed his teacher for even bringing this up because even though the Mayan calendar supposedly ended on the winter solstice that year, it doesn’t mean the world would end.  It just meant that the new cycle will start over from the last long count which ends in 2012.  The teacher might be dealing with his own anxiety about that date, maybe he saw the movie 2012 about the end of the world and took it for the truth, but he didn’t need to inflict it on a bunch of little kids who only wanted to get pointers on doing solid side-kicks.  I could imagine the other parents dealing with the same issues with their kids and trying the best they could to reassure them that everything would be alright.  I also wondered how many phone calls Master Bryant would be getting the next day from Moms and Dads who had their 9 year olds crawling into bed with them in the middle of the night because they wanted to be close to their parents when the end came.   Needless to say for a variety of reasons, we eventually pulled Daniel out of that karate school. 

It reminded me of when I was a kid and there were shows like In Search Of with Leonard Nimoy (Mr. Spock from Star Trek) where I learned about the prophecies of Nostradamus which have not always been on the money in the divination department.  Many times people would fit the vagueness of his prophecies to things that had already happened or were so obvious that they were going to happen that they were retroactively clairvoyant.  For instance, he predicted the world would end in 1999 and of course it didn’t.  Than the prediction was revised to 9/11/2001 which would make you realize that a prediction that is two years too late about two towers rather than the end of the world is probably not worth the paper it’s written on - but then his supporters will still try to find a way to believe no matter how far-fetched it is.   To paraphrase Dr. Seuss, apparently a prophet is a prophet, no matter how small (or wrong).
 

I remember in 1988, the world was supposed to end according to a NASA mathematician and crackpot, Edgar Whisenant who had figured out the formula from the bible because God had hidden it there. The rapture was supposed to be between September 11-13 1988 and was supposed to happen sometime during Rosh Hashana.  Of course it didn’t and the prediction was continually revised through 2001 when the poor man died and was more or less forgotten.  That scenario sounds pretty familiar to May 21, 2011 when Harold Camping predicted that his believers would be taken to heaven.  His radio station empire got hundreds of millions from their listeners to support his work and hopefully buy a higher place in Heaven when the rapture actually happened.   When it didn’t happen, it was revised to October 11^th of the same year and eventually he had a stroke which supposedly took away his ability to speak –  which is an ironic a bit of divine retribution because Mr. Camping thought he could outsmart God.

The scariest event that I could remember for the end of the world as we knew it was during the panic of Y2K or the year 2000.   For years, there were Y2K experts who worked on ways to avoid disaster and keep planes from falling out of the sky because the computers would be confused and would think it was the year 1900.   The reason people were so freaked was because in the 1960’s, the programmers abbreviated dates from 01/01/1964 to 01/01/64 to compress data and save massive amounts of limited memory.  So fast forward to 1999, there was literally world-wide panic when the new year would turn to the year 2000, the computers would think it was 1900 and stop working.  There were survivalists who had basements filled with bottled water, guns, ammo and canned tuna.   Everyone dreaded New Year’s 2000 because it might mean the end of life as we knew it.   We would have to live like the Amish without computers and cell phones.   In that scenario, the world would lose its technological advances and the grid would go dark.  There were TV shows starting in 1995 about how those brave nerdy programmers were trying to avoid a meltdown.  All of the year leading up to Y2K, that was all you heard and your sure didn’t want to party like it was 1999.  I remember sitting with Max on the couch at 11:45 p.m. on December 31^st wondering if life as we knew it would change forever and like the show Revolution anarchy would rein except for the brutal and hot militia guys who would suck the fun out of everything.   But as midnight hit in capital city after capital city around the world nothing untoward seemed to be happening - it looked we had dodged a major technological bullet.  The next day was like any other day, but with far less tension and fear.  The world had not ended, your money had not disappeared into a technological void and the lights were still on.  I remember taking three year old Amber to the park and enjoying the sun on my face and the shade of the trees which ironically would have still have been the same even if the lights had gone out. 

So even after life went on, there were news reports on how disappointed some people were that the world was still as it always was.  There were not thousands of deaths due to airplanes dropping out of the sky.  There were not marauding hoards of unwashed masses looting groceries stores.  The good citizens of those metropolises did not have to be saved by the valiant members of the NRA who had guns which made them way more prepared then the liberals who would just use their ability to use a thoughtful quip to stop the ignorant in their tracks.  Probably the worst thing to come out of Y2K was those people who had invested thousands in K-rations to survive were now stuck with hundreds of pouches of chipped beef on toast which I would imagine would be enough to make anyone really depressed. 

I’ve always been surprised that time after time when those dooms day predictions did not come true that there were people who were extremely devastated that the world was still around to see another day.  Harold Camping’s believers had to literally do some real soul searching to figure out why they were so duped and why they followed a false prophet.  Why would you be cheering for the world to end and have billions of people die?  What is going on in your own sense of reality that the end of all you know is a good thing?  I was sitting across from Max at the kitchen table and asked him that very question.  He very wisely stated that as much as we like to think we know what tomorrow will bring – we just don’t.  We like to think we can control things and but that’s a façade.   So some people are really going to click into the idea that the end of the world is a certain day because it gives them a sense of control – in a weird way it makes them feel better.  I sat back and thought, “Damn, my man is smart!”
 

 I guess that’s why shows like The Walking Dead and the aforementioned Revolution are so popular.  It’s feeding into the collective dread of December 21^st and asking us how we would survive if everything we ever knew what yanked from us in a very short period of time.  In The Walking Dead world, you have to fend off flesh eating zombies day after day along with trying to maintain a sense of order.  Life has a whole new meaning when there are the living and the “walkers” who wonder aimlessly looking for living flesh to eat.   When the world is full of the undead and you’re fighting like hell not to be one of them, the little things like the size of your bank account don’t seem that important.  Revolution asks us to contemplate what we would do to survive if the lights went out and there was no energy anywhere to keep your life as you knew it the way it was.  There would be no grocery stores, no ATMS - it would be Amish time!  Max and I experienced our own little revolution when Hurricane Andrew hit Miami in 1992 and we were without electricity for a week.   There was no phones, no internet, no newspapers and you could not drive around easily because of all of the debris in the streets.  It was hard to know what was going on.  You had radios but you had to conserve batteries so the information you got was limited.   I can definitely understand how the people who continue to experience the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy feel.   Like Homestead, Florida after Andrew, it will take months and years to come back after a disaster of that magnitude but people will because that’s what people do. Those disasters end up defining you way better than a zombie invasion ever could.  You come back stronger and all the stupid stuff you used to worry about just falls away because in the end it’s just not as important any more.   

Not having to worry about tomorrow might be comforting for some who are actually looking forward to the end of time as we know it, but when the sun still comes up tomorrow, then what?  Ten percent of the world’s population believes that December 21^st is the end of the world.   Maybe they are out there running up their credit cards, having those awesome dinners at expensive restaurants as their last meals because 2013 will never come.  There will be the stays at hotels they can’t afford on credit cards they just got as a last fling before the end.  When day break hits on December 22^nd, they will feel a little relived and then realize the massive cluster cuss they’ve gotten themselves into because the world did not end, life goes on and those new massive bills will still need to be paid.   

Probably the best end of the world prediction I’ve read is in the year 2034 from the “Church of Blair (a church with its tongue firmly in cheek – don’t ask which one) in which they predict that aliens who look like rainbow colored lemurs will land and wipe out mankind by bludgeoning us to death with giant burritos.  I’m actually pulling for that one because I think it’s so absurd, I would probably die laughing before they can get to me.   

There’s an old saying that “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.”  I imagine if you want to really make him laugh hard, like so hard he’s falling off his chair and is slapping the floor wiping tears from his eyes, tell him you’ve figured out the mathematical formula for when the world ends because you’re just that smart.  The angels will be chortling too, and Jesus will be slapping his knee and saying, “That’s hilarious, dude, good one!”  As much as we’d like to think we have it figured out, we just don’t.  So sit back, relax and just let life take you where it’s supposed to because my guess it’s not going to be on the back of one the four horsemen of the Apocalypse this December.

 

One of the great paradoxes in life if that you have to live life fully like there’s no tomorrow but still need to have some type of plan in place for the future.  If today was your last day, would you have helped the people you were supposed to and told them how much you loved them?   December 21^st could be figurative for changing the way you used to do things so that point in your life can literally come to an end.  It can be a time to make your life over to be what you want it to be so at the end you can be proud of what you’ve accomplished with no regrets.   So for those who have not been saving up for retirement because you were pretty sure your days were numbered, I have some good news and bad news.   The good news is that you’re going to be here awhile, and the bad news is that you’re going to be here awhile – what you decide to do with that blessed time is totally up to you.  Trust me, it’s not the end of the world.