The ghosts of Christmases past are too properly terrified of the present to accept c. 2023 haunting missions
But they're unanimously on record as affirming how much joy Christmas reliably brought to my home exactly when it mattered the most
I was thinking today that I possess a number of toys and tools that were unavailable even to the ultra-wealthy c. 1990. While this is not news, in my case, I had by then decided on what “things” were and would remain most important to me throughout my life, whether I knew it at the time or not.
In 2023, to cite one of dozens of relevant examples, I can access the granular details of the weather in my immediate midst immediately before setting out for a run. That's a game-changing miracle for anyone from New Hampshire. When I was a teenager and young adult, runners relied on what they had seen on the morning, noon, or evening local news for the most up-to-date information, which was often critical hours old and geographically imprecise.
I and other Gen X shrugging-machines just got used to being imperfectly prepared and occasionally caught in sudden-onset, deeply unpleasant storms at all times of year. Still, it's nice to be able to avoid such banalities today by pressing a few buttons on a tiny screen, a process akin to magic thirty-some years ago.
And the free mapping software? Heaven. Heaven all by itself, a new, powerful, and portable dimension to the running experience.
It takes as little to make me happy, really, as it does to perturb my sense of basic universal cosmic justice.
I'm as secure in most ways as I need to be. And most, though far from all, of my chronic angst is opt-in; the jaundiced lens through which I scan the world is the result of my basic choices and path through life, even if I would make some of those choices again and unhesitatingly if given the chance to re-run the whole half-century-plus-long experiment.
I was also thinking this week how eagerly I looked forward to Christmas every year as a child, from the age of three or four until I was a teenager and too old to plausibly enjoy the same automatic yuletide bliss-bordering-on euphoria every lucky child does.
And I was indeed lucky. To me, and to anyone who thinks about it for a minute, this guaranteed annual assurance of a giddy anticipation-reward cycle at Christmastime is an absolute, unmistakable signifier of having had consistently loving parents who made me (and my sister) the center of their world time and again despite often-limited financial resources.
In an unexpected and delicate way, and one that doesn’t show in many or any of my posts or comments, this has been my most meaningful and intimate holiday season in years, even if I can’t yet share the reasons or the details. The right people already know these anyway.
Merry Christmas or whatever holiday pause in which you and yours are indulging. And do relish the brief caesura in the tangible clamor of free-ish societies becoming nightmarish stews of hardship, citizen violence, and unpretentious crackdowns on nominally legal behaviors; 2024 will bring nothing but unprecedented levels of force-fed chaos and clamor framed as everyday democracy.