Tiny Analog Christmas
Could Harry Potter have been anything but British? It’s a rhetorical question. No! “The Great American Baking Show” will never be “The Great British Baking Show,” just as Renée Zellweger, Dick Van Dyke, and Don Cheadle ruined movies that demanded an English native. Americans didn’t invent but mostly ruined coffee, just as the Brits didn’t invent but thoroughly perfected tea and manners. The plain fact is that Episcopalians do Christmas better than any other worshipers in Christendom, and I say this as an Orthodox convert. (Our bailiwick is Easter.) I went to Orthodox service on Christmas for a few years in my early/mid twenties. It wasn’t the right thing. The Japanese make the best dirt bikes, the Italians make the best superbikes, and the Germans make the best dual-sports. Not everyone is great at everything. By my thirties I took that lesson, got over my Orthodoxy, and returned to the Anglican Church for one night a year. If I was alone I went to Old St. Paul’s in Baltimore, Maryland. When I was back home in San Diego, my parents and I would go to a different St. Paul’s near Balboa Park.
Sit through an Anglican midnight mass that opens with “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” and closes with an “Ave Maria” without crying. I double dog dare you. It’s sublime. My raised-Lutheran/now-Methodist wife agrees, but there will be no trip to Minneapolis’ downtown cathedral Thursday night. No holding hands in a pew with eyes welling up at another remarkable year. No feeling of the world spinning just a little slower when we whisper, “Merry Christmas” at 12 a.m. and think about what has happened since we last said that, the development of our children and deaths of people we love. We will not attend a ceremony or witness a sacrament. We will be alone. The girls are with biodad, and we cannot have Abby’s parents watch the boys. We cannot even have my in-laws over for dinner. My parents canceled their Thanksgiving flight. Our Christmas Day will be a morning much like any other weekend without our daughters; it will be Abby, our small sons, and a house too large, too quiet.
Advent is about waiting. Christmas happens on Christmas Day, but this Christmas will feel like the start of a year-long Advent. We are waiting for our girls’ Boxing Day return, waiting for the vaccine, waiting for a real feast, waiting to hang 18 stockings in 2021. We half heartedly put up some lights and a tree and an inflatable lawn ornament. We took some solace in addressing a couple hundred cards. We taped up the many we received in the kitchen, cards from people we pulled all-nighters with, from the pastor who married us, from cousins, friends, the guy who sold me a stereo — all, all, all and millions more waiting to get a shot in the arm. Twice.
When the virus started, when George Floyd was slain, before and after this city burned, there were signs on Minnehaha Parkway. My favorite read, “It will be good again. It will be good again. It will be good again.” I knew it was too idealistic, but I also knew it was true. Cities stop burning. Pandemics end. Peace has always been punctuated by crisis; 2020 has simply had more than its share.
When I was a bachelor riding through Fargo, North Dakota and Moorhead, Minnesota, I visited the Hopperstad Stave Church Replica, which has a small window not unlike a Wendy’s drive-thru for lepers and those seeking communion during Bubonic Plague. The original church was built 900 years ago. This is not humanity’s first rodeo. It is not the first time people have had to isolate. It is not the first time people were asked to forego hugs for safety.
This year’s holiday feels ersatz, like Cool Whip on pumpkin pie or margarine on a home-made roll. Is it Christmas without a choir? Without the smell of pine wreath, without the drip drip of a wax candle that lights our faces during “Silent Night”? With only a tiny roast ham for four? Of course it’s Christmas. Time waits for no one. It doesn’t feel right, though.
As a psychiatrist I am prone to saying — only partly tongue in cheek — that feelings are dumb. Feelings get us into trouble. Feelings are behind my patients’ drug relapses. Feelings lead people into terrible relationships. Love is just a feeling before it becomes an action and a habit. Belief is just a feeling, too. The things we feel so, so sure about are often wrong. But it is our feelings, blind and unknowing as they are, that give warmth and color to what would otherwise be lives mundane and not human. How are we supposed to feel spending Christmas alone? I don’t know that there is a right way. I myself am tired. I am hopeful. I am grateful. But mostly I am sad — and feeling less human — until we can gather again.
