Lights out in Bethlehem and why that matters

I keep thinking about the little town of Bethlehem, the avowed city of Jesus Christ’s birth in Israel’s West Bank, and how they put away their decorations for Christmas, before Christmas.

The majority of Bethlehem’s population is Muslim. As the Israeli-Palestinian war wages on, families are grieving the loss of a staggering number of lives, the largest share of which includes women and children. Accordingly, the local government and churches of Bethlehem conferred and decided to remove the Christmas decore and to scale back any festivities in the town that had been a major tourist destination in the past. 

What does it even mean for one faith tradition to choose to bear witness to another’s? It seems so powerful, and generous, and kind of hard to believe, honestly. I don’t find humans, namely Americans entrenched in a culture of capitalist overconsumption, especially good at holding space for others’ grief even in times of great sorrow.

We are often so hellbent on being human doings than human beings.

I think about Sandy Hook. I think about twenty six families burying children and teachers slain. I think about Christmas and Hannukah presents that would never be opened. I think about parents receiving condolence cards instead of Christmas cards.

And then I think about how school shootings have risen dramatically. How the past two years have seen historically high numbers, practically one per week. It makes me want to hunker down like Bethlehem for awhile.

Following Sandy Hook, Ann Curry had suggested 26 good deeds in response, and a movement of contagious kindness spread. Channeling so much sadness into positive action can feel productive, and even healing. However, sometimes the very act of abiding--that is, to take no action but to merely endure alongside the bereaved and hurting--is the kindest way to show up. 

In C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed, a memoir about the loss of his wife, Lewis writes about the impossible limbo of receiving condolences from others, “I see people, as they approach me, trying to make up their minds whether they’ll ‘say something about it’ or not. I hate if they do, and if they don’t.” Similarly, writer Sarah Wildman shares in a recent essay about the loss of her 14 year-old child, that eventually the text messages “slow and stop.” She notes that “holiday markers are as hard as promised” but it is her daughter’s daily absence that is the “cruelest blow.”

I think how I might write an imaginary holiday letter, sent to the masses of people who are kind enough to remember me and my mailbox at this time of year. Hey Y’all. First Divorced Christmas. Totally broke! Trying to meet my healthcare deductible! How ‘bout that monologue in the Barbie Movie, though?! Kids are fine. Funny. Sometimes moody. Me too, honestly. I’m mostly okay-ish. Sending love from Boston! xoxo

We try ever to say the rightest thing, to impart the most appropriate greeting. Then life knocks you sideways and you realize sometimes you’ve got to put your decorations away. There’s just no masking the sads.

Like the city of Bethlehem, no one is asking us to dull our sparkle. Solidarity is not a store looking to hire more seasonal employees, but rather a union that relies on volunteers. Sometimes the kindest thing we can do is merely to consider others’ pain. To imagine the space left by the empty chair at the dinner table, or the spot on the mantle where they hoped another stocking might hang. To wonder how great their river of sorrow must extend and into which tributaries of their lives it touches.

If the moment feels right to stand in solidarity with someone in pain this holiday, I hope we can do so. The experience may unite us with generations who have felt left out in the cold at the holidays, with no room left at the inn. 

Love is Actually

I had to make a quick pickup at the mall this evening, which is a lie, because even in pandemic times, a quick pickup at the mall in peak holiday shopping season on a Friday night is One. Big. Oxymoron. The holiday rush was so different, still loud and rushy, but it was masked up and spaced apart.

When I saw the Mall Santa wearing his shielded mask, sitting six feet behind the bench where children could supposedly meet him, something caught in my throat and I found myself oddly choking back tears. Shuffling by, I tried to unpack why I was so moved by the Socially Distanced Santa. I think it was partly due to how dystopian all this seemed, and how frankly unfair it is to the kiddies. We could have given them a virus-free holiday season as they are able to in, say, Australia which has effectively beat the ‘VID. I’m mourning the holiday that could have been.

But the Socially Distanced Santa also reminded me of the scene from “Love, Actually” when all the anonymous people are hugging in Heathrow Airport. We hear Hugh Grant intone that “Love is…actually…all around.” In spite of the film’s problematic relationship with curvy women, I’m a fan of the ways that it normalizes turtlenecks for all mankind, as well as its dismantling of the hierarchy of people needing love. Yes, the Prime Minister gets lonely. Yes, the widow and Claudia Schiffer and the married couple and the folks living in developmental care facilities are all dying to be well-loved. If we train our eyes to see, so says Hugh Grant, we’ll see the love all around.

I’d like to add a Covid in America Asterisk to that adage, if I may. In this quaky season before anyone on the stateside is vaccinated, I think it’s important not just to look for love, but to look for opportunities to love. Those are actually all around. They are found in the spare change jars we’ve been meaning to empty and turn into gift cards for the mail carriers and crossing guards. They are in the shoebox of stationery we’ve been meaning to bust open to write a letter to our granny in the home. They are in all the places we can exercise extra patience. True, no one can see our smile because it’s hidden by a mask, but that, too, is an opportunity to show love.

As for self-love, I will attest that I’ve been staring at this same mug for 40 years and, well, I don’t fully know how to love that lady. But she is looking for ways to love being herself. I can’t imagine learning to love being alive in one’s own body and not wanting it for one’s neighbor. Maybe it’s a radical notion, but wouldn’t we want for others the same measure of love we have experienced? Self-love, when it translates to love of being oneself, wants for others to be a part of that whole joyful equation. Self-love negates itself when it does not show that same love for others. In other words, stay home, drink egg nog, look for ways to love from a safe distance so that Mall Santa can live his best life next year and get back to handing out candy canes and judging kiddies’ wishes for ponies.

JanuWeary

January is a non-negotiable 495 days long every year, particularly if you live north of the Equator, especially if you live in the American Northeast. The Julian calendar is a lie and so is the New Year. You are still stuck with yourself and the bleak atmosphere of January. 

December? December is Mary Poppins as your babysitter, all your needs met and your booboos kissed and your trees topped with sparkly angels, and January is the month when Mary Poppins blows away, gripping her snowy white parasol, and the only person who’s left to babysit you is Boo Radley who doesn’t know any jokes or games and just likes to sit in the corner and peer creepily out the window, waiting for this all to end.

I am not made for January. Thinking about it reminds me that Heaven is a place with unlimited cookie dough and an endless December. January is a box with a gray lid, and within the box is one of those plastic trays segmented by little compartments for various chocolates with mystery fillings. Only in the January box, there is no chocolate nor mystery. Rather, each little pod contains items you collect in January: overpriced gym memberships, kale chips, self-loathing.

Here is a list of good things that happen during January if you live in the American Northeast: 

1. We remember Martin Luther King, Jr. and his legacy.

2. We get a day off work/school to remember Martin Luther King, Jr. and his legacy.

3. The Golden Globes are an event that happens in California and also on television if you have cable. 

4. We then get to enjoy the Fashion Recap after the Golden Globes.

5.  Some things go on sale. Like cars you don’t want to drive in January. Or TVs you don’t want to haul home in January. 

That’s it. The complete bucket of January joy poured out. (But be sure to toss salt on it or else it will turn to ice.)

It seems the only people who are happy in January are Zumba instructors. They get to be inside and elevate their frothy endorphins while doing a hip-hop dance that I will try to follow but invariably just grapevine my way into a deranged Macarena.

Besides Zumba instructors, there is another human living in the American Northeast who does not struggle with the Jans/Febs. 

I live with this human. His name is Husband. Husband is relentlessly chill. In fact, where hardship and woes are concerned, he is an all-around cool customer. I am told this is the mark of his birthright as a Canadian (show me a Canadian who is not earnest, I dare you), so even-keeled and fair-minded. This explains most of his immunity to the Jans/Febs.

There is another reason, though, that has nothing to do with his natural disposition and everything to do with his upbringing which was largely devoid of holidays, celebrations, birthday cakes, and all the trappings of my girlhood steeped in Americonsumerism. Where my December was a cozy hearth with stockings hung on the mantle, Husband’s was, you know, just a regular mantle, probably with the music stand he set up in front of it so his parents would believe he had actually practiced his violin (instead of watching “Days of our Lives” as was his weekday practice). He had no holiday letdown growing up and therefore he just soldiers into the barren month of January without expectation. Whereas my January is a snowglobe with snowflakes swirling around a bottle of anti-depressants and a lost mitten, Husband’s is a snowglobe with a peaceful tableau reminiscent of a Thomas Kinkade painting before they were mass produced by underlings.

Do you know anyone who has none of the post-holiday funk, none of the snow-capped mountain highs of the holiday season and none of the deep valley lows of the daunting new year? Isn’t it a little curious? What is there even to talk about in January if not lamentation? Perhaps I am getting the chorus wrong here, though, because Husband is the son of immigrants whose entire lives have been one, long, strong lamentation. His parents did their darndest to build a better life for their sons in a country that was as foreign in its culture, language and traditions as they could possibly imagine. They were not concerned whether they were going to have to pay express shipping on the shearling bathrobe they had embroidered with a monogram. They were interested in paying their rent and not being deported. That has a way of informing a boy who becomes a man who understands what a real crisis is. A crisis, contrary to what my Jans/Febs contend, is not Sephora running out of my favorite--actually, no crisis involves the word “Sephora.” Forget I ever mentioned it.

Much as I’m inspired by Husband’s non-subscription to the holiday and post-holiday tectonic shifts, I’m not really sure what to do with myself in this partnership. The balance in mental health tilts so far it hits the ground on my side of the marital teeter-totter after New Year’s Day. I can’t transpose his upbringing onto mine, nor would I want to; I can’t trade glasses and see it all anew. Ann Voskamp already stole my idea to write 1000 happy thoughts down and emancipate herself from the sads, (and she’s a Canadian, too, so you know mine would never be as earnest as hers anyway). 

I can try on a new pair of perspectacles, though. In fact, I’ve been practicing since earlier this year when my old man got a bunch of baseball tickets. My stepmom Julie’s Christmas gift to Pops was a trip to see the Cleveland Indians play at spring training in Arizona. “This is strategic, see,” explained the old man, who specializes in being pedantic about life decisions, “My old mentor Jack once told me you should plan your trip in February because that’s what going to you through January.” The simple plan struck me as oddly profound. It’s not that dangling a carrot just a short distance from one’s nose is a brand new concept. But I am dazzled by the notion of manufacturing a personal holiday just far enough in the future to get us through. That is, not relying on a civil rights hero to have a birthday observed or for a bestie to decide to come for a visit, in order to incentivize our survival of the Jans/Febs. 

When we’re young, we have to rely on forces outside of our control to spark our great expectations. We circle the date around the calendar as to when the junior high dance is scheduled, and we count down the sleeps until we get to leave for Girl Scout camp. Then we become grown-ups and I can only speak for myself in that sometimes it’s as though I forget that I have agency in how I plan my life. Sometimes I get so psyched about remembering to bring my reusable bags when I grocery shop (I AM THE GREATEST! ECO! HUMAN! EVER!!) that I forget that this is not the point of being an adult. Do better for yourself, Kendra. Do better for nine year-old Kendra who wrote in her diary “It’s Friday and I have to wait a whole two days for school again, what a bummerrrrrrr.” Do it for that girl who didn’t know what fun tasted like. Put the little totem of fun a few miles down your path. Then run your guts out in the race to get there, through the Jans/Febs, through tax returns, through snowbanks and through the pennant flagged car lots trying to sell Cadillac convertibles. Run your guts through all the bologna until you reach that marker. Then, do what Mark and Julie Stanton do at Spring Training.

For context: Mark and Julie are the most Midwestern people you will EVER meet. They make friends EVERYWHERE. Once, while on vacation in Savannah with them, Husband and I got up from the table for a few minutes at a restaurant and a couple of strangers sat down in our place, probably because they smelled the Midwestern on Mark and Julie Stanton. They could sense this was a friendly kind of couple. They had told Pops and Julie their whole life story by the time we got back to the table, leaving nothing out. Net net, Pops and Jules are at spring training. Naturally, they are SO PUMPED because of something they refer to as "Vendor Heaven," which, let me translate that Midwesternese for you: they are irrationally excited over strangers who carry over-the-shoulder satchels full of overpriced snacks to sell you while you watch sports. Pops and Julie text me that they are keeping their eyes peeled for one vendor especial. 

One of my gal pals had been to spring training in the past and bore witness to this supposed snack elysium. She also told us about a particular beer vendor who was so memorable that my folks would likely know him when they saw him. She relayed that the vendor was “stout” and “intense.”

Well, given no other physical description, Pop and Julie texted that they had found The Beer Guy.

The next day, I receive a short video clip from Julie of a poor man’s John Wayne explaining his career trajectory as a beer vendor to his new confessor, Mark Stanton.

Me: “He’s exactly how I imagined him. Did you buy a cold one?”

Julie: “We bought a cold two. He explained to us that he’s battling exhaustion and peaked too early yesterday. Also gave us his itinerary for the next week. Gotta be in top form for the Giants.”

I share the video with my girlfriend who had been at spring training the year prior. She responds, Mmm, he’s not her beer guy. But that she now wants to hang out with my parents at an Indians game and compare notes about favorite vendors of the suds in a ballpark in Arizona.

This is how you sidestep JanuWeariness, it turns out. You buy yourself some tickets to a baseball game that will take place in February and look forward to meeting your beer guy. It doesn’t matter if he’s not someone else’s beer guy. It doesn’t matter if you don’t drink beer. Just embrace him or her, embrace the experience, and boom! Lookathat. It’s already March. Home run.