'Twas
the season to be 'false'. Much of a month before Christmas Day there was just
so much to do! (And what was it all for?) There actually is little left of
religion in "Happy Holi-days". (After all, they are not so 'holy' for
many of us.) And the Xmas lights (er, Christmas) got strung out and affixed to
the balcony, and wound around the tree. The decorations got hauled up from the
basement storage and cradled out. There was eggnog, carols on the stereo, with
the fresh biscuits-a-baking too! All very festive. All very manufactured. All
very commercial. All of it much of a made-up occasion to arrive at a certain
date. All of it, really, quite expensive. (The cost of gifts quickly mounts
like unmonitored money in a bank balance.) All contrived and historically
inexact. Like New Year. For what? To celebrate a lie? To promote a Santa, a
Father Christmas, or an Easter Bunny? (Oops, wrong season.) One must get one's
dates right. Keep the lie alive! Just make it a consistent event. Or is there
too much of a bah-humbug in my tone?
Actually,
the effort required to participate in the season takes one out of oneself, as
it were. It is best done with grace. And with grit! You've got to expend a
different amount of time than usual when putting up tree lights, hauling out
wrapping paper and writing cards and tying bows and... yes, shopping for
presents. It becomes about thoughts of others. It becomes about a consciousness
of family and friends and people in the past and the present, and it becomes a
wish that all will find peace and joy and happiness and health and wealth and
all the good things that time and circumstance can afford. And in that wish,
one connects with others. And it all can be, should be, ought to be, good!
Who
did not receive a Christmas card? (Who was not left alive to send one to me
too?) The last time comes to us all. There is a finality that is inevitable,
sad as it may be. And grief, sweet grief, lingers long and abiding until you
too must die. We each take our turn. But it is of the living people who become
no longer in contact with us that I herein think, not those already departed.
It is of the very many relationships one has had to let go (especially by the
time one is in the seventh decade of life,) that I now recall, because
Christmas, that singular event marking the yearly passage of one's life, recurs
to remind us all: where were you last Christmas, and with whom? And what of the
same event ten or even twenty years ago? And what happened to the people of
one's childhood, one's workplaces, the students and the colleagues and the
friends and the very many people cared for along the way? Where’d everyone go?
Meryl
Streep (although dubbed in an infamous tweet as an "over-rated
actress") had it right, I think. We best lead our lives "with grace
and grit." It certainly was the topic of her speech at the Clinton
Convention. And so too was it the thread through her speech at her Golden Globe
Lifetime Achievement Award. That our leaders be imbued with grit is a given,
(it takes great perseverance to get to stand before a country as a candidate,) but
to have grace, now there's a stick with which to stir the mud-puddles. There
are so very many alternative ways to handling a situation, to responding to
questions, to pressure, to crises, and to the climb toward wherever one is
going, in every case. In every case, indeed. At all times. Grace is a quality
of choice, ideally a consistency of character, and of measured practice such
that it may be observed in the physical, yes, but even more so in the manner in
which a person treats another. At Christmas time or not. (We give grace not
only at the dinner table, just before a meal.) And so we give thanks for
Christmas and New Year and Birthdays and the Easter Bunny too. It all is about
care and gratitude. And that is the grace we perpetuate, or not: the treatment
of others. Despite our grit.