If you have lived a life where there is more behind you than ahead, this might be the holiday essay for you. If you are young and have years to burn, you may want to take a seat and a couple of notes in advance of your amazing future. In forty years, these words may come in handy.
If you find your feelings complex during this season, come sit by me. Maybe you’re missing folks who are now on the other side, all those wild great aunts and great uncles, crazy cousins and exotic neighbors who floated through holidays past and are etched in your memories. Maybe your parents have passed on. You may have lost friends, cousins, co-workers or a spouse. You’re grieving this Christmas, but you don’t want anyone else to be blue. Maybe you attempt to keep your chin up because you feel guilty being sad when it’s the season of light. There is no refuge from the twinkling lights, so you go with it. You have no choice, so you act like a person who made one instead of a person who has had Fate foisted on them like a rock slide. You may be determined to find some happiness in despair. So, you immerse yourself in baking and cooking, parties and cocktails, or the opposite, you head for your couch to watch Bette Davis movies because for whatever reason; Mary Wickes as Nurse Preen in The Man Who Came to Dinner always makes you laugh.
When I moved to New York City in the 1980s, I was an office temp at Merrill Lynch at 165 Broadway. I was one of the army of thespians put out on the street by Lois Weiner at the Accurate Temporary Agency (We’re accurate! the sign on the door read). Once you passed muster with Lois, you could get a gig.
Emilia Squeo, director of placement of office temporaries at Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, put me in rotation throughout the building. I answered phones and typed (using the only marketable skill I had at the time). But, I was also a playwright, intent to “make it” (whatever that means) in the Big Apple. No judgment on to the finance industry, but I had a lot of down time during the day to work on my plays.
When I ended up working the secretarial desk for a young star who ran the government securities trading operation, I made no bones about being in show business. When Dan Napoli tried to explain trading government bonds, I glazed over. He thought I had a good-enough personality and a sense of humor, so he implored me to consider a career on Wall Street, but I was content with the six bucks an hour I was making, and the no commitment approach to making the rent. “You’d be a good salesman,” Mr. Napoli said at the time. I was having no part of it. I’d like to go back to my 21 year old self and beat her with a shoe.
At the time, I was living in the Milbank, a boarding house for women in the village. It was divine- my own room, two meals a day and a phone on every floor. This was already a better deal than I had growing up in Big Stone Gap. Lifetime friendships commenced. All was right in my crazy little cabaret world. I worked with a group of girls in The Outcasts, a comedy troupe- working the clubs at night was a perfect complement to working in offices by day, but those are stories for another time.
I bring up the past, because back then, you got Christmas Day off, and that was it. As a temp, you weren’t paid if you didn’t show up- and I needed the rent. So I would travel to Big Stone Gap (blowing any money I had saved) and spent a day or two with family before heading back to work. You counted on Christmas falling on a weekend or you “ate” the lost weekday and returned as quickly as possible to get back on the clock. Now, it is a completely different deal. God help you if you break a tooth on Christmas Eve. Currently, offices close the week before Christmas and open a few days after New Year’s Day. I can’t believe it! Paid vacation days, a slew of them, given by the company- a ton of free spaces on the work calendar, like in Bingo! Now, of course, I am self-employed (and have been for the years since as a writer) which is why you get this Substack between Christmas and New Year’s. Law of the jungle in the creative arts is not so different from the old Wall Street behemoths: Produce!
I remember my youth in detail because women are good at recalling pain. Everything good that happens to women comes with strings- that includes the holidays. I remember my mother working long hours late into the night (back home in Appalachia it’s called a hoot owl shift in the coal mines) to give us beauty through the holiday season. Party has the word art in it for a reason. My mom decorated with fresh greens. She made ornaments. She lit candles. She baked more cookies than the Keebler elves or the Entenmann icing girls. Giant Tupperware tubs filled with layers of waxed paper lined with cookies- none of which broke- green Christmas trees with a teeny silver sugar ball at the top- cut outs and bars and spritz cookies- almond crescents. Her twin sister, Irma, sent a giant can of bourbon balls (cocoa and powdered sugar balls soaked in booze) in the mail (a nice touch in a dry county in the Appalachian south, as if we weren’t weird enough already- pack of Italian who drank and evidently used spirits when baking). You should’ve seen the side eye from Postal Chief J.E. Body when we went to pick up the can that smelled like the bar stools at Ray’s Cafe. Those bourbon balls could turn any good Baptist into a drinking Catholic, and happily so. You get the picture. It was the women who made the holidays sweet, with a few exceptions. My sisters (three of them) and brother Michael inherited the baking gene. Instead, I got a predisposition to varicose veins. I enjoy their cookies while wearing compression stockings.
I wept through Christmas Day Mass at Saint Francis Xavier, which I vowed I would not do. I don’t want my daughter to see me in a puddle at every holiday, but she’s in her early 20’s, so it’s probably time for me to model how to buck up and face reality or go to a real doctor and get a diagnosis of holiday depression. Weeping is not the worst thing, every church comes with wood floors you can drench, and by the closing Christmas carol, after the priest’s final blessing, I am not alone scrounging my pockets for a Kleenex. Warning: those Catholics get you every time!
There is untold suffering, pain, poverty and loneliness in this weary world, and we, who have anyone to love truly have nothing to complain about. So, maybe this Substack isn’t for you, unless everyone in your life aggravates you- in that case, keep reading. It’s also for the reader who doesn’t feel connected this holiday season- either because you have lost someone essential in your life, or have yet to fill the space for the losses of the past. When I wept at mass, it was not without reason. What is this life about, God? What do you want from me? We can be failures, even at pain.
But are we? If we’re trying, isn’t that important? Isn’t that something? God sees the trying, my cousin used to say. I believe her now, but keep in mind, she drank. So shake off that self-criticism. Shake off those feelings of unworthiness. You’re plenty worthy- you’re giving it all you got- you’re trying. You are not alone, dear reader- as long as you recognize that every sentence you read, every book you pick up, every poem you attempt to understand, is proof that someone out there wants to reach you. Take it in. It’s true. Artists are scrounging the world to find you- and if you’re an artist, you know in your soul, you are on the hunt to connect with those who need what you create.
I try to end these essays on a happy note- so, let me begin with gratitude. Thank you for joining me here. It does help to know that we are in this together. It helps to know that even when one is circling the drain, the ride in the suds ain’t so bad. Let go and spin may become my new mantra. Besides, we have the gift of a new year which gives us the chance to start over, begin anew and dream of what might be. The gifts of anticipation and possibility are priceless. In fact, they might be everything. What’s ahead of us is unknown, and who knows? It might be really great. We want to be in the best frame of mind when the good stuff comes our way. We owe it to ourselves for having survived the terrible times. These are some things to think about- to discuss amongst ourselves in these 47 interminable paid-for vacation days between Christmas and New Year’s. What else are we going to do? They gave us the time off- we might as well use it for good.
