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Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around. ---Leo Buscaglia
For some of us, the holiday season can be the spiritual equivalent of crawling through broken glass. If your holiday is up-tempo, it may be easy to miss the signs in people around you that say they are having it rough. Everywhere are the songs of family, of togetherness, of "no place like home for the holidays” of people having their “holly jolly Christmas” or gathering around the Thanksgiving table to full gathering of family eating a bird and fixings designed by Norman Rockwell. The TV commercials show perfectly intact nuclear families. TV special movies are about families rallying at the last minute to become whole again, to reunite, to become the perfect family once again. They are full of the successful reconciliations of which some of us only dream. No one is left divorcing or divorced – dying or ill or mourning – hurting or suffering for any reason. During Thanksgiving/Hannukah/Christmas/Kwanzaa/New Years, America suddenly creates images of herself as a combination of the Cosby family, Beaver Cleaver’s family, and the Brady bunch -- all perfect and smiling as they deck the halls, light the menorah, carve the bird or sing Auld Lang Syne. No problem is so gigantic that it cannot be solved in a one hour special.
For some people, these images of flawless and iconic families are just foolish. For some, they cut like a knife, reminding people of what they do not have or didn’t have or were not able to have. From billboards to Christmas specials, the media rocks on about a mythological family ideal that suddenly will exist in our lives if we shop at the right stores, wear the right cologne, eat the right food. And if you do not have that kind of thoroughly unblemished life, shame on you. It is easy to forget that nobody has that life 24/7. Nobody.
I arrived in NY over 23 years ago, newly separated from my husband of 13 years. It was snowing. Snowing hard. I moved in with a high school friend, and started to look for work in early December. I watched my pennies vanish as I failed to find work. Christmas music blared from every speaker in town. One I kept hearing over and over again was “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” The thought of Christmas being merry grew littler and littler every day. I grew to fear that song, and even today, so very many years later, I cannot hear it without remembering a particular icy morning long ago. I was looking for work.
I had stopped in at a coffee shop while in the process of applying for any job I might find. After great internal debate, I splurged recklessly on a steaming hot cup of coffee because it was so freezing cold outside. The lyrics came on, sung at the tremulous edge of a hopeful sob by Judy Garland “Someday soon we all will be together/If the fates allow/Until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow/So have yourself a merry little Christmas now.” I had to almost run out of the coffee shop because I started to cry and couldn’t stop. I had lost any sense that I could muddle my way to a merry Christmas or even a decent holiday ever again. My dreams had been dashed, and I was fresh out of new ones. I had never been on my own before, and here I was in NYC, divorcing, going broke, jobless, cold. And I was frightened.
Although it wasn’t my roughest life moment, I didn’t tell anyone about that day. In fact, this is the first time I am telling this story. Those of you out there reading this may have similar stories from your own pasts, or much harder, more private stories. Or, for some of you, this holiday may be the rough one – the hurdle it doesn’t feel that you can get over.
I wish I had the magic formula for how I got through that and some subsequent hard holiday years. Sometimes it was just gutting it out, counting the days until January 2nd. Sometimes it was helpful to do things for other people, taking the focus off my own stuff. Sometimes, I was able to grab onto
