Karl Klockars

I get a strange sense of paranoia about the holidays. Especially the night before, and the actual day of, I get a certain sense of doom, as if there were anything to go terribly, terribly wrong, it would happen then just to drive the cosmic hammer home a little further. As if there are a few days where it’s just that much worse for anything to happen to you, and then you end up on the news as a cautionary tale towards all of the rest of us.

As in: “Poor bastards, I’m sure they never saw that huge bus coming – especially since it was dropped from a crane in a freak Christmas Morning construction accident. At least we know those damned unions are working for their money! Let ‘em freeze!”

Or: “I can’t believe that Brown Line train fell into the Chicago River after the bridge shattered! Who would have thunk that the exact same moment that the asteroid hit the overpass, that the doors would all get stuck closed and everyone died in tragic asphyxiation and pain! Hey, can someone pass the ham and the mashed potatoes? And thanks again for the new socks!”

And so on. There’s something almost magnetic about Christmas and Holiday tragedy stories. A certain sense of gravitas goes with them, because the holiday season is when the empathy switcher gets amped up a little bit. We seem to feel a little deeper during the holidays – those of us with hearts, that is – and spend a little more time considering the pain of others while we’re waist-deep in wrapping paper.

Perhaps that same emotion and mentality is what makes me feel the doom a little bit more heavily – if anything were going to happen, man is it going to be bad. And what’s more, if something does happen…I kinda want it to be bad. As in, if something terrible is going to happen, let it be massive. Something worth the memory and hassle of the car crash, the elevator accident, the snowblower explosion.

Okay, maybe now I’m buying trouble. “Shut up, boy,” my internal Scoutmaster is telling me, suggesting perhaps that simply by typing this screed of holiday pain out, I’m virtually ensuring that on the upcoming trip to the MItten, we’ll end up captured by cannibals and devoured as a holiday dish ourselves.

Dammit–it’s exactly this kind of thing that the holiday was supposed to avoid! All this painful thinking and hellish thought that the good tidings and christmas cheer was supposed to banish away! This dark, deathly season with brown, dead grass in the lawns and empty trees, grating against the sky like fingers on chalkboards –

See, I’m doing it again. I have a theory that the whole holiday season was created by a bunch of crazy druids and vikings in the absolute depths of the winter darkness as a warding off of all the depression and misery that’s so easy to get wrapped up in. It was invented so people all over the northern hemisphere didn’t go absolutely yeti-shit crazy in the darkest days of the year.

Is it any coincidence that the need for a joyous family holiday doesn’t come in the middle of summer? Of course not – people are outside playing badminton and drinking white wine spritzers and driving with the windows down and Van Halen on really loud and shushing around on rollerblades and crap like that.

All the ancient, old-school holidays come in fall, winter, and right at the edge of spring. In order, they go “Hey, things are dying! Let’s party!” (halloween), “Hey, things are dead and it sucks, so lets party!” (christmas/solstice), and “Hey, things aren’t so dead anymore! Let’s have some ham and eggs! And party!” (easter).

Don’t need any of that in summer. It took us partytime Americans to jam a 4th of July in there for good measure. Holidays on a quarterly schedule is a very capitalist, fiscal-calendar kind of way to work and it’s very apple-pie and baseball. Way to go us.

So would I be justified in suggesting that the lack of a normal Christmastime mood is what’s contributing to my Christmastime mood? It’s like a mobius strip – one side that wraps around into a weird warping of the laws of physics. In this case, the lack of crummy weather equals a sense of death and morbidity?

Or maybe I’ve just been watching too much news programming. I should switch over to Sesame Street for a few days, just for experimental purposes. Next week: does an excess of children’s TV lead to flowery emotion, or just a desire to eat really sugary cereal? We report: you gaze in apathy.

Actually, since it’s all over except for the returning, the breaking, the battery-purchasing, the wrapping-burning, and the thank-you notes, I guess it all worked out okay…so far. No one has called to say their last goodbyes before hanging themselves in a closet…or we haven’t found them yet. Everyone is present and accounted for…unless there was some sort of “Home Alone” style miscount and somewhere a small child is being attacked by intruders. Hilarity and wackiness would at least ensue.

The sense of impending doom is fading as the emotional level backs off a bit, and we gear up for the other impending sensation: the hangover of New Years, just prior to the hangover of the end of the holidays. So I’ll revel in the next few days of work, with my head down and my ears off, and maybe this whole thing will pass us by for another year. We’re taking this new years’ off, avoiding the rookies and once-a-year drunks who horde the bars and streets and CTA. Smell you later, kids.

Until the next time, that is.